The Spoils of Dust

"""Outside of California's water experts, few know where Los Angeles's famous water grab came from or the social and environmental impacts that resulted. Alexander Robinson has written a thorough account of Owens Lake, which was once California's third-largest water body. The Spoils of Dust: Reinventing the Lake that Made Los Angeles reads like a whodunit told by an omniscient narrator (Robinson himself, as a small-town detective), featuring the Great Basin Unified Air Pollution Control District (GBUAPCD) and an unwitting protagonist, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP). It is a compelling environmental saga that combines site analysis with a discussion of design process in the complex environmental and legal landscape that shapes Owens Lake today."" --Journal of Architectural Education ""Unlike moralizing contributions to the long Progressive Era's anti-urbanist tradition, 2018's The Spoils of Dust: Reinventing the Lake That Made Los Angeles establishes not only a case for reparation but also a path toward achieving just that. According to USC landscape architecture and urbanism professor Alexander Robinson, design allows for reinvention as restitution."" -- Peter Sebastian Chesney (LA Review of Books) ""At times, The Spoils of Dust is a dense read. But its gorgeous maps, graphs and photographs celebrate a landscape that others might dismiss as post-apocalyptic. Robinson makes a convincing case that massive human developments need not always result in decimation."" --Nature: International Journal of Science"