What a joy to read, this New York Times article out June 27, 2025, which taps into the often-unexpected truth we here at Mono Lake love to tell visitors when we talk about Los Angeles’s water use. Yes, LA was once a symbol of excessive water use, but today, LA is a model of urban water conservation.
The story of how this came to be is curious, and is well told by Kimmelman, and beautiful to read, not to mention incredibly timely and relevant. Highly recommend.
One highlight is, of course, the section on Mono Lake.
The city’s generosity isn’t pure altruism. Three decades ago residents at Mono Lake took Los Angeles to court to force the city to raise the lake’s depleted water level. A messy legal battle produced a landmark court ruling, which established “public trust” obligations that cities in California have to future generations and the environment and which limited Los Angeles’s right to divert water from Mono Basin.
— “For the Future of Water Conservation, Look to … Los Angeles?” by Michael Kimmelman, New York Times, June 26, 2025
Decades later, the lake still isn’t at the level the city promised, and Los Angeles is again taking the maximum amount of water from Mono that the law allows, after saying it would take less. Even so, Mono Lake advocates, who are pushing for the State Water Board to order L.A. to take less, talk about a changed culture.
“Mono Lake encapsulates the whole decades-long evolution from building huge transverse systems like the aqueduct toward seeing water as a shared, limited resource,” says Martha Davis, who directed the Mono Lake Committee during the 1990s, when it won the landmark lawsuit. “We’ve come a long way from the era of Mulholland.”
Here at the Mono Lake Committee we hear this message loud and clear—the people of Los Angeles want to balance their water needs with Mono Lake; they want to protect it. They know the water-wasting stereotype is old, and that they’ve made real progress. And, they know that more progress means better environmental justice and local water resilience. They are literally asking the leadership in Los Angeles, and the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power (DWP), for more progress, directly.
The New York Times article weaves together some positively shocking facts: “In 1990, when its population was 3.4 million people, L.A.’s annual consumption was 680,000 acre-feet of water, according to the city’s water authority. (The industry metric, an acre-foot is about half an Olympic swimming pool.) With a population of 3.9 million, the city today consumes 454,000 acre-feet per year.”
In other words, despite adding half a million people since 1990, the city now uses a third less water overall. And mostly, people in LA can conserve water without thinking about it. Water conservation technology and efficiencies are increasingly built into every part of daily life in the city, from outside irrigation, to faucets, dishwashers, toilets, showers, and more.
The people of LA are doing their part, and seeing the benefits of what Kimmelman calls “generational evolution.” It’s been 31 years since DWP promised to raise Mono Lake—it’s time for DWP to evolve, too.
Top photo is a screen capture of the article “For the Future of Water Conservation, Look to … Los Angeles?” by Mike Kimmelman, shown with the photograph by Adali Schell.