Gilboa: New York's Quest for Water and the Destruction of a Small Town (review)

There are many ways one might read this book, for it focuses on New York City and its hinterland but provides many angles from which to view the issues at hand. The ostensible core of Gilboa is a chronicle of the construction of a dam to create the Schoharie Reservoir during the 1920s, which destroyed the village of Gilboa in order to provide additional water for New York City.

Substantively, I'm inclined to view this book as a case study in water politics, one among a growing number of such cases that have emerged in recent years as debates over water (as a right, a resource, a commodity, etc.) have rapidly intensified. But Gilboa is a historically-focused tract with a set of substantive discussions. This has advantages and disadvantages, for Gilboa provides an historical counterpart that serves as a cautionary tale for contemporary battles over water, though the story told in this book is somewhat scattered, fragmentary and repetitious.

Let me begin with the strengths. Gilboa contains numerous descriptions of fascinating historical contingencies that set the stage for later events involving the Schoharie reservoir and Gilboa village. New York's natural landscape, with its numerous river basins and specifics of topographic relief, later becomes crucial for difficult political choices about where New York City's next best sources are for water. Dutch mercantilism led to the establishment of trade along the Hudson River, later making the New York City a target for immigration, which fueled rapid population growth. Feudal tenure relationships in upstate New York led to revolts by renters, but under specific conditions (e.g., the death of a key landowner), which later proved insufficient to stimulate similarly strong protests against dam construction later (due to rural depopulation, driven by industrialization and better jobs in urban areas).

Another strength is the attention given to cultural assumptions and ideologies among various interest groups that interacted in specific ways to prevent or hamper efforts to resist construction of new reservoirs in place of rural communities. Whereas key New York politicians held to the view that water for the city provided the greater good for the greatest number, Gilboa also makes clear that the privilege given to urban populations in effect relegated rural peoples to second class citizenship. In later chapters, discussions of who set the fire in Gilboa village and debates over environmental restrictions on use of reservoirs also lay bare very different constructions of those disputes.

Despite the richness of the many threads to the tale told in Gilboa, this book also has some important liabilities. A key issue concerns the exposition itself. It is rather fragmentary, with little by way of transitions from chapter to chapter, and from (what passes for) a given chapter introduction to the meat of that chapter. If Gilboa does well at chronicling facts and contingencies, it provides a pretty sketchy roadmap for overall the logic of the narrative. This is compounded by periodic repetitions, as many topics are rehearsed at multiple points in the text, which often surges forward with fascinating new content, only to cause disappointment by lapsing back again in material already presented rather than advancing the argument in a coherent fashion.

Another issue concerns the intended audience for this book, for it exhibits significant tensions in the way information and arguments are presented. On the one hand, the painstaking detail of New York history suggests a general audience interested in the state and its grand city; on the other hand, the wide array of substantive issues, complete with citations of some pretty sturdy theoretical discussions (from Marx to Maslow), suggests a specialist audience. The upshot of this is that general audiences may find the plotline, which periodically lurches between detailed historical accounts and abstract theoretical exegeses, tough to follow. At the same time, specialists will find limited theoretical innovation here, and dissatisfaction that the treatments of numerous theoretical perspectives are usually...