Indigenous Environmental Justice: Comparing the United States and Canada’s Legal Frameworks for Endangered Species Conservation

Canada and the United States are both committed to the protection of endangered species. This article examines how the legal frameworks created around the US Endangered Species Act (ESA) and the Canadian Species at Risk Act (SARA) intersect with Indigenous environmental justice (EJ). Specifically, the distribution of benefits and burdens is examined since critical habitat designations can limit activity on Native American and First Nation tribal lands. Legal documents and recent court cases also give insight into Indigenous inclusion and recognition in conservation approaches in North America. Overall, it is argued that Canada’s approach comes closer to EJ, but neither legal framework meets the criterion of genuine EJ for Native Americans and First Nations.     

Keep Burning Coal or the Manatee Gets It: Rendering the Carbon Economy Invisible through Endangered Species Protection

As ever expanding accretions of human industrial and residential development pave over endangered Florida manatees’ warm water springs winter habitat, more than half of the manatees have come to depend upon fossil fuel‐burning power plant hot water effluent channels for survival. In an effort to save these manatees, environmental activists have leveraged the US Endangered Species Act to protect the effluent streams and, by extension, have enshrined the power plants themselves as ecological saviors. This study interrogates the paradoxes within the resulting spatio‐legal regime. Recognizing the problematic human/nature binary at the heart of dominant Western practices, our study suggests spatial and legal regimes do not simply reify and reproduce this binary but also produce invisible ecocultural spaces that are essential to prop up an inherently unstable, illusory, and ultimately destructive definition of human existence.     

The Advocacy Coalition Framework and Implementation of the Endangered Species Act: A Case Study in Western Water Politics

Theories about subsystem activity typically focus on policy formulation processes. One causal model of public policymaking, the advocacy coalition framework, offers a potentially useful way to bridge the gap between policy formulation and implementation in examining subsystem activity. The purpose of this paper is to assess the analytical utility of the advocacy coalition framework by examining the stability of policy-producing coalitions over time in the face of implementation complexities. An analysis of the policy changes that occurred during the implementation of the Endangered Species Act vis-à-vis planning for the construction of the Bureau of Reclamation's Animas-La Plata water project is conducted. The analysis reveals how coalitions protect their policy core beliefs during technical disputes through the acquiescence of secondary aspects of belief systems.     

The Effects of Critical Habitat Designation on Housing Supply: An Analysis of California Housing Construction Activity*

Abstract. Under the Endangered Species Act, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is required to designate critical habitat (CH) for listed species. Designation could result in modification to or delay of residential development projects within habitat boundaries, generating concern over potential housing market impacts. This paper draws upon a large data set of municipal‐level (FIPS) building permit issuances and critical habitat designations (CHDs) in California over a 13‐year period to identify changes in the spatial and temporal pattern of development activity associated with CHD. We find that the proposal of the median‐sized CH results in a 23.5 percent decrease in the supply of housing permits in the short run and a 37.0 percent decrease in the long run. The results indicate the proposal of CH acts as a signal that all development in that FIPS will be more costly. We also find that the impact varies across the two periods in which CH is designated and by the number of years relative to when CH was first proposed.     

Play Nice or Pick a Fight? Cooperation as an Interest Group Strategy at Implementation

The open, multilevel nature of U.S. policymaking enables interest group activity throughout the policy process. At policy implementation, groups attempt to secure benefits or ameliorate legislated effects by devising cooperative or conflictual strategies to influence outcomes, especially when agency officials have discretion to design rules and negotiate agreements. Investigating group “street‐level” activity with respect to the Endangered Species Act, this research finds that policy context and resources shape the degree of information and access available to groups, which influences the strategies groups adopt. Groups with access and specialized information will attempt to change or influence policy outcomes cooperatively. Groups with limited technical information are more likely to fight implementation.     

