| Book Review | Environmental History, 12.4

Book Review

The Borderlands of the American and Canadian Wests: Essays on Regional History of the Forty-ninth Parallel. Edited by Sterling Evans. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006. xxxvi + 386 pp. Illustrations, maps, tables, index. $49.95 cloth.
Few political boundaries make less ecological sense than the forty-ninth parallel between Canada and the United States. Without wavering, the border slices relentlessly across the grasslands, forests, and mountain ranges of western North America. In the early twentieth century, the two countries marked the border on the land by cutting a swath eighteen-feet wide and hundreds of miles long. Apparently, posting signs was just not good enough.	1
Historians and geographers heed the border far more than animals and plants do. Far too often, the border has served as a wall impeding attempts by scholars to write histories that address processes or places that cross the border. Or so argue the contributors in Sterling Evans's edited collection, The Borderlands of the American and Canadian Wests. To varying degrees, the contributors want to dismantle this barrier dividing historical scholarship, and more generally, strike a blow against the tyranny of national-oriented histories.	2
While the collection addresses a number of topics, environmental historians will find the chapters and sections about natural resource matters of most interest. In these chapters, as in the ones on non-environmental topics, the authors adopt one of three approaches to "forty-ninth parallel history" (p. xxxii). Continental approaches examine regions of western Canada or the United States as regions, such as the Northern Plains, that extend beyond the border. (The continentalist approach is similar to what historian Dan Flores has elsewhere called bioregional history, an approach familiar to most environmental historians.) A comparative approach analyzes similar processes and topics on both sides of the border. Finally, the borderlands approach places the border itself at the center of analysis, as something with "agency in history" (p. xxxii). In a sense, a borderland area becomes a region of its own, where people on both sides of the line share an identity and a common but often contested history.	3
Chapters on environmental themes appear throughout the volume, but are highlighted in the book's final section, "Natural Resources, Conservation, and Environmental Issues in the Borderlands." Lissa Wadewitz shows how migratory animals can serve as a useful topic to address transboundary environmental issues. Her article focuses on how west coast fishermen flaunted government harvesting restrictions by catching salmon on one side of the border, and then scurrying back across, much to the consternation of customs officials. As long as state monitoring remained weak, subsistence fishermen proved adept at using the international border to their advantage. In a fascinating piece, Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands assesses just how international the Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park really is. While designated in a spirit of unity during the 1930s, national views and bureaucratic initiatives in both countries overrode the laudable international sentiments. Nationalist geographic imaginaries firmly constructed Waterton National Park as a "Canadian" park just as Americans did with Glacier National Park across the border.	4
It is a short piece in the collection by a journalist rather than an academic that points the way forward for a transboundary environmental history of the North American West. In his lively article, Todd Wilkinson shows the constraints Canadian environmental activists currently face as they try to rein in damaging energy development in the Northern Rockies. Unlike the western United States, most public land in Alberta is controlled by the province, not the federal government. To an American, it is as if Idaho or Wyoming were given complete control over natural resource decisions within their borders. American environmental activists have been able to call on publics outside the region to restrain development, using federal laws such as the Endangered Species Act, Clean Air Act, and Clean Water Act. For the most part, such tools are unavailable (or considerably weaker) in Canada, leaving environmental activists at a significant disadvantage against the conservative, pro-development provincial government.	5
Wilkinson is concerned with the contemporary situation in Alberta and Montana, but his findings raise a host of questions for intrepid environmental historians. What accounts for the major differences in natural resource policy between the two countries? How are provincial-state or national publics enrolled in environmental conflicts in both places? Answering such questions will lead historians and geographers beyond the region to issues of federalism and the role of the states and provinces within their respective nations. A good borderland history must address common ecological conditions within the region with the different political realities that nations have superimposed on the area.	6
Editor Sterling Evans and many of the contributors want borderland history to grow. To do so, the field will have to cope with institutional barriers in North American universities. Despite the many changes that have rocked the academy in the past three decades, most history departments construct histories in national terms. Few jobs are advertised primarily as borderlands or environmental history. More typically, departments seek a Canadian or American historian with expertise in a particular time period followed by topical expertise, of which environmental history is one possible subject in a longer list. Young scholars know this all too well and guide their research questions accordingly, addressing historical topics safely within a national, rather than transboundary, framework.	7
It remains to be seen whether the development of Canadian environmental history will break down the importance of the forty-ninth parallel in North American environmental history or merely harden the border even further. The sub-field shows signs of developing within the same national framework as environmental history has in the United States. For a field devoted to the role of nature in human history, we pay undue reverence to nation-states. Borders exist, yes, but only to be crossed.	8
Robert Wilson earned his PhD in geography at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. He is now a professor of geography at Syracuse University and is completing a book on the historical geography and environmental history of migratory bird management and refuges in western North America.

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