| The Ithaca Journal has a Gannett article today that focuses on hydrofracking and the competing demands of upstate landowners who want to exercise their mineral rights, versus the interests of the New York City watershed. This is obviously a much more direct confrontation between upstate and downstate citizen interests than was the long-simmering NYRI dispute, which turned a wide swath of southeastern New York into a big and mostly unified "NIMBY" zone that the downstate media barely noticed.
Also today in the NY Times is a series of editorials on "Can New York (State) Be Saved?" Upstaters' hackles may rise at this particular response, but in truth we've seen this attitude before, and I'd rather spend this diary considering the real "truth about Upstate" as it relates to "The City." |
| It's occurred to me lately that politicians and economists and urbanists from New York City have a peculiarly narrow way of thinking about the earth - specifically, of thinking about the concept of territory. When you consider how much money is thrown around down there in the trading of tiny apartments and corners on city blocks, their strange myopia about space (and its profits and demands) is more understandable. Their conception is of New York City as a city alone, or maybe as a metro area, but not as a watershed - a watershed that lies on unfamiliar physical, cultural and political territory. In other words, the popular conception of the true northern border of the city seems a little fuzzy.
Professor Moss' prescription for lightening New York's load (it's unclear whether he means "New York" the state or "New York" the shining city) is something I've heard before. And it remains puzzling to me why, when considering splitting up the state or turning away from some part of it, NYC-secession cheerleaders seem to believe that they're actually ever going to get rid of Upstate.
This is just as magical a line of thinking, as the magical thinking of Republican state senators who pretend their constituents are paying for NYC welfare queens. Unless they start building some serious desalinization facilities, NYC will always have an Upstate to deal with in some fashion... but no Albany to do it through.
So I'm not sure how that's such an automatically great arrangement for the Big Apple, to be honest. Whereas, the cities and towns of Upstate (that is, Upstate proper, outside of the NYC watershed) would certainly be poorer initially; but would actually be independent, free to develop a polity (or several regional ones) represented by a newly developed political class able to concentrate on their own pressing issues - to accept or fight off federal or corporate help (or "help") as best they can.
I dunno - that sounds like Upstate proper definitely gets the better deal in the long term.
I don't understand why a city-state at the head of an empire (in this case, NYC) would voluntarily decide to let its northern border turn into a wasteland full of barbarians. Unless they do "highland clearances" on their watershed, the barbarians will still be causing them some degree of trouble. Barbarians tend to get nastier, more cohesive, and occasionally, cannier, the fewer their numbers get. (New York City's political and hence physical territory, as of 2010, still encompasses the whole state via Albany. Has any empire in history ever successfully downsized its physical and political territory and maintained its world domination?)
I think there is a fantasy about the other struggling parts of the state - that the old place is just going to clear out and slowly become a big wildlife park with no human activity (that seems to be Professor Moss' hazy conception of what would happen, anyway). I don't think so. One way or another, clearly, there will always be an Upstate for NYC to deal with. |
