Mono Basin An Economy of Ecology

The alarm rings at three in the morning, for which I curse having shared whiskeys with drinkers and jokers in Lee Vining the night before. I have coffee to make, and a walk along a lake, here from a perch in the dirt under my truck, under the shadow of the Sierra Nevada. I am not quite sure why I am here, but sometimes that is the way travel goes. No answers, at least not yet.

Wilson's Phalaropes — migratory shorebirds — and the Kutzadika'a people shared in common a palate for a particular fly. The alkali fly, Ephydra hians, inflates a balloon-like sac on the front of his head to pop his pupa shell. A natural scuba diver; small hairs on the body of Ephydra hians create for his small black body a droplet of air which can keep him underwater for quite some time. In 2017, Caltech biologists finally worked out how: the fly is hairier than other flies, and a wax on the hairs repels Mono’s carbonate-rich water so well that a bubble wraps the whole body, leaving only the eyes exposed. Big claws let it crawl along the rocks against the bubble’s pull. Mark Twain, who watched them here, said they came up “as dry as a patent office report.”

For thousands of years, the Kutzadika’a, a band of Northern Paiute whose name means “eaters of the fly pupae,” harvested the pupae, which they call kutsavi, for food and trade. Pretty unpleasant, I thought when I poked at the soupy legions of fly pupae. But then again how bad can California desert caviar be after seeing a head cheese, or pickled pigs’ feet? I consulted Leviticus. Flies are out (“all winged insects that go on all fours are detestable to you”), but it says nothing about pupae.

While the Kutzadika'a feed on the pupae of the fly, the flies and the brine shrimp, as many as six trillion of them, feed on algae that bloom in the lake each winter and spring. Mono Lake sits on the western edge of the Great Basin Desert, below the eastern wall of the Sierra Nevada, just east of Yosemite.

The brine shrimp, of the species Artemia monica, are unique to the lake. Up close, they look like space aliens. Their cousins’ ability to lie dormant for years let one clever company sell them to children as Sea-Monkeys.

The algae blooms; the shrimp and the flies feed on the algae; the phalaropes feed on the shrimp and the flies on their way to South America. The ones that don't make it plop dead in the lake, and the lake takes them back, but more on that later. It is a simple ecosystem; and though we often call ecosystems fragile, it is hardly that, for it has lasted millennia, pretty much this way, in a so-called free market of biology, unencumbered by the influence of external pressure.

A Simple Economy

Although the Mono Basin itself comprises fourteen unique ecosystems, the lake is an ecosystem of its own, and one of North America's oldest lakes. Some of its species — the brine shrimp, for example — are found nowhere else in the world.

It is for all purposes a simple economy of an ecosystem; few places in the world harbor such a simplicity of balance; so few players, like a macroeconomic graph on a university chalkboard. Guns and butter, flies and shrimp.

A tunnel runs beneath the basin, and dumps into the Los Angeles Aqueduct; a vast manmade barrier which propels in pretty much a straight line toward Los Angeles, to feed grass in the desert.

Starting in 1941, Los Angeles diverted the streams that feed Mono Lake. By 1982 the lake had dropped 45 feet and lost half its water. A hardy ecosystem had lost its air to breathe. Salt content was rising, choking the ecosystem like a harsh tax.

I have always found it strange that the armchair proponents of free markets and healthy economies are the first to poo-poo the free market of ecology. Economics and ecology are the same. If we define economics the way the British economist Lionel Robbins did, it is just the study of unlimited wants in a world of limited resources.

The fear of environmentalists is a world biology which will one day need to be micromanaged, like East Germany's factory outputs, like North Korea's rations. Saving swarms of tuna at the expense of a hundred species of wrasses; cows at the expense of the lily. If the Mono Lakes of the world need to be regulated, who has the balls to say we will be able to master the balance of ecology with the precision of its creator?

All that dies in Mono Lake is taken back by the lake; the phalaropes who die here sink into the depths, and slowly, like everything else here, return to the lake’s chemistry.

Krill, Shrimp and Other Simple Economies

Mono Lake is not the only place on Earth that runs on a handful of players. The Southern Ocean around Antarctica works almost the same way, just scaled up past comprehension. Algae grow on the underside of the sea ice. Antarctic krill, shrimplike animals about the length of a paper clip, graze on the algae. And nearly everything else — blue whales, fur seals, penguins, albatrosses — eats krill, or eats something that does. Krill may be the most abundant wild animal on the planet by weight, hundreds of millions of tons of them.

