Emma S. Norman

Standing Up for Inherent Rights: The Role of Indigenous-Led Activism in Protecting Sacred Waters and Ways of Life

ABSTRACT Time and time again, Indigenous people throughout the world are faced with the need to reassert their way of life, and to “buck” political and social systems that continually marginalize their treaty rights. In this article, I explore the role of Indigenous activism at different scales—personal, tribal, and collective—to intervene in key moments to uphold treaty rights and protect Indigenous ways of life. In defending treaty rights, Indigenous peoples have become leaders in the social and environmental justice movement, particularly in relation to climate justice and fishing rights. The article recounts three ethnographies that illustrate how access to rights is wrapped up in geopolitics and the political economy. Highlighting these acts of resilience and leadership in the face of crisis is the central work of this article. The article concludes with a call to fundamentally rethink governance mechanisms and structures, to protect ecological and human health.

Do good fences make good neighbours? Canada–United States transboundary water governance, the Boundary Waters Treaty, and twenty-first-century challenges

This article analyzes the rescaling of transboundary water governance and explores challenges and opportunities for the twenty-first century. The analysis is grounded in the example of the Canada–United States transboundary water governance regime, and asks two questions: What are the lessons learned since Canada and the United States first signed the Boundary Waters Treaty 100 years ago? And what is the potential of rescaling to influence the tension between the ‘sovereign rights’ of a nation and transboundary water governance protocols based on ‘good neighbourliness’?

The Shifting Geopolitics of Water in the Anthropocene

ABSTRACT This forum responds to recent calls to hypothesize a geopolitics of the Anthropocene by examining how our notions of geopolitics of water may shift in the context of this new and, at times, divisive framework. The Anthropocene describes the geological epoch in which humans are the dominant actor in the global environmental system and has been a concept that is not without controversy. Taking the Anthropocene as an epistemological divergence where nature can no longer be viewed as separate from humanity, this forum asks how moving away from understanding hydraulic systems as essentially stable to understanding them as unstable and profoundly influenced by humans changes our understanding ofthe geopolitics of water. Collectively the contributions to this forum illustrate that formulating a water geopolitics of the Anthropocene requires 1) moving beyond a focus on fluvial flows to consider other forms of water; 2) broadening our understanding of the actors involved in water geopolitics; 3) examining new geopolitical tactics, particularly those grounded in law; 4) engaging critically with new and emerging forms of visualization and representation in the geopolitics of water, and; 5) examining how the notion of the Anthropocene has been used towards geopolitical ends and worked to elide different positionalities.

Advancing methods for research on household water insecurity: Studying entitlements and capabilities, socio-cultural dynamics, and political processes, institutions and governance

Household water insecurity has serious implications for the health, livelihoods and wellbeing of people around the world. Existing methods to assess the state of household water insecurity focus largely on water quality, quantity or adequacy, source or reliability, and affordability. These methods have significant advantages in terms of their simplicity and comparability, but are widely recognized to oversimplify and underestimate the global burden of household water insecurity. In contrast, a broader definition of household water insecurity should include entitlements and human capabilities, sociocultural dynamics, and political institutions and processes. This paper proposes a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods that can be widely adopted across cultural, geographic, and demographic contexts to assess hard-to-measure dimensions of household water insecurity. In doing so, it critically evaluates existing methods for assessing household water insecurity and suggests ways in which methodological innovations advance a broader definition of household water insecurity.

Transcending Borders Through Postcolonial Water Governance? Indigenous Water Governance Across the Canada-US Border

This chapter explores the evolution of transboundary water governance along the Canada-US border. We examine two key examples in two eras of water management across the Canada-US border, separated by more than a century. First, we examine the Boundary Waters Treaty (a bi-national agreement between the federal governments of Canada and the United States), as an emblematic example of the dominant concerns that underpinned (colonial settler) water governance at the turn of the twentieth century, creating the framework in which nation-state governance mechanisms were dominant. Second, we examine the development of Indigenous-led transboundary governing bodies, focusing on the Yukon River Intertribal Watershed Council. We argue that the YRITWC is emblematic of a new era of transboundary water governance: participatory, and (in an increasing number of cases) Indigenous led – which implies new principles for water governance, involving an expanded network of actors beyond the nation-state.

Measurement and Modeling of Atmosphere-Surface Exchangeable Pollutants (ASEPs) To Better Understand their Environmental Cycling and Planetary Boundaries

Pollutants (ASEPs) To Better Understand their Environmental Cycling and Planetary Boundaries Judith A. Perlinger,*,† Hugh S. Gorman, ‡ Emma S. Norman, Daniel Obrist, Noelle E. Selin, Noel R. Urban,† and Shiliang Wu#,† †Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering, Michigan Technological University, Houghton, Michigan 49931, United States ‡Department of Social Sciences, Michigan Technological University, Houghton, Michigan 49931, United States Department of Native Environmental Science, Northwest Indian College, Bellingham, Washington 98226, United States Division of Atmospheric Sciences, Desert Research Institute, Reno, Nevada 89512, United States Institute for Data, Systems, and Society and Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, United States Department of Geological & Mining Engineering & Sciences, Michigan Technological University, Houghton, Michigan 49931, United States

Local impacts, global sources: The governance of boundary-crossing chemicals

Over the last half century, a multijurisdictional, multiscale system of governance has emerged to address concerns associated with toxic chemicals that have the capacity to bioaccumulate in organisms and biomagnify in food chains, leading to fish consumption advisories. Components of this system of governance include international conventions (such as the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants and the Minamata Convention on Mercury), laws enacted by nation states and their subjurisdictions, and efforts to adaptively manage regional ecosystems (such as the U.S.–Canadian Great Lakes). Given that many of these compounds – including mercury, industrial chemicals such as polychlorinated biphenyls, and pesticides such as toxaphene – circulate throughout the globe through cycles of deposition and reemission, regional efforts to eliminate the need for fish consumption advisories cannot be successful without efforts to reduce emissions everywhere in the world. This paper argues that the scientific community, by monitoring the concentrations of these compounds in the atmosphere and by modeling their fate and transport, play an important role in connecting the various jurisdictional scales of governance. In addition, the monitoring networks that this community of scientists has established can be visualized as a technology of governance essential in an era in which societies have the capacity to produce and release such chemicals on an industrial scale.