Wild(er)ness: Reconfiguring the Geographies of Wildlife

Amidst millennial talk of the 'end of nature' ( McKibben 1989 ), this paper examines the precarious geographies of 'wildlife' in rather less apocalyptic terms. Animal (and plant) species designated wild are placed categorically outside the ambit of 'human society', confined to inhabiting the margins and interstices of the social world. Yet, we contend, such animals have long been routinely imagined and organized within multiple circuits of social power, which (re)configure them in important ways. These social orderings of animal life confound the moral geographies of wilderness, which presuppose an easy coincidence between the species and spaces of a pristine nature. In this paper, we employ the fluid spatial vocabulary of topology to map a more volatile and relational conception of the fabrics of wildlife. Our arguments are worked through glimpses of two historically very different social orderings of 'wild' animals – those associated with the military vernacular of the gladiatorial games of Imperial Rome, and the scientific vernacular of endangered species listing and conservation under CITES (the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species). These 'foldings' of wildlife in distant time/space aim to disrupt the linear historical narratives of 'civilization' and 'evolution', which consign wildlife to marginal spaces with a teleological destiny of erasure.     

The Rush–Bagot Agreement: Canada–US Relations in Transition

In 1817, Great Britain and the United States concluded the Rush–Bagot Agreement to prevent a naval arms race on the Great Lakes. Despite frequent transgressions to the agreement, by the 1920s, the agreement was heralded internationally as a model to emulate. The predominant scholarly focus on the agreement in the nineteenth century fails to explain why a broken agreement in one century was praiseworthy in the next. This article argues that the twentieth-century narrative of the agreement is of critical important to explaining the agreement’s impact on Canada–US relations. Through the lens of three stages of Canadian political leadership, this article demonstrates that the Rush-Bagot Agreement shifted from a rigid compact to a symbolic agreement that not only reflected but aided the transition toward one of the most unique security relationships. The article concludes that this extant agreement reinforces the prevalent notion of the “undefended border” in Canada–US relations.     

Forks in the Road: Energy Policies in Canada and the US since the Shale Revolution

ABSTRACT

This article examines policy responses in Canada and the US to the shale revolution and changing North American oil and gas markets. We outline the effect of the shale revolution on North American oil and gas markets, and how the subsequent energy policy choices in each country changed the relationship between Canada and the US. In the US, increasing production, combined with the policy imperative of maintaining energy security, led to less support for Canadian supply and the subsequent on-off-on saga of the Keystone XL pipeline. In Canada, growing concern about the balance between the environment and the economy led to stalled pipeline development and reform of regulatory systems, problems exacerbated by the new policy direction in the US.     

Both Sides Now: “Parallel” Lines Across Bi-National Pasts

Originally presented at the Bridging Distances conference at Western Washington University, April 29, 2011, this article addresses the changing ways that Canadian and US histories, policies, and public images have reflected continental and national images of connected and separate pasts. It combines the author's personal and professional experience as a US citizen and American historian teaching in Canada to suggest the challenges and promises of transnational histories. The article explores how the 49th parallel has been constructed through the historiographies of the US and Canadian Wests, the impact of 9/11 on how the border has been imagined and policed, and the experience of Canadian women who crossed the border to claim US homesteads in the late-nineteenth century. These examples illustrate the larger point that bridging the distances between the US and Canada requires respectful understanding of historically constructed power imbalances and national policies, and the willingness to confront distorted national self-images and images of the neighboring country. Such tensions have always been present in the history of the US-Canada relationship, but they have mattered differently at different times to people pushed and pulled across a selectively porous border.     

Living with the fence: militarization and military spaces on Guahan/Guam

The landscape of Guahan/Guam, an organized unincorporated territory of the USA and the largest and southernmost island of the Mariana Islands archipelago, is visibly marked by chain link fences that enclose land taken for use by the US military. This US military presence on Guam is evidence of a long military colonial history that has stressed, particularly under US rule, the importance of the island's strategic location. The ‘fence,’ a frequently used but rarely defined expression, refers to a multiplicity of lines, most of which recreate a dichotomous view of military/local relations, and help to make invisible the complex web of identities that go through, over, and beyond its real and imagined spaces. Working from an understanding that theory must be grounded in experience, this article draws on interviews to explore the multiple meanings of the fence. It focuses on the ways the colonized, militarized, and gendered spaces of the fence promote US values, interests, and security concerns but also mark points of resistance to militarization and colonization. Exploring the ways colonization and militarization are played out on the bodies of those who live and work on the island, the article concludes that tearing down the ‘fence’ must include both demilitarization and decolonization, but in ways that transcend, rather than reproduce its present gendered and dichotomous spaces.     

