STILL AT MONO, AFTER ALL THESE YEARS

“If you go places where nobody’s looking, you’re going to find something new,” Dr. David Herbst told The Sheet Saturday, explaining why he once decided to strap 42 pounds of weight to his body and scuba dive into Mono Lake.

He was standing at the shoreline of the lake, which he first came to in 1976. Back then, he was a graduate student with, as he put it, a hunch that something was wrong.

He was right.

At that point, Los Angeles had already been diverting water from Mono Basin streams for decades. The lake had dropped dramatically from its historic level. Scientists were still piecing together what that meant for the birds, brine shrimp and alkali flies that make Mono work. The Mono Lake Committee had not yet formed. The landmark State Water Resources Control Board decision that would later curb water exports to Los Angeles was still nearly two decades away.

Nearly 50 years later, as California regulators again weigh whether Mono Lake needs stronger protection from water diversions, Herbst occupies a pretty unusual place in the basin’s long-running water fight. He helped build the scientific case for protecting Mono in the first place, and now he’s around to watch the state revisit whether those protections went far enough.

“It was my opportunity to find that thing I had been waiting for,” Herbst said of that first summer. “Not only to study something interesting and unusual, but to have it tied to a conservation issue.”

Herbst went on to spend decades studying Mono Lake and other saline lakes across the West and South America, becoming an expert on alkali flies, brine shrimp and the ecology of extreme aquatic environments. But Mono tied him to the basin’s politics in a way few scientists get tied to a place. The same research that drew him to the lake in the 1970s also helped lay the scientific groundwork for one of California’s most famous environmental fights.

Early research by Herbst and others helped show that Mono’s falling lake level was not just changing the shoreline. It was changing the lake itself. As Mono shrank, its salinity rose, threatening the organisms at the base of the food web. That mattered because Mono’s brine shrimp and alkali flies sustain the millions of migratory birds that use the lake as a stop on the Pacific Flyway.

Herbst said the work his group did in 1976 predated the formation of the Mono Lake Committee by about a year and helped demonstrate how important lake level was to the health of the ecosystem.

“It really formed, in part, because of the studies we did, where we discovered the importance of lake level, the toxicity of rising salinity,” he said.

After graduate school, Herbst came back and started scuba diving in the lake to study the shallow nearshore zone where alkali flies and algae thrive. 

Mono’s buoyancy made diving there difficult. Herbst said a diver might need 17 or 18 pounds of weight to get down in the ocean. At Mono, it took 42. So he would walk in from shore loaded down with weights and head into a lake so mineral rich that he had to put Vaseline around his lips to keep the regulator in his mouth.

“If you’ve ever tasted Mono Lake, you know why,” he said.

While studying the lake, Herbst helped expand scientific understanding of Mono’s alkali flies and also documented another way tufa can form underwater, when minerals crystallize on submerged pumice, logs and rock. But the flies ended up becoming one of the clearest indicators of what a shrinking Mono Lake means biologically.

That kind of research helped bolster the case that Mono needed more water, and in 1994 the State Water Board issued its landmark decision to curb Los Angeles diversions and manage the lake toward an elevation of 6,392 feet above sea level. The ruling was hailed as a major environmental victory and a turning point in California water politics.

But Mono never reached that target. Instead, the lake has spent decades bouncing below it, rising in wet years and falling in dry ones without ever achieving the full recovery envisioned by the board’s order. In the years since, climate change has scrambled the assumptions behind that decision. Sierra runoff has not looked like the historical patterns used in the 1990s. Big water years have not erased the lake’s long-term deficit. Mono’s ecological future remains unsettled.

Now, with the State Water Board again reconsidering Mono’s management, Herbst finds himself in a familiar role. This spring and summer, he has been among the scientists briefing board staff as they revisit whether the current rules are enough to protect the lake.

The case he is making is not all that different from the one he was making decades ago. Mono still needs more water, he said, and the old compromise has not held up under a hotter, drier climate.

“The future didn’t bring the same kind of abundance of water that the past had,” Herbst said. “The original decision that was made was a little bit naive in terms of not anticipating that.”

That does not mean Herbst sees the 1994 decision as a failure. Without it, Mono would almost certainly be in far worse shape. But he does see the current moment as a reckoning with the limits of a plan built around a climate California no longer has.

He also sees a shift in how science fits into the Mono fight. During the earlier legal battles, he said, there was plenty of money for lawyers and not much for scientists. Now, as agencies and advocacy groups prepare for another major decision, there is broader recognition that the lake needs continuous ecological monitoring and that management has to be grounded in current science, not just old assumptions.

“If we don’t have a good understanding of science, we’re not going to be able to do a good job with making the kinds of management decisions that are going to be in the best interest of the lake,” he said.

He said he hopes this round of Mono Lake proceedings is not quite like the last one, which at times felt more like court than government.

“Last time was quite a process,” he said. “But if they need it, I’d do it.”