Provocative glimpses of developing technologies, trends and breakthroughs in the arts, sciences, politics, and global affairs, accompanied by images from the JGS collection and commentary by guest writers.
Owens Lake
by Karen Sinsheimer
In 2050, when oil is $500 a barrel, will clean water – at any price – be available?
David Maisel’s aerial photographs of Owens Lake, on the eastern flanks of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, offer mute testimony to the possible future. The once vast 200-square-mile lake has been bled dry to slake the thirst of Los Angelenos, and more ominously, the dry lake bed spews an estimated million tons of polluted matter as far as 150 miles away, when the winds kick up their toxic dust storms. These strangely beautiful images are visually seductive until one realizes that in all their colorful abstraction, they picture a starving earth.
Increasing numbers of people populate the sun-drenched West, and water supplies, if used and husbanded, might be sufficient for some time to come. But the quest for water to sustain the promised life-style of semi-arid communities – golf courses, landscaped verdure, and tourist accommodation -- will become an increasingly difficult problem and no doubt contentious, if not disastrous. And the use (and subsidy) of water for agricultural crops such as cotton in California, for example, is another issue altogether
Karen Sinsheimer is the Curator of Photography at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and a JGS board member.
Photography: David Maisel