Guest Blogger: Natural Allies: Environment, Energy, and the History of US-Canada Relations by Daniel Macfarlane

Natural Allies: Environment, Energy, and the History of US-Canada Relations by Daniel Macfarlane is a reinterpretation of the history of US-Canada relations through environmental and energy issues. In the guest blog below, Macfarlane gives us an introduction to the topic of his book.

Billions of dollars of goods and services cross the Canada-US border daily. Canada is the largest foreign supplier of fossil fuels to the United States, not to mention the biggest foreign supplier of electricity. For most of the last seventy-five years, Canada and the United States carried on the largest bilateral trade in the world. That trade has – directly and indirectly – revolved around natural resources.

Canada has long been America’s most important economic partner – not to mention sharing the world’s longest border, many different ecosystems, and myriad forms of infrastructure. Yet American international historians rarely pay attention to Canada-US relations. Conversely, Canadian scholars have probably written more about their country’s relationship with the United States than they have about Canada’s relations with the rest of the world combined. However, there is a major blind spot amongst these scholars too: environment and energy.

Figure 13.1 Map of the US-Canada energy trade as of 2020 showing transmission lines and pipelines.

The central conceit of my new book, Natural Allies, is that understanding the history of Canada-US relations requires foregrounding environmental and energy factors. After all, the Canada-US energy/environmental relationship is historically the most consequential in the world. Canada and the United States have likely exchanged more resources than any other two adjoining nations. No other two countries have produced as many noteworthy agreements or precedents (over fifty) and made as many signal contributions to the evolution of international environmental law and transboundary governance.

Natural Allies surveys the history of Canada-US relations from Confederation up to the present. Blending environmental and energy history with international and diplomatic history, underpinning this book is the conviction that nature is a powerful historical actor with its own forms of agency. That is, the materiality and characteristics of resources and energy have profound implications for human politics.

Natural resources were an essential part of the bilateral relationship from the beginning. In fact, most of the early direct diplomatic relations between the United States and the newly-minted Dominion of Canada revolved around the natural world, particularly fish and water. Environmental diplomacy in the half-century after Canadian Confederation was central to a Canadian-British-American ‘cleaning of the slate’ and creating an amicable continental relationship.

Table 0.1: Major Canada-US Environmental and Energy Diplomacy Issues and Agreements since 1900. In this chronological table the left column indicates date and/or time range and the right column lists the issue or agreement.

Environmental diplomacy demonstrated that Canada was capable of independently controlling its foreign policy, symbolized by the 1923 Halibut Treaty. Ottawa confirmed this independence by negotiating a series of water development accords during the interwar years, though most of these could not get through the US Congress, as well as handling the Trail Smelter case and inking free trade accords. Some of these agreements have become well-known precedents in the history of global environmental governance.

The bilateral harmony created by environmental and energy diplomacy paved the way for rapid Canada-US integration during and after the Second World War. As the scope of subjects dealt with by the two countries markedly widened, so too did the range of environmental issues. With the completion of several hydropower megaprojects on border waters in the early Cold War, as well as the beginning of Canadian fossil fuel exports, energy became an even more crucial facet of the bilateral relationship. Furthermore, Cold War environmental diplomacy frequently involved other resources critical to national security and nation-building, such as steel, aluminum, nuclear materials, and minerals. Interestingly, just as decades of binational hydropolitics reached their apogee with the construction of megaprojects on the Niagara, St. Lawrence, and Columbia Rivers, plus many smaller hydroelectric projects elsewhere, oil and gas were superseding hydropower as the foremost concern of North American energy diplomacy, which also included other forms such as uranium.

Fossil fuels were the most contentious form of energy relations during the 1970s when the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreements were cardinal achievements. Acid rain and air pollution became not just major environmental problems but diplomatic problems as well, where they were joined by Law of the Sea and other maritime issues, fish and invasive species, and Arctic concerns. In some respects, the 1988 and 1994 free trade agreements, along with the end of the Cold War, reset the nature of Canada-US environmental and energy diplomacy. Energy integration and trade accelerated significantly while new challenges, such as softwood lumber and climate change, rose to the fore.

The title of the book, Natural Allies, reflects the thesis that energy, resources, landscapes, and geography account for the relatively harmonious nature of the Canada-US relationship. That is, the upper North American relationship is marked more by cooperation than conflict largely because of resource statecraft. Looking at Canadian-American international relations through an environmental and energy lens reveals the extent to which cooperation is heavily predicated upon practicality, coinciding national interests, and shared environments. Frequent international negotiations about environmental issues fostered integration and provided ballast during times of stormy diplomacy, though certain resource negotiations became punctuated controversies that dominated government-to-government relations.

The history of bilateral ecopolitics helps explain why, despite the power imbalance, Canada often made out well in direct negotiations with the United States government. The technical expertise diplomats and officials developed about fish stocks or kilowatt hours not only helped pave Canada’s way to diplomatic independence from Britain, but this expertise served as a partial corrective to asymmetry vis-à-vis the United States. Furthermore, this history also tells us a great deal about the American view of empire, formal and informal, in relation to Canada. In Canadian energy and resource sectors where the United States came to dominate, Canadian policymakers and elites were generally not coerced or forced into it; rather, they frequently initiated or invited American involvement, opting for increased prosperity and security even if it meant reduced sovereignty.

The history of Canada-US environmental and energy diplomacy is, as Natural Allies shows, in large part responsible for the cooperative relationship and unprecedented affluence the two countries share. However, that very peace and prosperity is a double-edged sword: it has naturalized a belief in perpetual abundance and growth that has led to a voracious consumption of resources that is not remotely close to being sustainable. Arguably, no two countries are more responsible, per capita, for our current planetary crises: climate change, habitat and species collapse, toxic pollutants, and so on.

Daniel Macfarlane is associate professor at the School of the Environment, Geography, and Sustainability at Western Michigan University and senior fellow at the Bill Graham Centre for Contemporary International History at the University of Toronto.