Thank Goodness

I've been stressing a lot about my senior thesis lately. I know, it sounds weird, because I'm a junior, but it's not that I'm thinking ahead, it's that I'm taking the Capstone course right now. Finally I came to the realization this past week that the reason I was having such a hard time with researching for my thesis was that I wasn't really "feeling" the topic I had picked: negative effects of corporatization of agriculture in America. Yes, I'm passionate about it, and I believe that buying local is the way to go, but I was feeling too much opinion and too little academia, which was making it difficult to find good sources.

So last night I decided that I needed to relax my brain and then come up with a new topic: one that I would be interested in and would be able to passionately, enjoyably research. And I did just that. I wrote some letters, read some a real book, and relaxed. The result: a new topic popped into my head. Then this morning, as I was developing it, the thing took on a life of it's own and became something with a positive point and something exciting to research.

Now my thesis paper is "Battles Lost and Won: Development of Water Politics and the Restoration of the Owens Valley". That is, I'm going to write about how the concurrent events of Owens Valley and Hetch Hetchy Valley were both conservational battles lost to big cities, but how Hetch Hetchy became the proverbial Alamo of anti-damming environmental activism, which led to a shift in water politics and policy, eventually allowing the Owens Valley aqueduct to be revisited and setting the Owens Valley on the road to restoration.

Yeah. I'm excited to write about this.