Transnational Organizations and Canadian-American Environmental Diplomacy, 1890–1930

Abstract

ABSTRACT In the first decades of the twentieth century, a vast network of transnational organizations operated as spaces of collaboration and informal diplomacy that brought together private and public actors across the Canadian-American border in the common pursuit of the protection, propagation, and protection of fisheries in their contiguous waters. At their meetings, the members of this constellation of groups strategized, shared the latest scientific research, and passed resolutions promoting their preferred solutions to the problems plaguing the Canadian-American fisheries. While the process of environmental conservation was anything but expedient – legislation and treaties could be blocked by political and economic concerns, and the ambiguity of shared natural resources complicated the process from its inception – the cumulative efforts of these organizations at the local, state, and provincial level paid dividends at the international level. By the end of the 1920s, the United States and Canada had engaged in a number of bilateral treaties which relied heavily on prominent members of these organizations and the knowledge accumulated over decades of meetings and networking.