Foreword

of Ottawa where he specializes in Canadian and International Environmental Law, Water Law, Sustainable Development Law, and Canadian Legal History.His authoritative text, Environmental Law, entered its fourth edition in 2013, and his social, legal, and cultural history of wastewater and flushing (published in 2007) has been widely praised for its exploration of the murky histories of sewage disposal in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom through two hundred years.Long interested in policy issues, he has participated in a number of public inquiries and Royal Commissions and has also served as the executive director of the Academy of Environmental Law for the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.1Over the years, Benidickson's enthusiasm for canoeing, as a hobby and recreational pastime, has also led him along numerous Canadian waterways, and into print; his 1997 book Idleness, Water, and A Canoe: Reflections on Paddling for Pleasure is a social history of recreational paddling.2Towards the end of that work, Benidickson quotes (approvingly and perhaps even somewhat autobiographically) a passage from a 1915 issue of the Canadian outdoors magazine, Rod and Gun: "There is a secret influence at work in the wild places of the North that seems to cast a spell over the men who have once been in them.One can never forget the lakes of such wonderful beauty, the rivers, peaceful or turbulent, and the quiet portage paths, or the mighty forests of real trees."3xiv Foreword Mighty forests, beautiful lakes, and rivers both quiet and frenzied are defining characteristics of the Lake of the Woods area of northwestern Ontario and Minnesota on which Benidickson here focuses his attention.But "canoe" appears a mere handful of times in these pages.Fond though Benidickson may be of the scenic and recreational attributes of On tario's north country, Levelling the Lake is about the challenges of water shed management rather than the joys of paddling.It is an analytical rather than a nostalgic book.By tracing the course of resource developments in the Lake of the Woods catchment through the last 150 years or so, it sheds new light on the ways in which piecemeal responses to a succession of environmental challenges have spawned unanticipated consequences and tested attempts to sustain the watershed.This is no simple story.Watersheds encompass several "interlocking and interacting" considerations; they require engagement with "numerous interests simultaneously, and the promulgation of solutions which concurrently balance benefits and costs for many different parties."4They present what Benidickson and others characterize as quintessential polycentric problems, in which the consequences of actions (deliberate and inadvertent) are often poorly understood and "multiple forms of resolution and re-alignment" are possible.These problems are only compounded by history and precedent, and by radically different understandings of rights and entitlements among participating interests.They are further exacerbated when political jurisdictions cross drainage systems, because water knows no borders, while politicians and bureaucrats are notoriously attentive to the reach of their authority and that of their counterparts.Lake of the Woods is a remnant of the former glacial Lake Agassiz that once covered much of present-day Manitoba, northwestern Ontario, eastern Saskatchewan, North Dakota, and northwestern Minnesota.It strad dles both the international border and a geological boundary, between glacial till (to the south) and Precambrian rock (to the north).Broad and shallow, Big Traverse Bay in Minnesota is bordered by wetlands and peat deposits.The remaining two-thirds of the lake, almost all of which is in Ontario, is an intricate mosaic of open water, 14,500 islands, narrow channels, inlets, and bays; thin soils and mixed forests cover many of the islands and much of the land around this part of the lake.Feeding into the Winnipeg River from an outlet near Kenora, Lake of the Woods is part of an extensive drainage basin carrying water from the southern third of northwestern Ontario and the northern reaches of Minnesota (approximately 150,000 square kilometres) into Lake Winnipeg and hence to the Hudson Bay.5 Benidickson focuses his attention on the

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