Levelling the Lake: Transboundary Resource Management in the Lake of the Woods Watershed by Jamie Benedickson (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Levelling the Lake: Transboundary Resource Management in the Lake of the Woods Watershed by Jamie Benedickson Mark Kuhlberg Benedickson, Jamie–Levelling the Lake: Transboundary Resource Management in the Lake of the Woods Watershed. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2019. 366 p. Jamie Benedickson’s Levelling the Lake recounts the history of the truly remarkable array of thorny issues that have affected the administration of the greater Lake of the Woods watershed in northwestern Ontario (i.e., including the upstream waterways to the east such as Rainy Lake and River and Shoal Lake). In presenting his case, Benedickson has produced a comprehensive and valuable account of a relatively ignored section of Canada. It convincingly demonstrates that considerations involving geography, politics, and economics—indeed, practically every consideration imaginable—combined to make this a most complicated natural asset to administer. Benedickson chooses an apt metaphor to describe and understand this profoundly complex situation. He does so by borrowing from American legal scholar Lon Fuller, who coined the term polycentric to describe instances in which many competing interests faced off against each other. Fuller compared these situations to a spider’s web, whereby “‘pulling one of its strands will distribute tensions after a complicated pattern throughout the web as a whole. Doubling the original pull will, in all likelihood, not simply double each of the resulting tensions but will rather create a different complicated pattern of tensions … This is a ‘polycentric’ situation, because it is ‘many-centred’—each crossing of strands is a distinct centre for distributing tensions’” (pp. xxvii–xxviii). Benedickson admirably outlines the multiple forces that rendered the Lake of the Woods watershed such a battleground of conflicting interests. On the most basic level, the area spills across national (Canada-United States), provincial (Ontario-Manitoba), and state (Minnesota) boundaries, and includes numerous municipalities (the most important of which are Winnipeg, Fort Frances, and Kenora). Jurisdictional and constitutional clashes among these levels of government are legendary in both countries, and the Lake of the Woods watershed served as another venue for fighting them. Moreover, a host of parties prized the local waterways for different and often antithetical reasons. Industrialists, for example, eyed them beginning around the turn of the twentieth century for their potential to generate vast amounts of hydroelectricity. Realizing this aim involved reconstructing the local environment—damming lakes and rivers and interrupting the natural water cycle—to maximize its potential to produce energy. In contrast, fishers—Indigenous, Canadian, and American—saw the water in a very different light. From their perspective, the highest priority was to protect its capacity to sustain a number of valuable fish species that they could catch for personal, commercial, and recreational purposes. Realizing their aims typically involved leaving the waterways as undisturbed and clean as possible, a goal that canoeists (the author is a noted one) also sought because [End Page 187] they cherished paddling the region’s waterways while soaking in what they saw as the sublime beauty of the local landscape. Further complicating matters were the local residents and municipal officials, who paradoxically sought clean drinking water but also considered the waterways to be appropriate dumping grounds for their waste. Benedickson provides plenty of evidence to demonstrate how the battles over the Lake of the Woods watershed involved more than its water. For example, lumbermen sought to gain control over and cut the region’s larger-diameter timber—primarily pine and spruce—and convert it into solid wood products. Similarly, pulp and paper makers aimed to harvest the area’s spruce and balsam fir (and later jack pine), which they could convert into a range of consumer goods. Furthermore, for much of the twentieth century, these forest industries used the local waterways to transport both their logs to and waste from their mills; the pulp and paper producers also needed enormous volumes of clean water in their manufacturing processes. In contrast, mining interests valued the local rock for the valuable minerals that it contained. While the early gold mines were small and caused relatively minor disturbance to the local environment, the development of the Steep Rock Iron mine near Atikokan during the Second World War entailed the draining of a lake and the...