Blog: Will barons of blue water be more equitable than those of black oil?
Many of today’s under-resourced communities have no more access to blue gold (scarce water) than the under-resourced white residents of the Owens Valley have had since the 1920s. In 1924 greedy public and private water interests transformed the lush Owen’s Lake into a noxious dust bowl. One of the guilty parties LADWP (Department of Water and Power), recently celebrated partial restoration of Owens Lake by constructing a ghostly monument of granite and sculpted earth in the long desiccated lake bed. … For many indigenous peoples denied their rights to water for a century, partial restoration of the lake without full restoration of their water rights is too little, too late.