Taylor Walters - April 2, 2026: Water (In-Class Entry)

Today we talked about aqueducts, aquifers, dams, and rivers! We also discussed how water gets redirected to major cities like San Francisco or Los Angeles. The specific example we focused on was the Hetch Hetchy water system, which involved damming a valley inside a National Park just to supply water to a city. We literally flooded part of Yosemite! That to me feels like it should have been a bigger deal than history made it out to be. The thing that really got under my skin was the idea that water value has gotten so high that water is no longer treated as a public resource but as private property. Once you frame it that way, I feel like everything changes. Who gets it, who doesn't, who can afford it? Water is the most basic thing you need to survive and the fact that it's being treated like a commodity is honestly kind of terrifying. We also talked about the Mogollon Cliff Dwellings, built by people who had incredibly complex relationships with water in a dried up landscape. Ancient communities figured out how to live sustainably where water was scarce and we've basically undone that wisdom for development. How far does the privatization of water go?

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