Air pollution challenges nations sharing common borders to balance
economic needs with protecting citizens and the environment across
jurisdictions. By examining landmark cases on the two borders, John
Wirth shows how environmental diplomacy, citizen action at the
grassroots level, and the role of science, industry, and the law
converged, bringing Canada, the United States, and Mexico to the
threshold of today's continental approaches to pollutant pathways.
Wirth first examines the famous Trail smelter conflict of
1927-1941. This precedent-setting case, which pitted U.S. farmers
against the Canadian smelter, resulted in the doctrine that in
cases of transborder damage, the polluter must pay. Although the
farmers were modestly compensated and the British Columbia-based
smelter cooperated to control pollution, Wirth reveals the real
significance of the decision: U.S. industries shared with the
Canadians a common interest to resolve the case in a manner that
would allow them to continue to pollute freely across international
borders with minimal regulation.
Wirth then turns to the Gray Triangle confrontations of the
1980s, in which the new instruments of the Clean Air Act and
cooperative policies developed by the Mexican and U.S. governments
established an entirely new climate for citizen action, resulting
in the closing of an American smelter in Arizona and the imposition
of stricter standards on two Mexican smelters in Sonora. Although
the Trail precedent favored industry, the Gray Triangle resolution
signaled that the needs of industry and the public interest were
now in better balance.
Drawing on extensive interviews and previously untapped
archives, Smelter Smoke in North America provides new analysis of
the development of a North American institutional response to
continental air pollution. It chronicles how industry developed a
continental perspective in a shared regional space, the mineralized
West, and how successful efforts of governments and citizens to
protect the environment evolved.
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