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Book Review
| Political Waters: The Long, Dirty, Contentious, Incredibly Expensive but Eventually Triumphant History of Boston Harbor: A Unique Environmental Success Story. By Eric Jay Dolin. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004. xi + 240 pp. Illustrations, notes, index. $34.95.
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| Eric Jay Dolin offers a lively accounting of one of the nation's largest, most expensive, technically complex, and politically controversial public works projects. No, not The Big Dig, The Other One—the multi-billion dollar project to redo the Boston region's sewage treatment system and thereby clean up its filthy harbor. |
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The core of the book examines a two-decade legal and political battle to force often-recalcitrant policymakers to tackle a perpetually underfunded and ignored sewage treatment system, a struggle made infamous by George H. W. Bush's election-year sally into Boston Harbor to attack his opponent, Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis. To get to that story, Dolin traces the history of Boston's sewage system to its origins in neighborhood privies and wooden pipes, and shows how contemporary policy problems are in many respects new wine in old bottles. Nobody cares about sewage so long as it is out of sight—or smell. |
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In-depth coverage of the tussle leading to the Boston Harbor Project comes out of the author's dissertation. These sections, in particular the role of judges as key policy actors, are thorough to the point of being a bit overdone. The periods before (1630–1972) and after (mid-1990s and beyond) get varying attention. The reader gets a nice understanding of nineteenth-century events and civil engineering but, because the first seven decades of the twentieth century get crammed into one of the book's shortest chapters, will get the impression that Bostonians virtually ignored sanitation from 1899 until the passage of the Clean Water Act. They didn't, of course, and Dolin later assesses pre-1970s dynamics in his narrative of the legal battle leading to the cleanup, but a more balanced historical treatment would be useful. The "after" section is a bit choppy, a series of vignettes that, while interesting, don't really add up to a strong narrative. |
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Still, the book is worth it for anyone seeking to understand the historical dimensions and current policy dynamics of a topic that, like sewage itself, gets overlooked until something bad happens. The study doesn't break new ground, but Dolin succeeds in giving the reader a sense of the big issues at hand. Equally important, he goes beyond personalities like federal judge David Mazzone to show long-standing institutional arrangements like federalism, the incentives that motivate political actors, and the impact of law on policymaking. The result is a good analysis of a complicated political controversy. |
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Political Waters is most useful for upper level courses on public policy, environmental studies, and environmental history. The publisher also reaches out to general readers—one imagines those living in Greater Boston who pay the water and sewer rates that support the project—with an attractive cover and sets of pictures. |
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Christopher J. Bosso is associate professor of political science at Northeastern University, Boston. His most recent work is Environment Inc.: From Grassroots to Beltway (Kansas, 2005). |
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