Eric Jay Dolin. Political Waters: The Long, Dirty, Contentious, Incredibly Expensive but Eventually Triumphant History of Boston Harbor--A Unique Environmental Success Story. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008. xi + 240 pp. $24.95 (paper), ISBN 978-1-55849-641-5.
Reviewed by Jonathan Kinser (Case Western Reserve)
Published on H-Water (July, 2011)
Commissioned by John Broich (Case Western Reserve University)
The Big Cleanup
As its straightforward and lengthy title suggests, author Eric Jay Dolin’s book, Political Waters, tells the story of Boston Harbor’s phoenix-like rebirth from “A Very Stinking Puddle” to a “A World Class Project,” which has left the harbor the cleanest it has been in centuries. The years between 1630, when the Puritans arrived, and 2000, when the Boston Harbor Project became operational, serve as the starting and ending points for Dolin’s narrative. In between these two events, Dolin, a freelance historian with a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, traces the long path taken to deal with Boston’s sewage problems. Specifically, Dolin focuses the book’s first five of eight chapters on how Boston’s inadequate sanitation practices turned Boston Harbor into an environmental nightmare. The remaining three chapters analyze the complicated political and legal battle over how to clean up the harbor, and conclude with the city’s creation of its new sanitation system.
Operating within this narrative framework, Dolin briefly discusses crude, early sanitation efforts by Boston’s political leaders and citizens. These included attempts by citizens to build rudimentary sewers, privy vaults, and leaching cesspools. Though these efforts were more refined than the old method of directly depositing human waste on the ground, they actually led to greater difficulties by creating large concentrations of waste. Additionally, the slipshod construction of the early private sewers, which were essentially nothing more than drains leading away from houses, tended to cause more harm than good.
Moving forward, Dolin offers a chapter, “The Sanitary Awakening,” which discusses the creation of the municipal and state health departments, and the groundbreaking research of Sir Edwin Chadwick in England and Massachusetts’s own Lemuel Shattuck. Reports such as these drew attention to the dangers of poor sanitary conditions and shed light on the terrible conditions in the poorest parts of town, but led to little immediate action in Boston. In fact, the city would not complete work on its primary metropolitan sewage system until 1904.
Dolin shows how Boston’s sewage system for the period between 1885 and 1970 was a large drainpipe into the ocean. He points out that the sewage did receive some primary treatment to remove solid waste and sludge at the city’s two treatment facilities located on Nut and Deer Islands, but this did not occur until 1952 and 1968. The city’s longest running facility, located on Moon Island, had no means to treat sewage and had the sole purpose of discharging waste onto the outgoing tide in hopes that it would go away. Unfortunately, the tide would return with much of the waste.
Having abundantly established that things were very bad indeed, Dolin commits the last three chapters of the book to succinctly illustrating the difficulties inherent in properly motivating action in America, and emphasizing the importance of legal action. Had it not been for the 1982 lawsuit filed by William Golden, city solicitor for Quincy, Massachusetts, and the dogged determination of Judges Paul Garrity and David Mazzone, lawmakers in Boston might still only be debating how to clean up the harbor. Instead, as Dolin points out, the work of these three men forced action within the state legislature and resulted in the technological marvel that is Boston’s current municipal wastewater treatment facility.
Returning to the environmental results of these efforts, one gets the feeling that Dolin is not convinced of the sustainability of Boston’s efforts to clean up the harbor. Dolin admits that the harbor is dramatically improved; however, his concern is that building the system and convincing the people of its necessity may have been the easy part. Maintenance, he claims, “is a silent actor, rarely seen or appreciated by those who benefit from it” (p. 196). Additionally, Dolin uses his conclusion to call attention to efforts to trim the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority budget, which has resulted in layoffs that have left morale at what he argues may be its lowest level since its creation in 1984 (p. 196). Dolin opens his book by calling attention to the fact that higher-profile environmental issues often overshadow the more basic act of getting rid of our waste. It is fitting, therefore, that he ends his work with a warning not to marginalize what he earlier calls the “monumentally important act of getting rid responsibly of the waste people produce everyday” (p. 3).
Dolin successfully tells the story of how Boston cleaned up its act thanks in part to his familiarity with and predominant use of primary source materials as evidence. Ranging from interviews with the major actors in the reform efforts of the 1980s and 1990s, to court documents, archival sources, and legislative committee minutes and reports, the author has gathered a fine collection of sources. And he has blazed a trail for others to follow for further research. At the same time, Dolin’s heavy use of block quotes could be taxing for undergraduate students, and it does occasionally break up the flow of his narrative.
This book will be useful as a text for classes that deal in part with environmental legislation. In particular, the sections dealing with Judge Garrity’s role in pressuring reform from the bench form an interesting case study on the role of judicial advocacy in legislation. Additionally, the work suits itself to the study of environmental history and it contains a wealth of information regarding Boston’s trials in developing a sanitation system that appropriately deals with the removal of human waste with minimal negative impact on the environment.
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Citation:
Jonathan Kinser. Review of Dolin, Eric Jay, Political Waters: The Long, Dirty, Contentious, Incredibly Expensive but Eventually Triumphant History of Boston Harbor--A Unique Environmental Success Story..
H-Water, H-Net Reviews.
July, 2011.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=32396
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