Environmental Management on North America's Borders.

• Author: Gaines, Sanford
• Position: Review

ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT ON NORTH AMERICA'S BORDERS. Edited by Richard Kiy and John D. Wirth, Texas A&M University Press, 1998. Pp. 1-305. $27.95.

On October 22, 1998, the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission (TNRCC) voted unanimously to deny a permit for a low-level radioactive waste disposal site near Sierra Blanca in far west Texas.(1) Ordinarily a decision to grant or deny a permit for a facility, even a radioactive waste disposal facility, would not garner much attention beyond the local area. In the Sierra Blanca case, however, the TNRCC decision was widely reported and discussed in Mexico City, Chicago, Washington, and elsewhere.(2) In fact, in the days and weeks before the Commission's vote, the Sierra Blanca waste site had been the subject of resolutions of the Mexican Congress, discussions between the energy secretaries of the two countries, press releases by the Mexican secretary for environment and natural resources, diplomatic communications from the Mexican secretary of foreign relations, and even an intervention by Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo.(3) Mexican legislators and environmental activists declared their intention to bring the matter to the North American Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC) if the TNRCC voted to grant the permit.(4) Even more strikingly, Mexican federal and state legislators conducted a fast outside the Texas governor's residence, and there were Mexican and U.S. demonstrators near the TNRCC offices in Austin in the days before the Commission's vote.(5)

The direct engagement of Mexican officials and activists in the legal and political jockeying surrounding the TNRCC's Sierra Blanca permit proceeding demonstrates social and political trends that are increasing cross-border interaction in North America on issues of environmental protection and resource management. The changing patterns of environmental protection among Mexico, Canada, and the United States on a continental scale have so far received scant attention.(6) Now comes Environmental Management on North America's Borders,(7) an important initial effort to examine transboundary environmental issues from the newly significant continental perspective.

The 1990s brought two dramatic developments that have changed forever the modalities for environmental protection in North America. One development was the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).(8) NAFTA not only gave new structure and intensity to the economic integration among Canada, Mexico, and the United States, but also prompted the development of new institutions to address the environmental consequences of the economic integration specifically and the condition of the environment in North America more generally. Most importantly, NAFTA prompted the creation of the first-ever trinational environmental body, the CEC.(9) The CEC has already begun to transform the ways in which the three national governments and the citizens of North America respond to environmental pressures and environmental controversies.(10) The CEC has also initiated several efforts to deal with the border issues when either the commonality of border environmental management for all three countries(11) or an ecosystem of continental significance is involved.(12) Ironically, Environmental Management on North America's Borders, much of which was written in 1995 and 1996,(13) comes too early to capture the CEC's emerging role through a specific case study.

The second social and political development was the emergence of civil society (business leaders, environmental organizations, and others not holding direct responsibility for public decision making) in Mexico as an influential force,(14) along with a more substantial engagement by local officials and environmental nongovernmental organizations in each country with their counterparts in the other two.(15) National and transboundary activism has prompted all three governments to restructure the processes for making decisions on environmental questions,(16) including those decisions involving one or both of their North American neighbors.(17) Thus, the trinational agreement creating the CEC and the bilateral agreement to establish the Border Environment Cooperation Commission (BECC) incorporate specific obligations and mechanisms for public access to, and influence over, the work of these international organizations.(18) At the same time, citizens, civic and business organizations, and non-federal public officials are freshly energized and empowered to take a direct role in environmental management, with or without support at the national level.(19)

Traditionalists in all three countries may scoff at the underlying premise of this book: that there is a "North America," particularly a North America that includes Mexico, in more than geographic terms. They may doubt that Canadians, Mexicans, and Americans could have a common perspective on issues, but there are powerful social and economic forces at work that are vigorously supplanting traditional values rooted in national identity.(20) The migration of people is one of the more obvious manifestations of these trends.(21) Recognizing the new realities, Mexico recently modified its citizenship laws to allow Mexican citizens to assume U.S. or Canadian citizenship as well.(22) As a result, cities like Chicago and Los Angeles, with their large Mexican populations, have become an important stop for candidates aspiring to the Mexican presidency in the year 2000.(23) By the same token, candidates for political offices in Texas and elsewhere now make campaign advertisements in which the candidate speaks in Spanish to the concerns of the Hispanic community.(24) On recent visits to the United States, Canadian Foreign Minister, Lloyd Axworthy, spoke of "building a North American community" and enlarging the "scope for practical work to expand bilateral and trilateral co-operation within North America across the range of transboundary issues that affect our daily lives."(25)

Not by chance, Minister Axworthy pointed to environmental and natural resource issues as ones that exemplify the continental nature of our shared livelihoods.(26) The need to manage border resources, especially water, with the United States' neighbors to the north and the south led a century ago to bilateral treaties and institutions.(27) What few realize is that the bilateral approach came about only after the United States failed to muster political leadership to pursue ideas for a broader continental approach in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.(28) The United States convened the trinational Irrigation Congress in Denver, Colorado, in 1894 with a follow-up meeting the next year in Albuquerque, New Mexico, but the State Department backed away from Canadian and Mexican proposals for a trinational commission on water rights and allocations.(29) A decade later, President Theodore Roosevelt saw that resource issues encompassed a broader realm of common concern.(30) He called a North American Conservation Conference in...