Smelter Fumes, Local Interests, and Political Contestation in Sudbury, Ontario, during the 1910s

During the second half of the 1910s the problem of sulphur smoke in Sudbury, Ontario, pitted farmers against the mining-smelting industry that comprised the dominant sector of the local economy. Increased demand for nickel from World War I had resulted in expanded activities in the nearby Copper Cliff and O’Donnell roast yards, which in turn produced more smoke and destroyed crops. Local business leaders, represented by the Sudbury Board of Trade, sought to balance the needs of the agriculture and mining-smelting sectors and facilitate their coexistence in the region. Among the measures pursued, farmers and some Board of Trade members turned to nuisance litigation, with the objective of obtaining monetary awards and injunctions affecting the operation of the roast yards. While the amounts of the awards were disappointing for the farmers, the spectre of an injunction was sufficient to convince the provincial government to ban civil litigation in favour of an arbitration process accommodating industry. This article provides an account of the political activism over Sudbury’s smoke nuisance that failed to bring about emission controls, highlighting the contextual factors contributing to this failure.Pendant la deuxième moitié des années 1910, la fumée de soufre à Sudbury (Ontario) a opposé les agriculteurs et l’industrie des mines et de la métallurgie, laquelle était l’un des secteurs les plus importants de l’économie. La demande croissante de nickel pendant la Première Guerre mondiale a mené à l’expansion des chantiers de grillage de Copper Cliff et O’Donnell, situés à proximité, accroissant ainsi la fumée près de Sudbury et détruisant les récoltes. Les leaders de la communauté d’affaires de Sudbury, représentés par la Chambre de commerce de la ville, ont tenté d’équilibrer les besoins des deux secteurs (agriculture ainsi que mines et métallurgie) et de faciliter leur coexistence dans la région. Parmi les mesures mises en place, les membres de la Chambre de commerce et les agriculteurs ont intenté des poursuites sur la base de la nuisance avec l’objectif d’obtenir une compensation monétaire et des injonctions quant aux opérations des chantiers de grillage. Bien que les compensations monétaires aient été décevantes aux yeux des agriculteurs, la menace d’une injonction a suffi à convaincre le gouvernement provincial de bannir les poursuites civiles et de créer un processus d’arbitrage accommodant l’industrie. Cet article décrit l’activisme politique par rapport à la nuisance de la fumée, lequel n’a pas conduit à une solution, et met en lumière les facteurs contextuels ayant contribué à cet échec

Inferences and Indices: Evaluating the Effectiveness of International Environmental Regimes

Institutionalists commonly assume that the operation of regimes accounts for much of what happens in international society. Realists and neorealists, by contrast, typically regard institutions as epiphenomena that reflect deeper forces in international society and that can be expected to change when the deeper forces change. As is so often the case in debates of this nature, the truth no doubt lies somewhere between these polar perspectives. To identify the signal of the effects of institutions and especially to track variations in the strength of this signal, we need to find ways to draw clearcut inferences about the causal links between institutions and collective outcomes at the international level. Ideally, we should also devise an integrated index of regime effectiveness that would allow us to compare and contrast different regimes or the same regimes over time in terms of their effectiveness. This article offers a critical review of the leading efforts to develop useful inferences and indices with particular reference to international environmental regimes. It concludes that our efforts in this realm to date have yielded only modest-though hardly trivial-results. Yet we are far from exhausting the available analytic resources in this field, and there is much that can be done to improve inferences and indices in this important area of research in the future. Copyright (c) 2001 Massachusetts Institute of Technology.