“The Owens Valley is nothing but a resource colony,” Kathy Jefferson Bancroft, tribal historic preservation officer for the Lone Pine Paiute-Shoshone Reservation, told me. … Bancroft’s office is a site of an historic struggle for historic preservation and not the only site or the only struggle against DWP in this valley. The largest, most unifying fight in the valley community has been to force DWP to reduce the amount of alkali dust from the dry Owens Lake, which, 20 years ago produced the worst air pollution in America. An unintended consequence of the campaign to make DWP comply with the state and federal Clean Air acts has been the arrival of increasing numbers of shorebirds in the reborn Owens Lake.