Some forty years after the aqueduct first began tapping the Owens Valley, L.A. leaders realized that the city needed still more water. They also realized that there was a wealth of unappropriated water in the next watershed up, just 200 miles further north – the Mono Lake Basin. This chapter explores the extension of the aqueduct to the Mono Basin in 1940 and the acceleration of Mono exports after the second barrel was built in 1970. It begins by introducing the extraordinary features of the Mono Lake ecosystem itself – the trillions of brine shrimp, clouds of alkali flies, and millions of migratory birds that depend on a hypersaline sea – suspended in a high-desert basin marked by dormant volcanism, geothermal activity, and limestone tufa towers rising from calcium laden springs entering Mono’s carbonate-rich waters. It also reviews the human communities of the Basin, including the indigenous Kutzadika’a Paiute and the European settlement that followed the California Gold Rush. Finally, it explores the human and environmental consequences that followed Los Angeles’s acquisition of rights to take water from the Basin, setting the stage for the legal controversy that would follow.

The conclusion sums up the historical legacy and implications of the landscape of genius. It begins with the landscape photographer and environmental activist Ansel Adams, who, like John Muir, became strongly associated with Yosemite and with the National Parks in general. Adams, through his photography and environmental advocacy, helped to translate the landscape of genius into the twentieth century, associating nature as wilderness with high culture and the fine arts. Those associations promoted both American nationalism and a specifically White, elite middle-class version of environmentalism. The conclusion then explores the wider implications of this “environmentalism of genius” for the environmental movement and popular conception of nature today. It argues for the dissociation of nature from genius as part of a larger reimagination of “nature,” in order to diversify the environmental movement and promote more socially just and ecologically effective approaches to environmental issues.

This chapter demonstrates how John Muir’s association with Yosemite defined its significance as a National Park and played a key role in the formation of modern environmentalism. Muir was deeply influenced by Wordsworth, Thoreau, and Burns and by the model of the landscape of genius in general. Muir represented nature in Yosemite as a form of high culture, analogous to the fine arts, in ways that defined the National Park as an institution and have exerted massive influence on modern discourses of nature. That high-cultural version of nature then shaped the American environmental movement, especially through the long political struggle from 1907–13 over the proposal to dam the Hetch Hetchy Valley as a reservoir for the city of San Francisco. In that struggle, Muir and his allies embraced many of the same forms of environmental rhetoric of the landscape of genius initiated by earlier attempts to preserve Wordsworth’s Lake District: a transatlantic connection that launched the American environmental movement and evolved into a hegemonic form of twentieth-century environmentalism.

“Art is in the eye of the beholder.” Yet, although still photographic images predated moving cinematic images, it took longer for photography to attain widespread artistic and creative appreciation. “Art for the sake of art” assumes that art has no practical purpose. Indeed, some have claimed that “everything useful is ugly.” Perhaps that’s why commercial photography initially overshadowed artistic or creative photography. Famed photographer Ansel Adams succeeded in both worlds: the commercial and artistic. What explains his success? How did he ever take up photography in the first place? How did Adams’ personal development coincide with the evolution of photography as an art form? How and why did Adams embrace environmentalism? And, how did his landscape photography advance the environmental movement in the United States? Answering these questions goes to the very essence of the creative arts and how art conveys meaning to those who behold it.