The 1985 Pacific Salmon Treaty: Sharing Conservation Burdens and Benefits by M. P. Shepard, A. W. Argue

Abstract

not live long enough, having been killed in battleswith the Indians, or they simplydisap peared from thepublic record. So, apart from the remote possibility thatLewis had syphilis, the long-term effectsof themen's indulgences seem to have been remarkably slight.Perhaps one could argue that thiswas due to Lewis's prompt treatmentwith mercury. Was Sacagawea suffering from a flare-up of gonorrhea when she fell sick justbefore the portage around theGreat Falls?Or, did shehave a urinary tract infectionor amiscarriage? All of these conditions might have been made worse by the bleeding and purging administered by Lewis and Clark. Clark blamed Charbonneau forher illness,suggesting that ifshedied hewas responsible. The meaning ofClark's remark is obscure. Did Clark blame Charbonneau for givingher gonorrhea, for making her pregnant, or justforallowing her to eat the"white apples" that made her sick? While therehave been at least threebooks dealing with the medical aspects of the expedi tion, this is thefirstdevoted to the important topic of venereal disease. There is no doubt that at times Lewis regarded itas a disciplin ary problem, but not an unexpected one. The morale-building effectsof sexual contactwith Indian women were probably great.And this must account forLewis's generally lax attitude towards these relationships. The price of ve nereal disease may have been small compared with the maintenance of the spiritsof the men. At no point was the progress of the expedi tionmarred by the presence of infected men, althoughmany of the men must have feltquite sick from themercury treatment.Fortunately, almost all thevenereal disease occurred while the expedition was stationary at theMandan Fort or FortClatsop. This isawell-written book: compact, infor mative, sticksto thenarrative, and isa valuable contribution to the burgeoning literature on America's most famous expedition. BRUCE C. PAT?N, M.D. Denver, Colorado THE 1985 PACIFICSALMONTREATY: SHARING CONSERVATIONBURDENS AND BENEFITS byM.R Shepard and A.W. Argue University of British Columbia Press, Vancouver, 2005. Illustrations, maps, tables, notes, index. 304 pages. $85.00 cloth. FOR TWO FUNDAMENTALLY friendlynations, Canada and theUnited States have spent an incredible amount of time bickering over trans-boundary natural resources. Migratory birds and mammals have been sources of dis putes in thepast, but nothing compares to the ongoing animosity over fish ? particularly the salmon fisheriesof thenortheastern Pacific. For a century, the two governments have sought scientificallybased agreements to resolve their differences. Fisheries diplomacy is inherentlyvery dif ficult.Valuable species rarely stay in one place, meaning that theypass throughmultiple juris dictions and, frequently,international waters.As they move around, theyare pursued by various groups of people who oftenuse different meth ods of catching them.These competing interest groups generally thinkthatother people are re sponsible foranyproblems ofpopulation decline. Of course, itishard toknow how theseproblems are caused, because fish can be difficultto study systematically, moving around unpredictably underwater as they are wont to do. Scientists who studyfish face challenges from both fishermen generally and foreigngovernments specifically. Even when negotiators manage to overcome these and other challenges and crafta successfultreaty, theystillfacetheunhappy truththatfisheriesare ina constant stateof flux,so thatannually their treaty edges closer to obsolescence. M.R Shepard and A.W. Argue acknowledge thesedifficulties infisheriesdiplomacy in their account of the 1985Pacific Salmon Treaty, on which theyworked for the Canadian govern ment. Rather thanbeing amemoir, however,The 1985Pacific Salmon Treaty setsout to recount the treaty negotiations and analyze thebroad forces Reviews 153 thatshaped both itsnegotiation and implemen tation. Shepard and Argue utilize a range of sources, although none is more important than theirown first-handknowledge. Readers, how ever,are alerted to theirexperience only by the material on theback cover of thebook, which informsus thatShepard servedas both a techni cal advisor and a negotiator to the salmon treaty from 1958to 1983and that Argue was a technical advisor for some indeterminate lengthof time. The acknowledgments briefly note that Canada's Department of Fisheries and Oceans provided financial andmoral support fortheresearchand preparation of thebook. Someone who plunges into The 1985Pacific Salmon Treatywould be forgiven for not recognizing that the authors were practitioners of fisheries diplomacy for one side in thisparticular dispute. Shepard and Argue made a conscious deci sion to approach the topic as dispassionately as possible, and they largely succeed. Complaints about theUnited States and itsvarious intrac...