Waging a war to save biodiversity: the rise of militarized conservation

This article examines the rise in militarized approaches towards conservation, as part of a new ‘war for biodiversity’. This is a defining moment in the international politics of conservation and needs further examination. The claims that rhinos and elephants are under threat from highly organized criminal gangs of poachers shapes and determines conservation practice on the ground. Indeed, a central focus of the 2014 London Declaration on the Illegal Wildlife Trade is the strengthening of law enforcement, and recent policy statements by the US government and the Clinton Global Initiative also draw the link between poaching, global security and the need for greater levels of enforcement. Such statements and initiatives contribute substantially to the growing sense of a war for biodiversity. This article offers a critique of that argument, essentially by asking how we define poachers, and if militarized approaches mean conservationists are becoming more willing to engage in coercive, repressive policies that are ultimately counterproductive. Further, this article examines how the new war for biodiversity is justified and promoted by referring to wider debates about intervention in a post‐Cold War era; notably that the international community has a responsibility towards wildlife, especially endangered species, and that military forms of intervention may be required to save them.     

Policies of Extinction: The Life and Death of Canada's Endangered Species Legislation

This article examines the attempt by the Canadian Federal Government to pass endangered species legislation (1995). It focuses on the constraints which confront the creation of environmental policy in Canada and identifies jurisdictional overlap and stakeholder conflict as the prime source of difficulties which confronted the Federal Government as it moved through the policy process for creating endangered species legislation. The wide-ranging consultation process leading up to the creation of the legislation provided ample opportunity for powerful interests to undermine the protection of endangered species. The article concludes with a discussion of endangered species legislation as an example of the failure of the "crisis management" approach to conservation and sustainability.     

Trumping foreign policy: public diplomacy,framing, and public opinion among middle power publics

Even as the world’s sole superpower, the United States requires the cooperation of other states to achieve many of its foreign policy objectives. The President of the United States thus often serves as ‘Diplomat in Chief’ in public diplomacy efforts to appeal directly to publics abroad. Given Donald Trump’s antagonistic approach to foreign relations and widespread lack of popularity, what are the implications for support for US policy among publics abroad – particularly among middle power states allied to the US? While previous research on public opinion relying on observational data has found that confidence in the US President is linked to support for American foreign policy goals, the mechanisms at work remain unclear. Using original data from survey-based experiments conducted in Canada and Australia, this article seeks to clarify the effect of ‘presidential framing’ (presenting a policy goal as endorsed or not endorsed by Trump) on attitudes toward key policy issues in the Canada–US and Australia–US relationships. Results point to a negative ‘Trump framing’ effect in Canadians’ and Australians’ trade policy attitudes, but such an effect is not observed in other policy domains (energy policy in Canada, and refugee policy in Australia).     

The Colonial History of the 1905 Aliens Act

The passing of the Aliens Act of 1905 was a defining moment in British immigration law and history. This article investigates the influence of settler-colonial immigration restriction laws on the passing of the Act, and questions the current historiographical inclination to focus solely on the influence of American immigration restriction laws. By analysing the trajectory of contemporary public debates, the evidence given to the Royal Commission on Alien Immigration (1902–03) and the political discussion on various bills, the article shows that the existence of colonial immigration restriction laws played an important role in the formulation and passing of the 1905 Aliens Act. Putting the Act in this larger context highlights its colonial derivation, but also its uniqueness: the British Act's defence of asylum, the exception extended to those landing as political and religious refugees, has no parallel in either early US law or any of the settler-colonial laws.     

