An interview of Mike Prather conducted for the Studio for Southern California History by Callie Black, Mark O'Meany, Megyn Rugh and Sharon Sekhon. In addition to discussing his career as a teacher in Death Valley and Lone Pine, Mr. Prather shared his vast knowledge on the history of the Los Angeles Aqueduct and the scientific reports conducted of the Aqueduct's effects on the region. Prather has been involved in several civic and activist organizations dedicated to wildlife and environmental concerns for Inyo County. Interview conducted at USC in Doheny Library in 2013.

water, Inyo County, LA DWP, Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, Los Angeles Aqueduct

Transcript:

Mike Prather:

My name's Mike Prather. I'm a fourth generation Californian. My name, my dad's name came into the state in the mid 1850s, but most of the rest of my family's [inaudible 00:00:17] and they have long roots in the state. I grew up in Northern California, Sonoma County, very attached to the ocean and the local environment. My family was a very outdoors type family. We hunted and fished and camped and we had a cabin, a small cabin, at the coast in a small cabin on the Russian River. So I grew up very much outdoors. Not necessarily that politically, those people would have blessed what I did with my adult life, although they do because they love me. But I think I was motivated by this environment that I came from.


When you love something a lot, and for me it was things that are outside, then you come to their defense sometimes when they're threatened. I just, I've been doing it for a long time. So I was a child of the sixties. The whole world turned upside down basically for a white guy from the suburbs in Santa Rosa. Went away to school when everything was churning politically and philosophically and lifestyle-wise. Earth Day in 1970, that's about the year I graduated, I think, from school and I was a biology major and I just...


Interviewer:

Where did you go to college?


Mike Prather:

I went to Santa Rosa Junior College for a couple of years. That was in my hometown. Then I went to school at Chico State, Cal State Chico. So I'm from Sonoma County. My wife's from, shares all the things I just mentioned. She's from Redding, so she's also in Northern Cal person. So we left Chico, moved to Death Valley. We had teaching certificates. We moved to Death Valley to teach in a two room school in a place where there hardly is any water. Got to live with the Park Service for eight years. Taught in a K through six. Nancy did kindergarten through third. I did fourth through six. Drove the school bus, did the janitor stuff when needed.


Interviewer:

What year did you move to...


Mike Prather:

1972. So we lived with the Park East, the Park Service, National Park Service, and got to teach Native American kids. There was a fair number of them in Death Valley at that time, [inaudible 00:03:04]. Got to know a little bit about their culture, didn't pry, didn't enter. It's very private, very private people, even after eight years. Time doesn't change the color of your skin or history, but it was a rich experience. So then we moved to Death Valley, or excuse me, to Lone Pine in the Owens Valley in 1980. So we've been living in the Owens family for a long time, whatever that is, 33 years.


Interviewer:

You mentioned the 1960s, then the rise of an environmental movement, [inaudible 00:03:44], Earth Day. What do you recall being the most pressing issues about the environment then?


Mike Prather:

Well, I've always been, I think an environmentalist is a term that's so general. It's just almost not useful any longer. I try to tell my opponents that sometimes, my friends that don't agree with me, and I'm not sure that they really accept it, that it's A to Z. So I was mostly interested in wildlife, parks and wilderness. The wilderness bill had passed. The original Wilderness Act passed in 1964, the year I graduated from high school.


Interviewer:

Could you explain what that is?


Mike Prather:

Well, it created these systems. It was based on [inaudible 00:04:38] Leopold and a whole host of other people that took eight years. It was first introduced in '56 and then eventually passed congress and was signed in '64. Basically, it says that we want places where there are few signs of man, humans, where there's natural quiet and solitude and where people are only visitors. These areas would be designated by an act of Congress, not an administrative thing that a superintendent or somewhere in office could just sign and then change. Somebody else could change it later. This was law. So I've been working a lot on wilderness. In fact, I'm going to DC next week to work on a new desert bill that's going to be introduced by Senator Feinstein later in the month, we hope.


Interviewer:

That's fantastic.


Mike Prather:

Yeah. So when I moved to the Owens Valley, I had a chance to get around people that were more active, older people than me. I was in my thirties and these were people that were Sierra Club people, mostly. Sierra Club has a long history of being a very well organized, very effective group that has evolved over time since Miers and others started it. So I got around people that knew how to do organizing, how to do politicking, how to do communications, a lot of training with them as just as a volunteer, just as a member, an activist. I like the word participant because that's what Ben Franklin and everybody wanted originally. They wanted people to participate in America. That's what drove the French and the Europeans crazy. They couldn't understand these Americans. They have all these associations, all these clubs, volunteer fire departments, and all this and that. I think it's still the case. I think it's honest. We participate at least those that are awake. People that are awake and motivated, they participate.


Interviewer:

I think it's also...


Mike Prather:

How could you not?


Interviewer:

... connected to a sense that we can change the future where there's a sense of fatalism about how things are...


Mike Prather:

I don't even think, I don't give that a thought any longer. I might have when I was younger, maybe, when I was a little more of an ideologue, idealistic. As I've gotten older, as I've watched older people work with experience, I try to get situations and issues and people to places where we can get something done. I try not to be a fool. I try not to be too naive. I give young people a chance to be naive, but I expect them to right with it and they will if they're awake. So I work on hard stuff. My county, Inyo County is the county I live in. It's a little bit larger than the State of Connecticut. It has 18,000 people. If you like open, empty spaces, that's the kind of place that those kind of people go to. So our valley, from Long Pine up to Bishop, which is our metropolis, our Paris of the Eastern Sierra up there is full of writers, professional photographers, international climbers and guides that do extreme outside things, extreme runners, people that do 50 to 100-mile races, and it's just full of those people.


So shortly after I moved there in 1980, I got around a few people, not necessarily those extreme people, but they were always... Extreme's the wrong word, but those amazing people, exceptional people. But those people always supported a lot of the stuff we've done, they've supported this in their own way. They're not political, most so of them. They're business people, they're physicians, they're writers, and photographers. But we formed an [inaudible 00:09:09] Chapter. We formed a Native Plant Society Chapter all in the first two or three years of the eighties that didn't exist. We brought the Sierra Club a little bit out of the closet. There had been a group there that dispersed. It's a very hostile politically conservative area for... It's changing, but it is a difficult place. It's a Sarah Palin place. It's a Fox News place, but it's changing. In fact, we just have four new supervisors that give us hope. We have one of the originals who's a tough nut, really smart, hardworking. She's a friend of mine. We agree on family and honesty and hard work and stuff like that.


But her family's been ranching in the Owens Valley since the 1870s. I mean, they look at the world in a different way and I can't criticize that. How can you criticize that? But the newer ones are much better, actually give a little bit of hope for Inyo County that if we can hang on to these guys that are willing to listen to people that come to the Board of Supervisors meetings and not give them two-hour lectures using lines from Sean Hannity and [inaudible 00:10:46] and all of this. It's just brutal to go through some of those sessions at times, especially for new people. They just walk out with their shoulders down. I'm used to it, but anyhow. So working the local politics is really important. It's easier where I live because there's fewer people. Individuals make more of a difference up there. Things are much more diluted here. I've been in city council offices in Los Angeles. I've met the mayor. I think he's still the mayor, and he's been to the Owens Valley a couple of times and met often with the Water and Power Commission.


