You are now in Media Coverage San Diego County category.

The picturesque tufa towers on the shores of Mono Lake, formed over centuries by underwater springs and left high and dry as Los Angeles diverted water from nearby creeks, have long been a symbol of the saline lake. Visitors who stroll beside the lapping water take photos of the craggy calcium carbonate formations as flocks of migratory birds soar overhead.

But residents, local officials and environmentalists say the lake’s level should be much higher than it is today, and that the fully exposed tufa spires show L.A. remains far from meeting its obligation to restore the lake’s health.

There are obvious benefits to logging, grazing, prescribed burns, and mechanical thinning of California’s forests. When you suppress wildfires for what is now over a century, then overregulate and suppress any other means to thin the forest, you get overcrowded and unhealthy forests.

California’s trees now have 5 to 10 times more than a historically normal density. They’re competing for an insufficient share of light, water and nutrients, leading to disease, infestations, dehydration and death. Up through the 1980s, California harvested 6 billion board feet per year of timber; the annual harvest is now 25 percent of that. We have turned our forests into tinderboxes, and that is the reason fires turn into superfires.