'A sort of destiny': The Multi-Jurisdictional Response to Sewage Pollution in the Great Lakes, 1900-1930

Reconsidering the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River: History, cartography, law, and ecology

“…The Great Lakes and St. Lawrence are often associated with the Laurentian thesis (Creighton 1937), which provided an interpretive framework for Canadian history and in its own way justified the construction of a national space from sea to sea. In the past few years, the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence have also been evoked in public debates around issues such as pollution (Read 1998(Read , 1999Sproule-Jones 2002), water transfers (Lasserre 2005;Desroches and Paquerot 2006), and the proliferation of invasive species (Alexander 2009). These evocations of all or part of the hydrographic basin-whether in historiographic, political, scientific, or legal contexts-have contributed to the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence being represented as a single entity, conferring upon it a "natural" character.…”