The five that are appointed by the mayor to oversee the Department of Water and Power. They're political people. They're usually big time fundraisers and organizers. That's how you get those. There's 55 commissions in LA, in the city of Los Angeles. You usually get those by, they're plums. You get them by pay to play kind of stuff, even if they're Democrats.


Interviewer:

Oh, there's difference.


Mike Prather:

There's no difference in [inaudible 00:12:09]. The first slimer I ever met was in 68. That was horrifying. That was where I was naive and it was a lesson.


Interviewer:

Would you tell us about that?


Mike Prather:

Sure. 1968, friends of mine, we were at school of Chico and we began organizing for Eugene McCarthy who had challenged the President of the United States for running for president in the Democratic Party. He was a... I think, Gene McCarthy was from Wisconsin. He was a wonderful man, just a real intellectual, honest, straight shooter, pure guy.


Interviewer:

Pessimist.


Mike Prather:

That appealed to a lot of us. If I remember right, because I'm getting old, I think we beat or came very, very close to beating the sitting president, Lyndon Johnson, in New Hampshire in the primary. Soon after that I think is when Johnson announced that he was not going to seek another term. That's when Bobby Kennedy jumped in. So a lot of our age group, our cohort jumped on the Kennedy bandwagon, [inaudible 00:13:27]. It's got a lot of charm. It's pretty. I stuck with McCarthy, pushed doorbells. So we opened up an office in Chico on Main Street next to the pizza parlor. We had a phone bank going. In came this hired gun kind of person they hire. When they organize, they hire all these political type people to organize in towns and neighborhoods and communities. A lot of these people are pretty disgusting people, quite honestly. So this guy came in one night, so I was maybe 21, something like that age. He was an older guy, came in just absolutely drunk. He had two nice ladies, one on each arm. They were also three sheets to the wind.


He came in and started berating all of our local Democratic Club people in Chico for not knowing what they're doing and being hicks and stuff and the students and all that kind of stuff. That made a big impression of me, not that I was going to quit, because guy's a jerk, he's going to be gone, he's going to go out the door. But those are the learning experiences that... Watch Primary Colors, that has little bits of that in it and some of the other really good political films. So anyhow, we lost. I could have gone to Chicago as a delegate, we lost in California and that night, Bobby Kennedy was killed, I was in San Francisco at our party and we all saw that night, it was a bad year, 1968.


Interviewer:

Would you tell them about Chicago '68?


Mike Prather:

Well, I wasn't there, but there were a lot of activists that were very militant activists right up to violence, Weatherman and others. They were well organized in Chicago. Where the Democratic convention was, the mayor was Mayor Daley, the father of the previous Mayor Daley, who was a real ball-buster kind of Democrat machine kind of guy in Chicago. So the protestors organized out of a park across the street. Most of it was probably peaceful, but there's often groups that will use that group to cause something to happen and unwind. So they caused basically it to start breaking into violence and things.


Then there was just what they called a police riot where the police came in and just cleared that park with just billy clubs and there were just blood and people in everywhere. Dan Rather was critical of it. He was a CBS reporter on the floor of the convention and he was challenging Mayor Daley's thugs. I think he called him out in the street and Daley had the security people grab Dan Rather, pick him up, and carry him off the convention floor, which was just amazing, amazing. Anyhow, so we got Richard Nixon. Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon. So anyway.


Interviewer:

So...


Mike Prather:

That's enough to make [inaudible 00:17:19]...


Interviewer:

... it was very political violence, messy, all these kinds of shows of force, different groups within political groups causing dissent. Often police informants were paid to do that. So watching that as a 21-year-old, I mean obviously you had this disgusting experience with someone in your own campaign offices. How did you react in terms of organizing?


Mike Prather:

I no longer, I haven't since worked on any political candidate things other than locally, our supervisors in our county. I work on wildlife and water and local spaces, wilderness.


Interviewer:

Focusing on animals over people too?


Mike Prather:

Environmentals.


Interviewer:

Yeah.


Mike Prather:

I work on environmental stuff trying to save the best of what's left.


Interviewer:

I want to ask you, you describe yourself as an activist, an information junkie, an archivist. Would you elaborate on this?


Mike Prather:

In school, I mean, I really liked information and history and facts and that sort of thing. I was not very good in mathematics. I did take a degree in biology, so I had to take some physics and chemistry and whatnot. I did okay. But I've always liked to read and learn. The primary goal, I mean, I'm a retired teacher now, taught for 29 years. I think the primary goal really of teachers, for teachers, for students, is to turn out lifelong learners. You literally want these individuals to never stop learning until the day they die. Maybe they won't stop learning then for all I know. So because that's just the way, that's the richest thing you can do for humanity, for the human flowering kind of thing. So I got my degree in biology, I got a high school credential, and then my wife, Nancy, was teaching elementary school and teaching kids how to read. God, that was just fascinating. Breaking down phonics and [inaudible 00:19:53], teaching writing. So I got interested in that. "Well, maybe I'll get an elementary credential."


So I got one of those two and that's how we ended up in Death Valley, which is a K-six situation. My archivist stuff is that I've collected a lot of the stuff that I've done actively for the environmental stuff. I mean, I have notes from countless conference calls and phone calls, workshop stuff, lobbying materials for especially the Desert Bill in 1994, a California Desert Protection Act, but also a lot dealing with the water battle between Inyo County and the City of Los Angeles. Over Los Angeles, mainly, it's over their pumping of groundwater, their use of groundwater, which has been the modern water war in Owens Valley. No one with any sense of reality is trying to undo what happened 100 years ago where Los Angeles bought the Owens Valley basically, they owned 240,000 acres in our valley and they owned the water. No one's trying to undo that. That's the first aqueduct, which was finished in 1913. Second aqueduct was finished in 1969. It was to be filled with groundwater. So Los Angeles came back. It's like the Delta.


Southern California is now back up there and has the governor convinced we need to put two giant tunnels under the Delta Sacramento, San Joaquin River Delta to bring more water to the south, and somehow they will salvage and fix the country and everything else. To me, what it looks like is Southern California coming back once again for the future of Northern California, which is the water. You take away the water from a place and you take away a lot of their future choices and dreams. So Los Angeles came back in '69 with their second aqueduct, which is to be, to take water out of the ground. First aqueduct was surface water, melting snow. Second aqueduct was out of the ground. When they turned the pumps on in 1970, they destroyed numerous springs, the two largest spring systems in the Owens Valley, wanted a place called Fish Springs and at another place called BlackRock Spring. They also dried up lots of meadows. Places that had water would come to the ground to support these large green areas. They call them spring fields and meadows.


The water was pumped, feet, yards below the [inaudible 00:23:01]. So the vegetation died. This happened before I was there. Inyo County used a new law that I don't think they even understood, called CEQA, California Environmental Quality Act. In 1972, sued the city of Los Angeles, that the city had to do one of these things called an environmental impact report that I don't know they really knew what the heck it was. That began litigation. I moved into town 1980, was mentored by some water activists, old timers. People are all dead now. It was 30 years ago. They were 60 or better then, they were my age then. They're the ones that taught us the history of they were there and watched what happened. So a few of us are still active. The ones that I was active...


