Delta tunnel plans echo California’s troubled history of trying to control water

Most mornings, I walk my dog at Hahamongna Watershed Park in Pasadena, pausing by the reservoir to watch grebes and ducks glide across the water. It’s a quiet routine, but since the fire tore through Eaton Canyon in January, the silence feels louder, like this place has something to say. 

As an urban planner, I’ve spent years working on land use and water policy. When I walk through my Altadena neighborhood, I don’t see a freak disaster. I see a moment of reckoning, in a much older story about the quest to control nature and consequences that echo across generations. 

As Californians struggle to recover from compounding climate disasters, Gov. Gavin Newsom is moving to fast-track the Delta Conveyance Project, presenting lawmakers with a familiar choice. But before committing billions to yet another major water project, we must confront some hard lessons from our past.

Eaton Canyon is named after Judge Benjamin Eaton, an Anglo-American settler who built Pasadena’s first water infrastructure in the 1860s. Eaton engineered irrigation ditches to support settler agriculture and real estate development by diverting water away from Hahamongna, a place named “Flowing Waters, Fruitful Valley” by the original Tongva inhabitants. His intervention added to a harmful pattern that began with the Spanish mission system, when the violent colonization of Hahamongna Village disrupted sacred community relationships with land and water. 

Eaton’s son, Frederick, later expanded his father’s ambitions on a larger scale. As mayor of Los Angeles in the early 1900s, Frederick Eaton partnered with William Mulholland to develop the L.A. Aqueduct, a massive conveyance system that redirects water from Mono Lake and Owens Valley — called Payahuunadü by the Native residents — to fuel Los Angeles’ growth 220 miles south. 

It was one of the most significant and destructive water transfers in U.S. history, devastating the ecosystems and homelands of the Nüümü, Newe, and Kootzaduka’a people. Owens Lake, which is also called Patsiata, was once full of life. After it dried out, it became the largest source of dust pollution in the country, exposing nearby residents to toxins that increased cancer risk. 

The consequences were not limited to the Eastern Sierra. Angelenos suffered, too.

The aqueduct committed Los Angeles to a model of extraction that has persisted for more than a century. Today we’re often told L.A. is a desert, obscuring the truth that the rivers, wetlands and groundwater that shaped this region didn’t disappear — they were buried, paved and drained.

Instead of investing in local solutions like stormwater capture, recycled water and fire stewardship, Los Angeles prioritized importing water, urban sprawl, and fire suppression practices throughout the 20th century, leaving it increasingly vulnerable to disaster.

The result: L.A.’s stormwater rushes to the ocean through concrete channels, bypassing the thirsty soil beneath our feet. Fire-adapted chaparral, once tended through Indigenous cultural burns, goes misunderstood and mismanaged. Fire always finds its fuel. 

This legacy didn’t spark the Eaton Fire, but it seeded conditions that allowed it to spread and devastate. Eventually the truth catches up to us. The land remembers what we try to forget. 

Meanwhile, policymakers rely on public amnesia. The governor’s latest push to secure legislative approval for the Delta Conveyance before the session ends in September risks repeating history. The success of this water diversion megaproject hinges on the same myth of control, the illusion that humans stand apart from the very ecosystems that sustain us, that futile attempts at domination can shield us from the fragile, uncomfortable reality of our interdependence with nature.

A tragedy like the Eaton Fire reminds us that true leadership begins with humility, with the courage to take a hard look at ourselves and admit that we’re in a relationship with living systems, not in charge.

If destruction can be built one choice at a time, so can repair. 

In Payahuunadü, the Owens Valley Indian Water Commission continues to fight for water justice and the right to care for Owens Lake once again. Here in Los Angeles, tribal governments and Indigenous-led groups, such as the Tataviam Land Conservancy and Sacred Places Institute, work to restore ancestral lands, revitalize native plants and uplift traditional ecological knowledge. 

Across the region, grassroots groups are repairing relationships to water and soil, planting native trees, removing asphalt and transforming concrete schoolyards into living landscapes. Local agencies are getting serious about solutions we’ve long ignored: stormwater capture, recycled water, groundwater recharge and conservation. 

The Eaton Fire is the latest chapter in the long Eaton story. A name once celebrated for taming water now symbolizes a fire that reveals the limits of our control. 

The irony invites a deeper question: what does accountability look like when harm is inherited but the consequences are still unfolding? The control we seek may already reside within us — in our ability to exercise restraint, respect limits and stay in relationship with things we don’t fully understand. 

Like those before us, we face complex trade-offs. But unlike them, we have the benefit of hindsight and the opportunity, if we’re willing, to choose another way. Will we take it?