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Reviews
THE 1985 PACIFIC SALMON TREATY: SHARING CONSERVATION BURDENS AND BENEFITS
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by M.P. Shepard and A.W. Argue
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University of British Columbia Press, Vancouver, 2005. Illustrations, maps, tables, notes, index. 304 pages. $85.00 cloth.
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| FOR TWO FUNDAMENTALLY friendly nations, Canada and the United States have spent an incredible amount of time bickering over trans-boundary natural resources. Migratory birds and mammals have been sources of disputes in the past, but nothing compares to the ongoing animosity over fish — particularly the salmon fisheries of the northeastern Pacific. For a century, the two governments have sought scientifically based agreements to resolve their differences. |
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Fisheries diplomacy is inherently very difficult. Valuable species rarely stay in one place, meaning that they pass through multiple jurisdictions and, frequently, international waters. As they move around, they are pursued by various groups of people who often use different methods of catching them. These competing interest groups generally think that other people are responsible for any problems of population decline. Of course, it is hard to know how these problems are caused, because fish can be difficult to study systematically, moving around unpredictably underwater as they are wont to do. Scientists who study fish face challenges from both fishermen generally and foreign governments specifically. Even when negotiators manage to overcome these and other challenges and craft a successful treaty, they still face the unhappy truth that fisheries are in a constant state of flux, so that annually their treaty edges closer to obsolescence. |
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M.P. Shepard and A.W. Argue acknowledge these difficulties in fisheries diplomacy in their account of the 1985 Pacific Salmon Treaty, on which they worked for the Canadian government. Rather than being a memoir, however, The 1985 Pacific Salmon Treaty sets out to recount the treaty negotiations and analyze the broad forces that shaped both its negotiation and implementation. Shepard and Argue utilize a range of sources, although none is more important than their own first-hand knowledge. Readers, however, are alerted to their experience only by the material on the back cover of the book, which informs us that Shepard served as both a technical advisor and a negotiator to the salmon treaty from 1958 to 1983 and that Argue was a technical advisor for some indeterminate length of time. The acknowledgments briefly note that Canada's Department of Fisheries and Oceans provided financial and moral support for the research and preparation of the book. Someone who plunges into The 1985 Pacific Salmon Treaty would be forgiven for not recognizing that the authors were practitioners of fisheries diplomacy for one side in this particular dispute. |
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Shepard and Argue made a conscious decision to approach the topic as dispassionately as possible, and they largely succeed. Complaints about the United States and its various intractable or inequitable positions are presented in a matter-of-fact manner rather than with the frustration they must have entailed at the time. The authors note Canadian conundrums as well, and they are careful to load the book with charts, figures, and maps that display basic fisheries data from several salmon fisheries. Readers will gain a reasonably complete picture of the treaty from the detailed account of negotiations, implications for different salmon fisheries, and historical background and current analysis. |
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Yet, the authors' decision to keep themselves out of the story is both disappointing and a bit misleading. On one hand, it reflects a larger decision to keep the participation of individuals to a minimum. Readers learn about interest groups but rarely about individuals who made significant contributions, either by presenting a good idea or taking a political risk. There is nothing inherently wrong with focusing on the big picture rather than specific figures, but it is usually individuals who provide color and memorable anecdotes to stories. At the same time, it seems impossible for anyone who is both an author and a negotiator to keep himself out of the story, so readers are left to wonder when Shepard and Argue are calling on their own experiences and opinions and when they are relying on their research. |
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That conclusion does not mean that the book is seriously flawed in executing the authors' agenda to improve the chances of success in future fisheries negotiations by studying the salmon treaty. They argue that "the treaty was not perfect, but its benefits to both sides far outweigh its disappointments" (p. xv). In support of that claim, they open with a brief history of Pacific Northwest political boundaries that inconveniently intersected the salmon's migratory pathways, and they summarize scientific knowledge about salmon migration, population fluctuations, and other material relevant to an international solution. In the middle of the book, they provide a history of negotiations, a summary of the treaty's parts, and breakdowns of thorny problems including trans-boundary rivers such as the Yukon and complex fisheries along the Alaska panhandle. In their conclusion, the authors argue that without the treaty international competition for salmon would have escalated and the stocks would have been overexploited. |
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In particular, Shepard and Argue demonstrate that the most difficult challenge for negotiators was to regulate interceptions and attain equity. Citizens of each nation tended to think that fish that spawned in their waters belonged to their nation, and they had pushed that idea — in conjunction with regulation and conservation — in international forums. Each recognized that there was no way to keep Americans from catching Canadian-spawned fish on the high seas (known as interception), or vice versa, so the challenge was to devise an equitable and manageable way to divvy up the catch. Beyond national equity, the range of interested groups —from First Nations subsistence users to recreational anglers—meant that the treaty negotiations also had to involve a great deal of domestic negotiation. In the end, it took an admirable show of political will by leaders in both nations to forge a compromise solution. Shepard and Argue show that such intervention from on high is, unfortunately, rare enough that the subsequent problems in the salmon fisheries are unlikely to be solved soon. |
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| KURK DORSEY
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| University of New Hampshire, Durham |
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