Mike Prather:

So a few of us are still active. The ones I was active with, the Owens Valley Committee for a long time, was president twice. That group is still organized, and some of those people are ones that go way back. So that's a good group to have contact with is the Owens Valley Committee, ovcweb.org.


Interviewer:

Did they do an environmental impact report then?


Mike Prather:

They did. They did an environmental impact report that was pretty thin. I like to say it was a little bit thicker than a Denny's menu. They were challenged on it and the court rejected it as being inadequate. So they did another one and came back in about three years with one that was three volumes or two volumes and inches thick. It was also challenged as being in inadequately describing the impacts and the foreseeable future of what had occurred in the past, and describing what the project itself was going to be, this groundwater plan. It was also thrown out by the court. What came next was Inyo and LA began talking to each other. Maybe we can come to a settlement or an agreement and design our own future and not spend all this time in court. That costs a lot of money, takes a lot of time. It's a lot of uncertainty involved with that. I'm going to get a drink of water.


Interviewer:

Oh, yeah.


Mike Prather:

Cheers.


Interviewer:

Oh, how do you challenge an environmental impact report? Do you have to hire someone as like the Sierra Club would garner funds to do that? Or is there money set aside by the state to help generate criticism?


Mike Prather:

No, I wouldn't say there's any money by the state. The state CEQA, the California Environmental Quality Act is meant to have transparency in projects. It's meant to have information, a clear description of what this project's going to be, come out in the open, and then the public, and then agencies like fishing game, now it's Fish and Wildlife and other agencies can comment on it. Then their comments can be incorporated or they can be explained away and this whole thing can go forward. At that time, then you could go to court and challenge the environmental impact report. But what you might get is a court saying, "Yes, it is inadequate." But the court's not going to tell you what it needs to be. But sometimes it's still much better than nothing, that's for sure. It followed the National Environmental Policy Act called NEPA, which both are under assault right now, especially here in California.


Interviewer:

Would you explain that?


Mike Prather:

Well, the governor and some of the legislators feel that CEQA is used to block or delay and thereby increase the cost of projects, favorites like a football stadium in Los Angeles. But it could be a housing development in a beautiful strawberry patch in Watsonville. It could be any environmental project, any kind of project. He wanted to streamline it, make it better. For who? Developers, bankers and people that donate to political causes. So that's taking place right now. There's a nice editorial in the LA Times this morning exactly on that. It's by John Vandicamp, who was a past attorney general in California.


Interviewer:

Who was a DA too, I think here.


Mike Prather:

Yeah. Usually there's a path you go through. I think he was from the mid-eighties to early nineties or something. So he talks about the importance of that act and how he argues against it being used to delay needlessly that there's... Or frivolous lawsuits. It's really quite well written so you can get it online. So anyhow, as environmentalists, since we really don't have the means usually, we don't have the deep pockets, we go to the workshops and training by people that do EIRs, that train you as just a citizen. How would you look at this? What does the law require? It's not too tough. Yep, it's a learning curve, but you can do it.


Interviewer:

You arrived in Lone Pine in 1980 and the pumping aqueduct had been in effect 10 years. Did you see effects after that from 1980 forward, or were the immediate effects happened within that first decade?


Mike Prather:

Well, our county, I'm on the... One thing I didn't share is that I am on the Inyo County Water Commission, which is a group of five people appointed by the board of supervisors to gather to conduct meetings throughout the year and gather information or comments from the public on these water related issues. So I'm still in the middle of it, so to speak. We're going to be down here the 20th, I think it is. We'll have what's called a standing committee meeting. It'll be at the top floor of the DWP building where the water commission meets, and that's where Inyo County and LA meet regularly through the year to try to sort through things, difficulties. The agreement was signed in 1991 and there are numerous important aspects of it that are not working well. They're not working well. Oh, damage since the pump, because I came 10 years after the real bad stuff. The way the damage occurs nowadays is in the agreement past water practices spreading water, certain amount of greenery, there's protocols for measuring meadows and irrigated pastures and things.


Those practices are to continue. Well, there've been places where it hasn't, and there's been disagreement between Inyo County and Los Angeles. One of the ones going in dispute right now that'll be talked about on the 20th, deals with a place called Black Rock 94. It is a vegetation monitoring site that is linked to a nearby groundwater pumping field, a well field where these wells go down 300 feet, 500 feet, 700 feet. This dispute is that there has been measurable change in this vegetation plant. There's places where the species composition is changing, where it's going from meadow and grasses, which have shallower roots to shrubs which have deeper roots. They come in after a place starts to dry. They're an indicator of that. There's places where there's now death of vegetation. So Los Angeles is saying that it's... DWP is saying it's not their concern. Not their concern, it's not their fault.


They say that Inyo hasn't demonstrated that the groundwater pumping is tied to these effects, and that's being hammered out right now. It's been in dispute for at least a year. So it's going to go to a mediation as part of the process to try to solve it.


Interviewer:

Are there scientists on the other side?


Mike Prather:

Yes.


Interviewer:

Or is it like the global warming debate that we're constantly dealing with in the public sphere?


Mike Prather:

The water agreement is the Inyo County Los Angeles Water Agreement has funds that Los Angeles gives to Inyo County with no strings. It started with a million dollars a year and with a COLA, a cost of living adjustment to fund Inyo County's water department, which would have scientists, hydrologists, plant people. We do have legal counsel. Our water department has permanent staff of nine. The Department of Water Power has many more and they have lots of money. They hire out and bring in scientists that are consultants that can look at vegetation or look at hydrology and pumps and pay them great sums of money, hundreds of thousands of dollars. Use that to argue their case against Inyo, which has nine and limited amounts of money for our county. Not a very...


Interviewer:

It's also very-


Mike Prather:

No counties are wealthy anymore. Maybe Marin.


Interviewer:

Yeah, San Fernando Valley. I think it's also really odd to have your money coming from them. It's like tobacco money that they set aside with these promotional campaigns that are anti-tobacco. You say that it's no strings attached. Is that money guaranteed? How is it guaranteed?


Mike Prather:

Well, the water agreement is a contract.


Interviewer:

A contract.


Mike Prather:

A contractual would apply.


Interviewer:

Dialogue between Inyo County started it formally in LA in 1991?


Mike Prather:

The negotiations began probably in the early '80s.


Interviewer:

So that's when after all of this, they started talking.


Mike Prather:

Right. Inyo and Los Angeles began talking about the water agreement. So a group I was an activist with called the Owens Valley Committee at that time, we met in somebody's home. We had big bowls of popcorn and eat apples and try to go after Goliath. So we were able to eventually get the legal counsel pro bono, but we had to pay out of pocket, like mileage meals, lodging, costs of filing certain briefs and things, but the hours and things he ate. So that helped. Yeah, it's easy to do nothing, always in anything. It takes effort to do something.


Interviewer:

How would you define your first activist moment?


Mike Prather:

I remember as a young boy going with my dad, who was a planning director for Sonoma County back in the 1960s. He was approached by a group of men or people that were active with a sailing group. I was in a sailing group as the youth part where we learned to sail and we raced and stuff. They came to my father because they probably were using me as the foot in the door, I guess. They wanted him to go to a hearing down in Marin County, which was not our county, over the formation of the Point Reyes National Seashore. Because my dad was a planner for the adjacent county, and his voice would mean something. He was really a good speaker. It was easy for him to speak, seldom used any notes at all or any guidance. I went with him and watched, maybe that made me interested in those kinds of things. Little meetings. It was at a restaurant bar, an Olima, I think. Yeah, near Point Reyes.


