Boundaries of Analysis: An Inquiry into the Tocks Island Dam Controversy

This is a study of what happens to technical analyses in the real world of politics. The Tocks Island Dam project proposed construction of a dam on the Delaware River at Tocks Island, five miles north of the Delaware Water Gap. Planned and developed in the early 1960's, it was initially considered a model of water resource planning. But it soon became the target of an extended controversy involving a tangle of interconnected concerns - floods and droughts, energy, growth, congestion, recreation, and the uprooting of people and communities. Numerous participants - economists, scientists, planners, technologists, bureaucrats and environmentalists - measured, modeled and studied the Tocks Island proposal. The results were a weighty legacy of technical and economic analyses - and a decade of political stalemate regarding the fate of the dam. These analyses, to a substantial degree, masked the value conflicts at stake in the controversy; they concealed the real political and human issues of who would win and who would lose if the Tocks Island project were undertaken. And, the studies were infected by rigid categories of thought and divisions of bureaucratic responsibilities. This collection of original essays tells the story of the Tocks Island controversy, with a fresh perspective on the environmental issues at stake. Its contributors consider the political decision-making process throughout the controversy and show how economic and technological analyses affected those decisions. Viewed as a whole, the essays show that systematic analysis and an explicit concern for human values need not be mutually exclusive pursuits. Metadata: 29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY AND ECONOMY; 54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES; DAMS; ENVIRONMENTAL EFFECTS; SOCIO-ECONOMIC FACTORS; WATER RESOURCES; PLANNING; COMMUNITIES; CONSTRUCTION; CONTROL; COST BENEFIT ANALYSIS; DELAWARE RIVER; ELECTRIC POWER; ENERGY SOURCES; ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT STATEMENTS; POWER GENERATION; DOCUMENT TYPES; POWER; RIVERS; STREAMS; SURFACE WATERS; 290300* - Energy Planning & Policy- Environment, Health, & Safety; 510500 - Environment, Terrestrial- Site Resource & Use Studies- (-1989); 520500 - Environment, Aquatic- Site Resource & Use Studies- (-1989)