Immigration Reform in Canada and the United States: How Dramatic,How Different?

In contrast to recent policies in the United States, immigration reform in Canada, during the past decade, has resulted in one of the most transformative periods in Canada’s immigration history. This article examines these changes, against the comparative backdrop of American inaction. These include changes affecting the three classes of legal permanent residents—economic, family, and refugee—as well as temporary foreign workers and foreign students. Canadian citizenship rules have also been refocused from citizenship as a “right” to citizenship as a “responsibility.” The article illustrates the advantages of the Canadian system, but cautions against overmanagement, centralization of decision-making power, and the loss of Canada’s welcoming reputation. The Canadian system, while not perfect, is efficient and should be able to successfully adjust to future problems that arise, provided that the Canadian public has sufficient input in policy decisions. Given a more complex and cumbersome US immigration policy system, comprehensive immigration reform is not likely to occur if partisanship prevails.     

William Gould,Land Agent and the Rural Community in Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire 1783–1788

The land agent played an important role in community relationships. His position was frequently one of mediator and liaison between landowner and tenant, although his role often extended to settling disputes more generally. These relationships are often hidden in estate correspondence but in the case of William Gould agent to the Duke of Portland are more readily available through his diaries. This article will utilise this valuable resource to explore how the land agent of a large estate which was entering a period of industrialisation interacted with both agricultural and industrial communities.     

FULL EMPLOYMENT AS A POLICY ISSUE

Passage of the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act of 1978 is the most recent step in the development of a national full employment policy. This article traces the origin of the legislative debate over full employment back to the 1940s, the only previous time that Congress gave serious consideration to full employment legislation. It analyzes the conflicting economic and political interests and philosophies that led to the defeat of the Full Employment Bill of 1945 and to passage of weaker legislation, the Employment Act of 1946, which dropped the commitment to full employment. The article then traces the contours of unemployment since World War II: recurrent recessions; significant unemployment between recessions; the unequal distribution of joblessness, hitting hardest at groups such as minorities, women, and youths; and growing urban and regional unemployment. Some of the hidden social, human and economic costs of unemployment are explored. So is the relationship between unemployment and crime, poverty, welfare, the urban crisis and inequality. Full employment reemerged as a major issue in the 1970s because of the impetus from groups whose unemployment problems persist between recessions. Coalitions of these groups pressed for a national policy to secure full employment for all groups. This led to passage of the Humphrey-Hawkins Act. But the controversy over full employment has not ended. Attempts to implement the Act, the article concludes, may heighten underlying controversies over issues such as inflation, wage, price and profit controls, the environment, and job creation and may make full employment one of the leading domestic issues of the 1980s.     

生态系统服务对区域经济增长的影响研究——以黑龙江省为例

以净初级生产力作为生态系统服务的综合测量指标,在经典柯布道格拉斯生产函数的基础上,运用协整与误差修正模型对1986-2010年黑龙江省生态系统服务对区域经济增长的影响进行了分析,并评估了净初级生产力的边际价格。结果表明,黑龙江省生态系统服务对区域经济增长具有明显的促进作用,净初级生产力每提高1%促进真实GDP增长0.0257%;在生态系统服务的影响下,黑龙江省经济系统以每年1.8%的速率将系统波动产生的非均衡状态向长期均衡状态调整,说明生态系统服务在促进经济增长的同时也保障了经济体系的稳定运行;在误差修正模型基础上得到的黑龙江省净初级生产力的边际价格为255.1元/106kgC(以1952年价格为基准),此价格主要受净初级生产力产出弹性的影响。     

A dying art? Archiving photographs in Cameroon

I discuss the practical problems of running an project to archive the contents of a photographers studio in Cameroon with the help of the British Library's Endangered Archives Programme. Reflections on long term fieldwork in a small Cameroonian village end with the current uses of photography which are similar to those in the archive but likely never to receive such attention for reasons which I discuss.
The article is written for a non-specialist generalist audience.