Interviewer:

The other question I wanted to ask you related to your teaching, what was your favorite teaching moment in Lone Pine, as well as in Death Valley? Because I know there're two different groups of students.


Mike Prather:

Well, I think Death Valley was the best. Nancy and I are still in contact with students we had there and some of the parents. These students are now in their forties and have their own families. It was a place where you could teach in a very simple way. Our principal was 65 miles away and most of the teachers had school bus driver's licenses because if somebody got sick or quit, you had no more transportation unless you had somebody to could jump in the bus and drive the bus. I had a school bus driver, so I drove. I could drive buses all the way up to crown size buses.


So if you wanted a field trip, you didn't have to go through offices of administrators and deal with the costs. Nowadays, people can't even have field trips, unless you raise the money and maybe not even. It's really sad. We just jumped on the bus and just go. We had one outing a month during school days, somewhere in the park. Parents were invited, neighbors who were invited. It was very inclusive. It was all instructional science and national history and things. Then we always had one Saturday per month, a non-school day. That was the best. Yeah, that was a great place to live and to teach at that time.


Interviewer:

How hot did it get and how cold did it get?


Mike Prather:

We didn't even use a heater in our house. No, it was a little bit like LA and was nice. Almost never froze, it might freeze. We lived up off the Death Valley floor above Furnace Creek Ranch. Down there it's lower, like 200 feet below sea level where there's a golf course and things. They could get a little frost in there in the morning. You turned on your swamp cooler in April and it stayed on through October pretty much. It's really hot.


Interviewer:

Do you guys know what swamp coolers are?


Mike Prather:

Evaporative coolers. They trickle water through these pads of fiber material and a fan blows that water, that air that's cooled by that evaporating water that blows that into your home. Works really good in dry climates. Lone Pine, I don't know, I don't know if I can think of any real thing. I decided I liked it all very much. I taught fifth grade and sometimes fourth and sixth if we had to lump a little bit. Then the last 12 years I did middle school science, sixth grade, seventh grade, eighth grade. I enjoyed that.


Interviewer:

That takes a lot of patience. I barely handled those years as a person, much less as a teacher.


Mike Prather:

Well, that's because you kept changing every 60 seconds.


Interviewer:

That's right.


Mike Prather:

That's why you're talking.


Interviewer:

And you-


Mike Prather:

You're talking to Jennifer here and then you think everything's great and you caught up with all her girlfriends and what she's going to have for lunch or whatever. Then she turns around, she comes around the next time, it's like a new Jennifer. It's a different Jennifer. Very fragile, very vulnerable Jennifer, my archivist stuff.


Interviewer:

Okay.


Mike Prather:

When I say archivist, I don't mean like a library like this and stuff. I do collect all the materials that work on campaigns and things, maps and such. But I've been... Do you all know what the Stockholm syndrome is? It had to do with captives, people held hostage. That if you're held long enough, you somehow for some reason begin to sympathize with your captors. Well, I have that with the city of Los Angeles. I'm not foolishly sympathizing with Los Angeles, but I collect things related to water history and aqueduct history in the Owens Valley and some Owens Valley town stuff too. It's not LA but I read all the literature, I read all the history. I have a daughter that lives in Los Angeles. She's a costumer and she lives over in Melrose, Fairfax area over there, an apartment. Come down and visit her all the time because what a great city. It's tremendous.


Interviewer:

I think last time-


Mike Prather:

For a baseball game and go see the Book of Mormon in the same day. It's nice, great restaurants, people of all kinds of colors and languages and stuff. Man, it's rich, really rich. So I like it. I love the history. I follow all the politics and all the literature film. A resource you might be able to use is if you get Paramount's latest release of Chinatown, which was re-released...


Interviewer:

Five years ago?


Mike Prather:

Or less. It had the extras in there are interviews with a whole bunch of us locals.


Interviewer:

Oh, awesome.


Mike Prather:

Then Robert Town, who wrote the screenplay, got the Academy Award. They brought him up and I got to tour him around on Owens Lake and took him to the Alabama gates that the people seized years ago and were rich. Just to be around him, it's pretty cool. He's an LA boy. It's pretty ancient now, older than me.


Interviewer:

Okay. I want to ask you, why are birds important to you?


Mike Prather:

Oh, my birds are important to me. Well, I grew up around birds. I grew up outside. I knew a lot of the names of birds, not like a birder knowing the names of birds, but aunts and uncles and people, grandma and grandpa teaching you. Grandpa would teach you that we ate all of those. Uncle Lloyd, who was an Italian heritage, he would eat blackbird pies and stuff. I grew up learning birds and the names. In college I got around... I was in an anthology class, and I got around some real birders. First time I've ever been around birders that are chasers. A chaser is a birder that gets a call on Friday that there's this rare bird at the Salton Sea. They might skip their class that afternoon, jump in the car and drive day and night from Northern California all the way down here to see this bird. That fascinated me. But I was younger then, some foolish young pony. But it just intrigued me. Then the depth of their knowledge, and a lot of them were biology majors, life science majors, but some were like artists.


Their field books were filled with sketches and quick watercolor studies, really neat stuff. Or photographers. So I like the idea of learning those names. It's one of the reasons why it was easy to move to Death Valley because it's known for having lots of rare birds. During migration these birds are just spent, their lost. They're crossing uncountable miles of dry desert and they see a golf course and Ferns Creek Ranch and down they go. So Labor Day weekend and Memorial Day weekend, I say it's a great place to go to get rare eastern birds that are lost there, just don't know where they're going. So my main interest is natural history, but I probably have an emphasis on birds and botany. So I took my degree, I got a master's in botany. They're just wonderful. They represent the biggest... To me, they're something that people have always loved. Almost all people like to talk about birds, almost everybody has bird feeders. We celebrate a special day and in November just dedicated to a bird, turkey, Thanksgiving.


I grew up hunting a lot. I shot a lot of pheasant and quail and ducks and ate them. I don't hunt anymore. I'm tired of plucking things and cleaning things and don't have to buy a license and stuff. But they have song, they have beautiful colors, they have incredible behavior. They migrate, and many of them like insects and other things, but birds are the most visible wildlife. You can read an environment if you know how to read the birds. You can look at the health and diversity, the overall health of a landscape, or a location if you know what birds do. So I like the idea of trying to help in citizen science, a participant again. So I've been doing breeding bird surveys, BBSs, breeding bird surveys for the Federal Fish and Wildlife Service, FWS, since the '70s.


Mike Prather:

Yes, since the seventies. And those are where you drive. You drive... I think it's a 25 mile course on a road. It's vehicle based. You drive every half mile, you stop for three minutes and you encounter any bird you see or hear because birding by ear is pretty important once you get into it because you'll end up getting more birds with your ears than you will with your eyes. Especially if you're in the trees. You really need it when you're in the woods and they just drive another half mile, you do the same thing. You're 50 stops. But I've done [inaudible 00:48:44] with Audubon, and then I do... I started organizing because I have a lot of data on Owens Lake before the giant dust control project from back in the eighties. The dust control project didn't really start until '01 when the water came on, but we've been doing what's called our big day.


