Declining access to fresh water is one of the twenty-first century’s most pressing environmental and human rights challenges, yet the struggle for water is not a new cause. The 8,800-kilometer border dividing Canada and the United States contains more than 20 percent of the world’s total freshwater resources, and Border Flows traces the century-long effort by Canada and the United States to manage and care for their ecologically and economically shared rivers and lakes.

Ranging across the continent, from the Great Lakes to the Northwest Passage to the Salish Sea, the histories in Border Flows offer critical insights into the historical struggle to care for these vital waters. From multiple perspectives, the book reveals alternative paradigms in water history, law, and policy at scales from the local to the transnational. Students, concerned citizens, and policymakers alike will benefit from the lessons to be found along this critical international border.

 

Lynne Heasley is an Associate Professor with the Department of History and the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at Western Michigan University. Her research examines the intersections and complex problems of ecology, economics, and culture in the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence basin. She is the author of A Thousand Pieces of Paradise: Landscape and Property in the Kickapoo Valley.

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Daniel Macfarlane is an Assistant Professor with the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at Western Michigan University. His research examines Canada-US border waters and he is the author of Negotiating a River, Canada, the US and the Creation of the St. Lawrence Seaway.

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Andrea Charron is associate professor of political studies at the University of Manitoba and director of the Centre for Defence and Security Studies.

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Alice Cohen is an associate professor in the departments of earth & environmental science and environmental & sustainability studies at Acadia University.

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Dave Dempsey's profile page

Jerry Dennis' profile page

Colin A.M. Duncan's profile page

Matthew Evenden is a professor in the Department of Geography as well as the Associate Dean of Research and Graduate Studies at the University of British Columbia.

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James W. Feldman's profile page

Noah D. Hall's profile page

Nancy Langston's profile page

Frédéric Lasserre is a professor of Geography at Laval University, Directeur du Centre Québécois d’Études géopolitiques and a research associate at Groupe d'études et de recherche sur l'Asie contemporaine.

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Andrew Marcille's profile page

Jeremy Mouat's profile page

Emma S. Norman is an assistant professor of Geography at Michigan Technological University.

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Peter Starr's profile page

Joseph E. Taylor's profile page

Graeme Wynn is a professor of historical geography at the University of British Columbia and editor of BC Studies. He is a Fellow of The Royal Society of Canada and lives in Vancouver.

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Border Flows demonstrates the value of reaching across ideological and methodological boundaries that divide academic disciplines . . . the editors' keen sense for organization and the myriad conceptual connections that reach across each section, link this collection of articles to a larger aquatic context. This book will appeal to students and scholars from a wide variety of academic backgrounds and will serve as an excellent text for courses in legal history, environmental history, foreign relations, and borderlands studies. This edited collection represents a fine addition to the historiography of borders and water.

—Erik Reardon, Canadian Journal of History