Thirsty City: Politics, Greed, and the Making of Atlanta’s Water Crisis by Skye Borden (review)

Skye Borden’s short but ambitious Thirsty City attempts to explain why “Atlanta remains perched on a tightrope between water scarcity and infrastructural calamity,” a crisis which she contends has been “a century in the making and entirely its own doing” (p. xii). Over the course of 131 pages of text, Borden, an attorney and coordinator of the River Region Food Policy Council in Montgomery, Alabama, narrates a story in which economic development and political expediency consistently trump sound environmental planning. The result is a book that is a highly readable introduction to those unacquainted with Atlanta’s water problems, but one that may also prove frustrating to observers with deeper knowledge of both the city and the difficulties of managing urban environmental resources.

According to Borden, Atlanta’s water troubles began when it was “arbitrarily” established in 1837 at the intersection of railroad lines rather than on a major river or body of water. This siting choice distinguished Atlanta from virtually every other American city and made securing adequate water supplies from the rocky terrain a subsequent hardship. In the 1890s, city leaders tapped the Chattahoochee River, located some six miles north of downtown, but the river soon proved too erratic to meet evergrowing demand. In an effort to regulate the river for flood control and hydroelectric power, Congress constructed a series of dams along the Chattahoochee basin in the mid-1950s. Unfortunately, this “secure” supply source inadvertently promoted increased water consumption among Atlanta’s competing metropolitan jurisdictions. Suburban sprawl inevitably followed, and an over-reliance on septic tanks and overburdened and outdated sewer treatment facilities eventually led to exceedingly high rates of water pollution. By the 1990s, Atlanta was facing millions in federal fines, billions in court-ordered water-system repairs, and suits from downstream neighbors such as Alabama and Florida over the legality of its increased water withdrawals.

Shortsighted politicians emerge as the primary culprits in Borden’s declensionist account. Mayor William Hartsfield, for instance, is depicted as having helped usher in the metro feeding frenzy through his unbridled boosterism and successful campaign to convince Congress to fund the network of dams without stipulations for local financial contributions. Not surprisingly, Bill Campbell, an Atlanta mayor convicted and sentenced to federal prison for tax evasion, is treated as a stereotypically corrupt politician for allegedly taking bribes when the city embarked on the ill-fated privatization of its water-supply system.

Borden’s study is, in essence, a summation of newspaper reports synthesized through a reading of court decisions, legislative statutes, and a short list of published academic works. It contains no images, maps, charts, or graphs. Historiographical debates go unaddressed and archival research appears to be minimal. And while casting aspersions at “politics” and “greed” is often warranted, a more thorough analysis of economic, social, and environmental factors is needed. Readers therefore learn very little about the conditions under which politicians, engineers, and planners made crucial decisions about capital improvements and the adoption of technologies in the midst of a changing regulatory framework. Indeed, Maynard Jackson, whose election as Atlanta’s first black mayor occurred shortly after the passage of the Clean Water Act of 1972, receives only thirty-one words of coverage, despite his creation of a Bureau of Pollution Control and initiating construction on a nearly $300 million wastewater treatment project. Environmental constraints are similarly underexamined. Atlanta, for example, sits atop terrain that is carved into myriad subdrainage basins, which makes wastewater collection and treatment a difficult and expensive endeavor. The frequency of droughts, the evolution of a regulated riparian model, the percentage of water that metropolitan Atlanta governments return to the Chattahoochee River Basin are not, unfortunately, explicitly discussed. Such information would help readers better evaluate whether Atlantans are in fact irresponsible water users.

This is not to suggest that Borden’s book is without merits. Her writing is...