It's like a dipstick. You're just checking the level. We put as many people as we can get out on Owens Lake and then one day we try to count every bird that's there. We do it every April and every August. And lately we've been [inaudible 00:49:20] over the city of Los Angeles water power because they have biologists and I know a bunch of them. I've worked with them for years and they go out and help too. We just had our last one in April, the 23rd, and we had 114,999 birds.


Speaker 1:

Yeah, it prints out your list.


Mike Prather:

There's the list.


Speaker 1:

Yeah, it's very diverse too.


Mike Prather:

That is a 10th of a million birds in one day, that Owens Lake, which shows the importance. Now, when we went out in the eighties before there was a dust project, because that count was mainly the dust control project in the city of Los Angeles. We went out in the eighties where there was no dust control project, just small little postage stamp wetlands, seeps and springs and mud flats. We might get 1400 birds, maybe push 2000 and now almost 115,000 birds.


Speaker 1:

Could you explain the dust control project?


Mike Prather:

Okay. I'm seeing these guys get tired. Did you guys have lunch? And here's the deal because I heard that Mark was... You're studying or some of your coursework is engineering.


Speaker 2:

Civil engineering. Yes.


Mike Prather:

Okay. Because the world is not black and white. We know that. But there's lots of loud people, loud people left and right that they want us to think it's black and white because that'll make us afraid or angry and maybe give them money, watch their television show, become a member of their organization. So we have to watch out for that. One of the black and white fears is that all corporations are bad. Capitalism is bad, and I'm kind of a left of center person most of the time.


That development or engineering is just destructive. Well, I don't feel that's true myself and I'm kind of glad that most people don't think it's true. But I always worry about younger people coming in because I just hate seeing people get all crazy because there's wing nets from either side of the center. I work with them all the time. I've lost lots of friends. He leaned over to me one time when I was struggling in a meeting and he said, "A lot of people just like to fight." Waste of time. It might be time to do some of that, but it's really nice to get something done then move on to something else. But at Owens Lake, there's an example of a giant engineering project to control a huge regional health hazard PM 10 dust. These are particles less than 10 microns.


They're invisible. Human hair is about 70 microns. So these are invisible. They go to the deepest parts of our lungs. They've been blowing there for 80 years or so since the lake dried up in the mid twenties because the first dock went up in 1913. You see, it took all of the streams that would flow eventually into Owens Lake. So after 1913, Owens Lake was no longer getting its flow of water. And so it began to dry. And by the twenties took about 10 years it was gone and it began to blow dust, all kinds of different particles, many, many different kinds of salts and then some metals. The metal with the highest count is arsenic, but there's also [inaudible 00:53:24]. There's a lot of arsenic in desert water and springs.


So the Clean Air Act, the federal one, and the state one was... I shouldn't say used, but I guess it was used to compel the city of Los Angeles to control this hazardous dust source that for decades had been out of control. I mean, this dust would blow. The immediate area was maybe 40 to 60,000 people if you include Ridgecrest, a community south of us in a different county. But it at times blew all the way to San Bernardino. It blew well north of Bishop. So it was way more than just our county. And so Los Angeles agreed to fix it. And they started in '19, or excuse me, in 2001. Water, which was one of their tools, came on and began to control dust. And we're talking about on square mile levels. So they created many, many cells that they can flood. They can get wet with sprinklers. I'm trying to find a map. This is Owens Lake right here. So it's 15 miles this way, 10 miles this way. Blue is water, green is vegetation.


In some places they're using gravel. So their tools that they're allowed to use are managed vegetation. It has to be a native seed source or plant source, gravel or water.


Speaker 2:

And where are they getting the water?


Mike Prather:

The water's coming straight out of the aqueduct. So in a sense, it's like revenge on [inaudible 00:55:22]. That's what it's up here at the north end. There's a pipe that goes right into the side of the aqueduct. It's underground, so you have to point it out to people. It's 60 inches in diameter. It's five feet in diameter. It's that accurate. It's a lot of water. So that water drops by gravity to the lake bed where they can move it around with pumps. There's another pipe down here at the south end, a little bit smaller that does this part. This part here, the brine pool doesn't make dust, but this part up here is where the dust came from.


So all these areas have burns and they're called cells and they receive water from during the dust season, from October through July. And then they shut it down for a month or so for maintenance. And this is unbelievable engineering challenge out here. Chemically the surface and under it is very corrosive. So if you're having gates and valves and pump [inaudible 00:56:38] and things, there's stainless steel, which is not cheap. The pipes are almost like a composite metal and some kind of material. But they will run a light current of electricity through it to try to ward off the corrosiveness, the loss or gain of electrons, whatever causes rust.


They hired an engineering firm called [inaudible 00:57:15], which is one of the largest engineering companies on earth. They're a multinational like [inaudible 00:57:24] Halliburton. And they... Los Angeles hired them to do things like the designing this project, administering the work, developing all the plans, and they paid [inaudible 00:57:41] $105 million. $105 million was the fee. So the work has been going on since 2001 or so. Actually it was before. And now we're 2013. The city of Los Angeles has spent $1.2 billion. They have hired close to a hundred new positions of all kinds. Could be a person that just goes out and checks what the water level is and how the gates are doing. But it could be a computer operator, a programmer, engineers, environmental compliance, regulation type oversight people, all kinds of people. To me, those are kind of green jobs. Green jobs because they're spinning off Clean Air Act, doing something for public health. And we know with water and power, they pay really well. They pay, God 50% more per position than other positions in city government for the same job. Plumber, electrician, whatnot.


Interviewer:

Does this image correlate to the study?


Mike Prather:

Yeah, this is why the project was done. This is from a video camera. This is actually a dust cam that you can visit if you go to the Great Basin air pollution site. It's GBU, Great Basin Unified, APCD.org, GBUAPCD.org. They have live cameras of Owens Lake. They also have a whole history of everything, design projects, everything. But this is where tons in a half an hour or less, tons of particles could go up into the air. Usually associated with some sort of a major low pressure system coming off the Gulf of Alaska coming onshore on California. We're in the rain shadow where we live. We have the ridge of a Sierra there on the way to Mammoth, where we live in a lone pine area in the lake area is 14,000 feet high. So we only get about four inches of rain. So when the big storms come in, California might get rain, but we'll get wind.


We'll always get wind. Sometimes you might get rain, maybe a little bit of snow, but always the wind's going to blow two or three days, then it's gone. And that's just kind of horrific to me. That's the Inyo Mountains over there. This is a partway up the side of the Sierra. This is just the very northern end of the lake. The lake is 110 square miles.


Interviewer:

Have they tracked any kind of diseases? [inaudible 01:00:54].


