Transboundary Environmental Relations in British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest

“The nature of transnational environmental activity has changed in recent years. In the past, there was little organized subnational environmental activity across borders. Provincial and state governments tended to respond in an ad hoc way to specific problems, and in most cases these were handled at the federal level. The International Joint Commission (IJC), created in 1909 to deal with transboundary water questions along the whole of the Canada-U.S. border, was the main institution involved in western environmental issues until the 1980s. In the Trail Smelter case (Murray 1972) only federal governments were involved. The case involved U.S. complaints that sulfur dioxide emissions from the Cominco smelter in Trail, B.C. — ten miles north of the border — had damaged the Columbia Valley in Washington State. The 1931 IJC decision required the smelter to reduce emissions and Canada to pay damages to the U.S. The Columbia River Treaty, ratified in 1964, dealt with flood control and power development (Swainson 1979). The treaty followed fifteen years of negotiation by the IJC, with B.C. playing a major role in the final negotiations. The treaty focused exclusively on transboundary power issues and generally ignored environmental implications. It was not until the resolution of the Skagit/Ross Dam controversy in 1984 that subnational actors, along with NGOs, were principals in a crossborder environmental dispute. The Skagit controversy involved the proposed raising of Ross Dam on the U.S. side of the border and the consequent flooding of a valley in B.C. Although the IJC played an important role in bringing the parties together, much of the negotiations and ultimate policy work were undertaken by B.C. and the City of Seattle (Alper and [Robert L. Monahan] 1986). In recent years, the IJC has been less involved. The tendency has been for subnational actors to take more proactive stances on international environmental issues, often in cooperation with transnational environmental groups and networks interested in influencing corporate as well as political behavior. Smith and Goddard speak of the emergence of a “globalist policy phase” in the international activities of B.C. and Washington State (1996). This phase is characterized by the emergence of new issues such as sustainability; the preeminent role played by provincial, state, and municipal governments; new environmental and social activist actors; and bioregional approaches to environmental protection that transcend local/provincial/state contexts and involve broader based international strategies.
The simmering conflict over logging in Clayoquot Sound, a pristine rain forest on the west coast of Vancouver Island, boiled over in 1993 and helped to further internationalize forest politics in B.C. Following a long period of dispute over whether additional cutting of the coastal forest should occur, the provincial government announced its decision to allow two-thirds of the area to be opened for logging. Virtually all environmental groups in the province decried the decision, as did aboriginal groups and a wide variety of transnational groups, such as the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC), Greenpeace International, the World Wildlife Fund, and the Rainforest Action Network. Almost immediately, calls for international boycotts of B.C. timber products were made. Robert Kennedy, Jr., an attorney for the NRDC, staged an effective media campaign against the Clayoquot Sound decision and used his highly placed connections to raise the Clayoquot issue in the White House and Congress (Bernstein and [Ben Cashore] 1996, 14). Preservationist groups lobbied U.S. telephone companies and newspaper publishers to stop using B.C. paper products. Full-page ads, geared to influencing American public opinion, were placed in U.S. newspapers with pictures of unsightly debris-cluttered clearcuts. Following this international publicity, a scientific panel report recommending ecologically sensitive logging was endorsed by the government and partially defused the conflict. However, clearcutting in B.C. continues to be the object of adverse international publicity, as Hollywood celebrities and other high profile people place ads in major U.S. newspapers and speak out against B.C. forest practices ([Bernstein, Steven] and Cashore 1996).” (Taken from abstract)

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