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

1. A Problem of Scale, 1892-1897

1 A Problem ofScale, 1892 - 1897 he fisheries along the Canadian-American border are a diverse lot. On either coast, they include bays and rivers, with species that move between salt water and fresh. Between the coasts, lakes of varying sizes and depths straddle the border, from tiny Lake Memphremagog to giant Lake Superior. Each body of water has its own ecosystem, with differing carrying capacities and species mixtures. And each body ofwater has its own problems and opportunities. The freshwater lakes and saltwater coastal bays are quite unlike each other. Passamaquoddy Bay on the East Coast has little in common with Puget Sound on the West Coast. Lakes Huron and Superior have some things in common, but conditions are much different in Lake Erie. The one thing they all hold in common is a path of development from subsistence use by Native Americans to destructive commercial fishing as part ofan industrializing North American society. In the competitive market economies of Canada and the United States, people had incentives to practice unsustainable methods offishing. As a result , tension among fishermen was high, especially among groups separated by local or national boundaries. Fishermen from one state or province were quick to blame their problems on fishermen from other locales and slow to consider changing their own methods. It became especially easy to fault those on the other side of the international border, who were both competitors and foreigners. From the Atlantic to the Pacific, tempers flared as fishermen sought to restrict their foreign competition. By the 1890S, control ofthe fisheries had become a diplomatic issue. In 1892, Canada and the United States responded to the increasing animosity among fishermen by establishing a two-member scientific commission to address the decline of the fisheries. This diplomatic approach revealed two important, and partially contradictory, assumptions about the 22 A Problem ofScale place of these fisheries in diplomacy. First, unlike the long-running feud over the cod fishery off Newfoundland, this issue did not intrigue highranking diplomats, who were happy to leave it in the hands of scientists. Second, bywrapping all ofthe boundary waters into one package, the diplomats indicated that they were more interested in a political resolution- a sort of magic wand approach - than in a rational scientific solution to an old and complex problem. Two scientists, no matter their diligence, could not hope to tackle the political, economic, and ecological problems inherent in overfishing along such a huge international border. The two scientists had their mandate, however, and after four years they filed an exhaustive report that confirmed the unsustainability of the prevalent fishing methods and presented some suggestions for regulations. But they left unwritten one conclusion that might have made a difference: the boundary water fisheries could not be regulated by one treaty, law, or commission . The diversity and complexity ofthe fisheries and the economic and political strength of fishermen combined to make one uniform approach unfeasible. Perhaps the scientists understood this central problem of their effort, but it was not their job to establish the diplomatic framework to solve the problem. THE BOUNDARY WATERS Beginning on the East Coast, the first body ofwater on the border is an inlet of the Bay of Fundy, Passamaquoddy Bay, between Maine and New Brunswick . Dramatic tides and a rocky shore make fishing dangerous in these largely Canadian waters, but the American lobster (Homarus americanus) has rewarded fishermen for their efforts. In addition, common ocean fish, such as the mackerel, come into the bay when the tide is high. The St. Croix River empties into the bay after running for seventy-five miles, mostly along the Maine-New Brunswick border. A number of anadromous species cross through the bay to head up the river to spawn. Historically, the most important of these have been the Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar), which was quite prolific prior to the 1850S, the alewife (Pumolobos pseudoharengus), smelt (Osmerus mordax), and various fish from the herring family.' Moving inland, glacier-carved Lake Memphremagog and Lake Champlain provide the next international fisheries. The former is mainly in Quebec but reaches down into Vermont, while the latter stretches for 125 miles along the NewYork-Vermont border and into Quebec. Both lakes are oligo23 ~.~ ... A Problem ofScale trophic, meaning that they are nutrient poor and too deep for sunlight to reach the lake bed in most places, so that they cannot support much life. Neither lake has an abundance offish...