Mike Prather:

That's been difficult. It's all anecdotal. There hasn't been able... You really couldn't do a study there I think very well, I'm not a statistics person, but the sample signs will be very small. These are small communities, but we have anecdotal evidence from ER rooms, emergency medicine rooms, urgent care type things. We have a local hospital in Long Pine and then in Ridgecrest they have a full-blown hospital down where the channel like Naval Weapons Center is. And those physicians there talk about during the major events, people with respiratory challenges, people with emphysema, elderly people are breathing oxygen. Asthmatics [inaudible 01:01:43]. They'll be coming in. They'll begin suffering from that. So that's the best knowledge we have. There's people that are concerned about the arsenic and cancer incidence and stuff. Those are really tough things to deal with. You read all the studies where they're trying to help communities out in the farming areas with a lot of these chemicals that are used on fields. And it's just... It's hard because you're going to be challenged.


Interviewer:

Especially people with deep pockets.


Mike Prather:

And judges don't necessarily like to do science. We would rather see the parties settle. That's what the judges want. And that's kind of what the attorneys would like.


Interviewer:

I'm going to ask you to describe some of the photos that you sent us. I'm going to just begin this one.


Mike Prather:

Oh, this is a reflection of Owens Lake in the foreground and the sky and the mountains here in the background are the Inyo Mountains just opposite the lake and the sky. This is a reflection. This was taken across one of the dust control ponds. It is incredibly photogenic place. Los Angeles water and power doesn't really want ponds out there because they're only required to keep a flooded area, 75% puddled or moist. And that will meet the air standard. The science has been done and that will meet the particles per cubic meter that the law requires. And so some of these ponds are like two feet deep and are foot deep, and they really only need to be much less. So they're adapting. They're starting to adapt. But of course this is what the bird's like. But to me, this is the historical [inaudible 01:03:37] also in a sense, it's what the lake probably looked like before it disappeared.


Speaker 3:

The first one was the hundredth anniversary?


Mike Prather:

Yeah, our local museum, our local museum in Independence, which is our county seat, has the Eastern California Museum. Really a neat little museum. It has a lot of great stuff in it. And they had in partnering with City of Los Angeles, had a 100th year. We didn't want to call it a celebration because there's a lot of people that don't think it was something to celebrate about. Like these Bayou Indians that demonstrated out in front and inside during the general manager's talk. Ron Nichols, Department of Water Power. But they didn't interrupt, but they had some amazing signs. This at the top is a photograph of the aqueduct semi historical photograph. It's being presented to the manager or the director of the museum, John Klusmire, by the Los Angeles party over here. This is the very, very jovial effervescence, greatest backslapping politician. Very nice fellow Tom Labon.


Speaker 3:

I've been [inaudible 01:05:08].


Mike Prather:

Yeah.


Speaker 3:

It's a verb here.


Mike Prather:

Loves to have pictures taken.


Speaker 3:

He does.


Mike Prather:

Anyhow, so we have Inyo County over here, one of our supervisors. God, all the rest of these are all LA. Wow. We're really outnumbered. So we have the general manager Department of Water Power, Ron Nichols is manager in charge of all water operations. Jim McDaniels, the [inaudible 01:05:39], two water commissioners. Christina Newan, Jonathan Parry, who is a green person, very green person here in Los Angeles. He was with, I think it was one of the concerned scientist groups or physicians groups. And then is now, or had been with the LA Green Coalition, I think. And then a couple more DWP higher up. But the sciences by the [inaudible 01:06:07] were really nice. This is what you're celebrating. And it's a photograph area, photograph of Owens Lake dry, where's [inaudible 01:06:17]. There's a nationwide Native American protest of all things that are harmful going on and up into Canada too. I forgot what it said. No longer silent or no longer something.


Interviewer:

Yeah, I've heard about it. How they're using can canoes to travel from Polynesian. Indigenous people have canoed all the way to continent here and then gone up to Seattle. And on the way they meet Native American tribes and share stories as well as values about the general goal.


Mike Prather:

In our valley and in our valley, the Owens Valley, when the settlers came in the 1850s, late 1850s, there began to be problems with the [inaudible 01:07:11] folks. Usually involves something like somebody had a cow disappear or because it's easier to hunt a cow than a deer. It's very washable, I think. And where the farmers and settlers were... Is usually where there was water to spread. I mean, we do live in a desert, but there are these streams that come from the snow in different locations along the valley. Well, that's where the Indian folks [inaudible 01:07:38] lived too. So there began to be problems and violence. There were some massacres that Owens Lake where they drove the Indians into the village and drive the Indians into the lake and just killed them all.


One of those sites was just rediscovered last year during the dust project where they were out doing some initial archeological work and they began to find these artifacts and things and started finding musket balls. Military ones, like soldiers. There's never been an admission that the military was involved, but there can be renegade people anywhere. And so the whole Owens Lake and the whole valley is an archeological.


Interviewer:

Yeah.


Mike Prather:

It's amazing. So the government sent a calvary group up into the Owens Valley to supposedly deal with some Indians that have been stealing horses down around the missions. And it turned out they weren't the ones that were stealing. And they seemed pretty peaceful folks. All the write-up was really quite good. And they were concerned about the Indian safety pipes. But they gathered them all up and they marched them from the Owens Valley all the way down to Fort to home, which is on the grapevine, the five going over the top to Bakersfield.


And there's a state park up there called Fort [inaudible 01:09:17]. And there on a smaller spot down on the San Joaquin side, Sebastian, they had reservations there and they held the Paiute people, the Owens Valley people there for several years. And then I think they just allowed them to go back and walk back or whatever. So when they got back in the late 1860s, all the places were taken, all the places with water, all the places where they gathered food, all the places where they moved seasonally, because these were people who moved seasonally. They lived very, very well for Great Basin Paiutes. They were beyond subsistence. They ate well, but they lost all their land. They were completely landless until the mid 1930s. They were squatters around ranches. They built traditional [inaudible 01:10:15] little houses or things out of brush in the summer, just pile up brush and make it go for the top and have it empty in the middle and a door and you can get in there.


And they worked on ranches and farms and lived around towns. And then in the 1930s, Los Angeles got together maybe at the invitation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the federal agency that still deals today with those issues to try to see if they could get some land for these people. And so they set up rectangular reservations, small ones in Long Pine, Big Pine and Bishop, and gave them an X amount of water that would flow in there. I think they gave them five feet of water for every acre of ground. And so that's where they've been living since. So that's a whole nother story. And the current president of Allen Valley Committee, Allen Bacoch, spelled B-A-C-O-C-H, Allen is a local Paiute member of the Big Pine Band and really knows the history well through his family and through his own study.


Interviewer:

Would you tell them about the orchestra that you're in?


Mike Prather:

Yeah, sometimes. I'm a very linear person. I kind of see things that we do this and then you do that and you do that. And then there's people that are creative and can look at lots of solutions and lots of little tweaks and tweaks. And then there's...


Mike Prather:

Look at lots of solutions and lots of little tweaks and tweaks. And then there's artists. So sometimes it's artists that can get you to places, get people and societies to places where they hadn't been thinking or looking or seeing or hearing or feeling before. So there's this artist named Lauren Bond who has her own studio and her own stable of other artists and creative people around her. She calls it the Metabolic Studio, and she does projects like that. So she got up to the Owens Valley, she was fascinated, she's an LA girl. She's fascinated by this hundredth year of the aqueduct. This year in November, it's going to be 100 years. The first aqueduct was finished.


