Climate change and population growth are creating a new appreciation — and anxiety — around water infrastructure, both in the western United States and around the world. We’re joined today by Professor Erika Bsumek, whose new book, The Foundations of Glen Canyon, focuses on America’s second-highest concrete-arch dam. Not simply a massive piece of physical infrastructure, it is also what Professor Bsumek calls an infrastructure of dispossession whose history shows us how cultural structures, power relations, and indigenous knowledge and labor interacted in the 19th and 20th centuries — and gives us a window into how the might interact moving forward as the fight for western water intensifies in an age of climate change.