Simple systems are astonishingly productive. Nobody has to share. That’s why Mono Lake can grow trillions of shrimp in a summer, and why one to two million eared grebes stop here each fall, some nearly tripling their weight before they fly south.

But a simple system has no backup. When the one thing it depends on falters, everything falters at once. Around the Antarctic Peninsula, one of the fastest-warming places on Earth, the sea ice is shrinking and the krill are moving south with it. At the same time, the krill fishery, which grinds krill into fish feed and omega-3 capsules, has boomed. In 2025 it hit its 620,000-ton limit and closed early for the first time. In 2026, it did it again.

Utah’s Great Salt Lake is Mono Lake’s bigger cousin, and it runs on brine shrimp too. Their dormant eggs are harvested every winter and shipped around the world to feed farmed shrimp, an industry worth tens of millions of dollars a year. In 2022, after decades of upstream diversions, the lake fell to its lowest level on record, and the salt climbed toward levels the shrimp can’t take. A simple lake in Utah had become a single point of failure for shrimp farms on the other side of the planet.

Simple Human Economies

Human economies can be simple, too, and they strike the same bargain. Nauru, a speck of an island in the Pacific, had one thing to sell: phosphate, the fossilized droppings of seabirds. In the 1970s its people were among the richest on Earth per person. By the early 2000s the phosphate was nearly gone, most of the island had been strip-mined down to coral pinnacles, and the savings had vanished in bad investments. Venezuela sits on the largest proven oil reserves in the world, and oil brought in about 95 percent of its export earnings. When oil prices crashed in 2014, on top of years of mismanagement, the economy shrank by roughly three-quarters, and some seven million people left.

Simple economies do one thing extremely well. When the price is right, they are fabulously productive, just like Mono Lake in June. But they have no second act.

Economists call the cure a portfolio, and it turns out ecologists use the same word. In 2010, the University of Washington ecologist Daniel Schindler showed that the sockeye salmon of Alaska’s Bristol Bay stay abundant year after year because they are not one population but hundreds, each spawning in its own river and lake. When one crashes, another booms. Without that diversity, his team found, the fishery would have to close about ten times as often. They called it the portfolio effect.

Norway figured this out with its oil. Instead of spending the windfall, it poured it into a fund invested in thousands of companies around the world, now worth about two trillion dollars. Norway turned a simple economy into a diverse one. Mono Lake can’t do that. It has one cast of characters, and it will always depend on the snowmelt coming down from the Sierra.

That is what I love about Mono Lake. It is simple, and simple is beautiful, and simple is productive. It is also why it needs a guardian.

The Tufas

I finally reach the famed Tufas of Mono Lake; the monoliths which were once preserved under water. They are twisted, trollish, ungodly, like Lot’s wife, turned to salt fleeing Sodom. They are beautiful and obscure; the pale gray-white of irregular columns springing out of the shore, out of the lake. Monolithic calcification brought into the dry world by the Los Angeles Aqueduct. I can only see them with my head-lamp, and from the light of the stars, which makes them appear much larger than they are.

All this death and stoning, what does it matter? After fifteen years of lawsuits, including the California Supreme Court's 1983 public trust ruling, California ordered Los Angeles in 1994 to cut its diversions and let the lake rise to 6,392 feet. Los Angeles now uses no more water than it did in 1970, even though the city has added more than a million people. Somebody believed in conservation, and mandated the change of a city's water habits. The lake still hasn't made it; even the giant snow year of 2023, which lifted it nearly five feet, wasn't enough. On September 1, 2026, it stood at 6,382 feet, nearly ten feet short, and Los Angeles was still taking its full share of the streams. Somewhere, somebody else is fighting for another lake. But most are already too late. The Salton Sea, Owens Lake — gone or almost there. Lakes like the Aral Sea or Iran’s Lake Urmia don't have California's dual sense of destruction and protection — they don't have conservation's best friend — wealth and leisure.

All lakes share a role in a system, and lakes are among the first to fall to human abuse. But the answer to protecting lakes may just fall in the hands of environmentalism's alleged enemy — the economy. Conservation saved Mono Lake, but an economy that understands the nature of the ecological processes realizes that the two are one and the same. That a dying sea will end local irrigation, advance desertification, and expand the decline of resources. An economist's nightmare.