And so she began doing projects, different art projects. She began trying to help local people grow food so we could have more local food and more choice and maybe healthier food and things like that and that's been ongoing. She's a very hands-on, philanthropic person. She likes to be right on the ground with what's going on, because a lot of them are in buildings and skyscrapers and stuff. I don't see Eli Broad doing that, but not to judge him at all. But anyway, one of the things that Lauren did is she rented this old chemical plant, not the nasty kind of chemicals you think about with Louisiana and Texas and stuff, and maybe Wilmington or whatever's down there.


Interviewer:

With fire plumes.


Mike Prather:

Yeah, but one that just made this material called soda ash from the brines in the lake. It's a fairly benign product. It's not an awful thing. Anyhow, they had this large factory there, all these metal buildings and things, and it closed in 1970. So Lauren's group got ahold of the owner and leased this property and they cleaned up the whole inside. They put a yurt inside so there could be meetings and functions even through the wintertime. And her first project was to do ... she has this thread of a story called Silver and Water, which deals with water going from the Owens Valley to Los Angeles building this big city and the yellow brick road. Who knows what that is.


And then we had a large silver mine called Cerro Gordo right above Owens Lake that back in the 1870s brought a lot of wealth into Los Angeles in terms of banking and investment and development. They capitalized the city. It gave it the wealth to then begin to grow, so that's the Silver and Water story. So one of the aspects of this story is she wanted to do Somewhere Over the Rainbow, but she wanted to use ... she's fascinated by glass. She kept thinking about all the chemicals in the lake and things that are used in glass making. First she wanted them to make the glasses themselves. Well, that didn't work out. So they went to the secondhand store and just got stemware.


And then she hired a professional guy that does that kind of music. He does this resonance stuff and way beyond that, Greg. And so he became the conductor for a local people that were invited to do a whole bunch of rehearsals and then a performance in one of the silos, big, tall, round silos that was part of the plant. They cleaned it all out inside, it was all round. The audience was around the outside, [inaudible 01:16:12] was around the outside and in the middle were these tables with glasses and we played Somewhere Over the Rainbow. Lauren, she's recording all of the stuff she's done and she's done things down here too in LA. Her studio is just north of Chinatown.


Interviewer:

It's near the Spring Street Bridge next to the state-


Mike Prather:

Yeah, it's literally next to the Spring Street bridge. Years ago they did something called, Not a Cornfield, where they built this giant cornfield out in an area that historically, apparently way back had been a farming area. When they found it, I think it was a train yard or something or other.


Interviewer:

Yeah, and [inaudible 01:17:02] Crespi and Portola came up through the Sacred Expedition in 1769. They talked about corn growing along there.


Mike Prather:

Okay.


Interviewer:

And then it was a railway yard and she spent millions of dollars cleaning it up so it could be a state park.


Mike Prather:

The state took it over. There's a little piece of the [inaudible 01:17:23] in there, the mother ditch that came off of the river with this big giant wheel that would pick up the water and then lift it to a higher level and dump it and then run the ditch. I think Lauren ... didn't she-


Interviewer:

I heard that she's bending the river to a water. I was told that six months ago.


Mike Prather:

Okay. She had this project of building that wheel again and using it in the narrows area or somewhere. Anyhow, it's just wild thinking that I can't even follow because sometimes I pick up the phone and everything had completely changed. I did a little bit of work for her, a little bit of writing for her and some research and participated in things and got to know the group. Like I said, she grew up in Los Angeles, so she has a connection with Eastern Sierra, the Owens Valley, because that's the backyard of LA where people go fish and camp and backpack and ski at Mammoth, and so she's always done that. She had a real interest. She's been able to get access to some of the real high levels in the city, and she's very into sustainable communities, some of the communities being able to live within their means in terms of resources. So she's tried to develop those sort of things.


Interviewer:

What was it like participating in that orchestra as a non-artist?


Mike Prather:

It was nice, Nancy and I both went. If our daughter lives here in LA was visiting, she would go to the rehearsals, even though she couldn't make the performance. It was a small town we live in. So you were seeing people that you know, people that were former students or whatever, so I like that aspect. And it was enriching to be around people that just do art, that do projects, that do thinking on all kinds of different levels.


Interviewer:

Yeah, it's an inspiring space to be in.


Mike Prather:

Yeah, and a lot of that kind of thinking had to do with a lot of the engineering. I was like, there was no book. There was no book on a shelf to take off about how to get giant vehicles and dig ditches and put in plumbing and get water to spread out and do all of this at a place and an environment like Owens Lake. So it took a tremendous amount of really engineering, creativity, a lot of real creativity and it was done for the public good on multiple levels. I mean, first of all, of course the health, but the wildlife connection later, because the birds had showed up.


I mean, they had been flying over since the lake and disappeared in the twenties. But immediately when the water was out there, the algae began to grow these primitive algae mats right on the mud, brine flies came in like at [inaudible 01:20:34] lake on the shore and began to breed in the algae. And then that set the table for the birds, because that's what they love to eat. Just train loads of brine flies out there. They're really nice flies. They didn't ever land on you. If you have a picnic or anything like that, they don't ever land on you. It's wonderful to be around, and that's all engineering.


And now you throw in biologists, and you throw in a computer programmers, you throw in remote sensing, different wavelengths to look at moisture in the soil from Landsat satellites or plant growth, it's a marvel. But anyhow, Lipkas and the tree people are amazing and they've done some interesting partnerships that involve engineering. They worked with different flood control groups and communities and entities at a place in the valley. San Fernando Valley called that Elmer Street or something. It's an area that's always flooded by rain. And the reason it flooded is, or it was like one of the last places to flood, is it was a neighborhood and community that really didn't have a voice. I mean that's just where the water ended up. That's the way it was going to go.


So the original project was this big expensive something. And instead of doing that, Lipkas got together with the flood control, Pirelli County and the different cities and whatnot and they designed a whole thing. They looked at a watershed not being a mountain of trees or a canyon, but a neighborhood, and they called it an urban watershed. And so they got buy-in from anybody that wanted to get in, and they went in and took out driveways and made it a permeable material where water could go through. They did rain barrels to collect water off of roofs. They did these vegetated soft swells they called them, that gutters direct water into these vegetated and hardened areas where we can get in Nashville, infiltration back into the groundwater.


And then there was a park nearby that had some kind of open ground where they went in there and put in a large catchment area for all the extra water, and I just thought that was an amazingly creative thing. I mean, it was millions of dollars that was set to do this other project. It was traditional, but Lucas and his group convinced all these people to stay in the room, federal, state, county, city. And that's what Audubon ... I do a lot of my work out with Audubon. I know it's like is just to try to get people to stay in the room and talk to each other and not knock each other and fight all the time. That was a very inspirational story, I thought. And that would probably be on the tree people website, nice website.


Speaker 4:

I'm going to ask students to ask-


Mike Prather:

Ready to ask. Can I chew on a sandwich while we're-


Speaker 4:

Oh, I was actually-


Mike Prather:

It's fairly informal.


Speaker 4:

Oh, I was going to actually ask you about the birds, but you answered my question about how the algae was growling and then they were migrating over and they stopped. And that's why the numbers went up?


Mike Prather:

These are pretty primitive algae. They're not filiform and things. They're more of just a matte form and they're not really that attractive. It's dark and black.


Speaker 4:

It's enough to stimulate.


