water in the
American West An Immersive course at The Bay School of San Francisco, as experienced by Margaret '23 and Sam '23
On the first day, we arrive at the Sierra Nevada Aquatic Research Laboratory, which everyone calls SNARL, and we start setting up. SNARL is a fully equipped biological research station owned by the University of California. It’s located about 8 miles from Mammoth Lakes. This is home base for the next two weeks.
Right away, we get out into the surrounding waterways and land to study both the ecology and hydrology of the area. Understanding these systems is important to the work we’ll do next, talking to the many stakeholders who rely on the waters that flow through the Eastern Sierra. We also take turns shopping and cooking for our large group... which is definitely easier for some people than others.
Of course, we also get to be immersed in the environment. The river is dammed in several places, so we could go swimming. There are no street lights for miles, and one night we got to see a spectacular meteor shower.
We did a lot of preparation for the stakeholder interviews. We studied life in the area before colonial interference and learned about how agriculture and water politics developed. We went through archives at a museum—with actual physical papers. It felt like something out of a movie. Over the years, Bay has developed relationships with leaders from different groups in the Owens Valley. They spend time with our classes to discuss the science, the history, and the future of water in California. We learned a lot about the water crisis and the dilemmas facing the different groups. We talked to members of the Mono Lake and Owens Valley committees—those are environmental groups. We talked to a rancher named Mark Lacey, native Paiute, educators, and a representative of the LA Department of Water and Power.
Our time with members of the Paiute tribe included going to the small town of Lone Pine and watching a native-produced film called Paya: The Water Story of the Paiute. We also got to hear from a native leader named Noah Williams, whose father was also a big part of water activism in the area. Millennia ago, the Paiute had their own complex system of irrigation ditches, so they had an established agricultural climate, moving water miles from the Owens River to irrigate pastures for native crops. Noah took us to ancestral grounds and guided us to petroglyphs; we also saw a centuries-old irrigation ditch—you wouldn’t even know it was there if you weren’t looking for it. All of those water rights originally belonged to the Paiute but were stripped away; they are now seeking to settle historical land and water claims. You read a lot of things from secondary sources, but having someone tell you what their people had done to them is so impactful. We really got an understanding of how grounded their efforts are in the land and their stories.
“
You read a lot
of things from secondary
sources, but
having someone
”
tell you what
their people had done to them is
so impactful.
The final week, we split up into small groups to sift through everything we’ve learned and write a lengthy position paper in which we represent one of the stakeholder groups. It helped that in the first 10 days, our class as a whole was talking to the different stakeholders, so we all got a good sense of the different perspectives in the Owens Valley. On the last day, we held a Socratic discussion where we represented our stakeholder groups, and we came away with multiple solutions. No one path is going to work for everyone. The rancher we spoke to, Mark Lacey, understands this; he talked a lot about his work with environmentalists. There’s power in numbers, and you need an array of solutions. The discussions we’re having are important, not just in the classroom setting but in the real world.
One thing that came up time and time again both in class and with the people we interviewed is that finding common ground is genuinely the most important thing. To get anything done, you need to have camaraderie and cohesion with other people. That’s something we’ll take away from this class that applies everywhere.