The Dawn of Conservation Diplomacy: U.S.-Canadian Wildlife Protection Treaties in the Progressive Era (review)

In The Dawn of Conservation Diplomacy, Dorsey analyzes the complex diplomatic and political maneuvers involved in the negotiation and ratification of three early twentieth-century treaties designed to protect wildlife resources shared by Canada and the United States. The decline of fish populations in waters contiguous to the American-Canadian border—chief among them the whitefish of the Great Lakes and the sockeye Salmon of Puget Sound—inspired the Inland Fisheries Treaty of 1908. The North Pacific Fur Seal Convention of 1911 addressed hunter overkill at sea and on land, ultimately resulting in a treaty involving Russia and Japan, as well as Canada and the United States, after twenty-five years of haggling and tortuous diplomacy. In the third, the Migratory Bird Treaty of 1916, Canada and the United States sought to protect the wide variety of birds annually crossing their borders. In all three cases, declines that threatened extinction of wildlife prompted conservationists to seek international cooperation.

The author demonstrates that although each case differed, negotiations in all three combined scientific expertise, ethical justification, popular support, and an economic formula palatable for resource users. Dorsey believes that the treaties set an early standard “as creative and instructive solutions to previously unimagined problems” (239), and that they identified many ingredients still vital for acceptable environmental treaties.

Most important, he maintains, treaties “must achieve a positive ratio of environmental protection to economic restrictions in all countries involved. . . . A good treaty, then, equalizes the costs and benefits for each nation” (245). Hence, in his epilogue, he introduces the idea of cost/benefit analysis to synthesize what he has already laid out in descriptive, literary form, though he does not demonstrate it with quantification. He comes closest to putting dollar signs on economic realities in the case of the North Pacific Fur Seal Convention, the one treaty of the three in which the bargaining focused sharply on economic equity.

A lack of public interest and a well-organized, politically experienced commercial fishing interest with a clearly defined short-term stake in open fishing defeated implementation of the Inland Fisheries Treaty. As for the Migratory Bird Treaty of 1916, skillfully mustered public sentiment and a demonstration of the economic benefits to agriculture combined to counterbalance commercial hunting and millinery interests.

The author worked intensively in American and Canadian government archives and published records to reconstruct the course of negotiations. He plumbed the literature of the conservation movement, and borrowed heavily from science and international law to give his history broader meaning.

Although these treaties do not represent the “Dawn of Conservation Diplomacy” (the four-nation Rhine River Treaty of 1886 to conserve salmon preceded it), and despite errors and omissions in the treatment of Canadian policies for the Great Lakes fisheries, Dorsey’s work is a valuable contribution to understanding progressive conservation and the history of international cooperation to save natural resources.