Mike Prather:

Yeah, it provides food because they're the primary fixers, the sun, it's energy and then whatever nutrients might be in the mud. And then the flies come in and breed, lay their eggs, the larvae feed on the algae and so on.


Speaker 4:

So besides the bird population increase, have you seen any other changes since they finished the engineering project?


Mike Prather:

The dust project currently is not finished.


Speaker 4:

Oh, okay.


Mike Prather:

It is 90% compliant with the Clean Air Act, which is huge because I lived there when there was no control. And three or four times a winter, that whole Owens Valley almost to the top of the mountains was just filled with dust really bad.


Speaker 4:

Would you guys just have to stay indoors in those days?


Mike Prather:

I was at a high school basketball game one night, and it gets in everywhere. It's so small, so you can taste it in your throat and in your nose because the salt's dissolving.


Speaker 4:

And it's so small that you have to put a bandana over your face.


Mike Prather:

I did some field work before the project. I did some bird survey work as a ... I was hired by a consultant that wanted to mainly find where snowy plovers were. That was the sense of a species at Owens Lake. And so we were out on the lake walking on foot, often well away from your vehicles. We already had radios and I don't know if we had cell phones then. Well, we had radios, but we had breathing masks in case we got caught because the lake can go up really fast.


Speaker 4:

Like the-


Mike Prather:

The kind like a bug-


Speaker 4:

Yeah.


Mike Prather:

Yeah, they could really catch the small stuff.


Speaker 4:

Good.


Speaker 5:

Working with the urban watershed.


Mike Prather:

Pardon?


Speaker 5:

Where again? What city?


Interviewer:

San Fernando Valley and Elmer Street.


Mike Prather:

Yeah. I want to say Sunland again, but-


Interviewer:

Sunland?


Mike Prather:

I'm guessing, but I think we can track it down on-


Interviewer:

I'll look on tree people.org.


Mike Prather:

So Lipkas is a guy, the [inaudible 01:27:05] people, that room I find remarkable, and Mark Gold was their director. He's now at UCLA. I think he's an instructor in some environmental department there. I think his name's Mark. His brother's Jonathan Gold that does the food stuff for the LA Times.


Speaker 4:

Jonathan Gold, is that the same one that does the ... I'm getting confused, is that the omnivore dilemma guy or is that-


Mike Prather:

No, that's Michael Paul I think.


Speaker 4:

Oh, okay. Nevermind, totally different.


Mike Prather:

Yeah.


Speaker 4:

But sorry, what was the name of the UCLA professor you just said?


Mike Prather:

I think his name is Mark Gold.


Speaker 4:

Mark Gold.


Mike Prather:

He was a former director of Heal the Bay, Santa Monica Mountains Group, Edmondson. He's probably not maybe day to day anymore, he's getting older. But that was an incredible group to take this land that people willing to put gazillion dollar mansions on.


Speaker 4:

Sure, yeah.


Mike Prather:

But our walkable, wonderful open space and to try to go in there and save as much as you can, I just found that just remarkable. And Mono Lake Committee, another group that I really find I have a lot of admiration for. We don't have that level in the Owens Valley. I don't know why.


Speaker 5:

So do you find many engineers have compassion or want to serve the environment or was the revitalization of the wildlife in the Owens Lake just a byproduct of complying with the dust control?


Mike Prather:

Well, it was a dust project.


Speaker 5:

Yeah.


Mike Prather:

And in the early years ... because I kept bringing up birds and I would share data from surveys that we did with groups and they would say, well, Mike, it's a dust project. And I'd say, yeah, but these birds are there. You cannot ignore them, can't ignore them, but they just happened to show up. But now the conversation is that DWP wants to create this master project. It's guided by work we've done, a group of us have done with DWP, there are a lot of stakeholders on Owen Lake's master plan. Owen Water Power wants to do a master project that would fix the dust, save maybe as much as half the water they're using on the lake, which is an enormous amount of water they're using. I'll give them that. It's 95,000 acre feet per year, which is a lot, and would also protect the existing wildlife. It would enhance the habitat and protect it over time.


And this is what this pretty thing is. So they spent probably several million dollars hiring a landscape architect firm to develop these different ... what the land cover's going to be, different kinds, different color analysis, how they'll phase it in, and different species that they'll work on, different birds that'll benefit. Some birds are shore birds in the mud, some birds are diving birds. We call these guilds. They're groups of birds that have common behavior, way of making a living. So we have waterfowl, snowy [inaudible 01:30:43] shore birds, migrating birds, breeding birds and that's what this all what this about. There's a lot more to that story, but I don't think I can can get into it today.


Speaker 4:

Why don't we-


Mike Prather:

I'll just share something real quick. I'll try to be quick. In 2007, I put together a field trip and invited every individual and group I could think of that had an interest in Owens Lake. So that was who owns it, which is the State Lands Commission, who manages the wildlife, that's the Department of Fish and Wildlife, formerly Department of Fish and Game, the Dust control Agency, the ABCD, city of Los Angeles, ranchers, miners, wildlife people, community people like the chamber of commerce. And I led a field trip there for a day and a half and the attendance was ... I was really impressed. There were significant people, particularly from Los Angeles and state that came because you can always ask. You don't necessarily get people to show up, particularly in really obscure, hard to get to places. I mean we're not really on the road to anywhere. [inaudible 01:32:15]


And from that, our Audubon group, our chapter got together with Audubon, California, which is Audubon on a paid professional level. It's called Audubon, California. And they agreed to give us staff time to help us organize, and so we began a process to create a master plan for Owens Lake that would look at everything. They'd look at water, look at birds, habitat, dust, of course, somebody that wants to graze a cow. There's a little bit of mining and look at all that. And after a couple of years, water and power, D WP, decided this is a great idea. So we're going to hire a facilitator, which they did, really good facilitator, probably spent a ton of money just on that.


And we did close to three years of meetings and field trips and work groups dealing with water, with habitat, with crafting the enforcement language of this master plan, not master project, but master plan. And then last year the air pollution district up our way issued an order to Los Angeles that DWP had to do 2.9 more square miles of dust area, that they were about 90% finished, but they needed to do this much more. And DWP and Los Angeles, they just flipped. They just dug in and refused the order and they appealed it to the Air Resources Board for California and Sacramento. They lost their appeal there. They appealed.


They had a federal case where they sued the Bureau of Land Management, which is federal. They sued the State Lands Commission. Did I say the Air Pollution Guard? They sued pretty much anybody standing in the room almost that had some kind of authority, and they just had their federal case dismissed in the court in Bakersfield. And now they're just remaining this state court where they're saying that they're basically being abused. They're rate payers. Their water rights are being attacked by these ... they called them rogue regulators. It's a friend of mine [inaudible 01:35:04] named Ted, very nice guy, but he will enforce the law.


So that case is still outstanding, but the problem was that occurred amongst our stakeholders, and DWP was a stakeholder, state lands commission was a stakeholder. And so DWP has sued these others. So to keep those people in the room still talking about a master plan has been really tough, so we haven't had a meeting in a while. We're supposed to have one on 15th next week, and in the meantime, DWP came out with this, which has everything we talked about in the master plan. And they call it a master project, which will do the same thing, but they'll be totally in charge. And so that's making everybody-