immanence

As a Canadian who has long valued this country’s differences from the United States, I’m as concerned as anyone about the Trump administration’s threats of annexation toward Canada. This is mostly for obvious reasons: threats of annexation against sovereign nations violate Article One of the United Nations charter, and these threats are being made in a context of an attempt to radically redraw global geopolitics in the direction of a more authoritarian, neo-imperial order. Trump’s imperial grasp should be curtailed, and the Canadian border is as good a place to do that as any.

I happen to be a US citizen as well, having lived there for most of a quarter-century, so my appreciation of some things about that country makes things a bit more complex.

But mostly I consider myself a citizen of a rapidly changing planet. It’s those changes that I study, write, and teach about. And because of them I believe we need to view these things not only through the prism of business-as-usual, but through a longer range view. That requires asking what kind of subdivision of governance responsibilities makes most sense on a fragile and rapidly altering planet.

From an ecological perspective, bioregional, or ecoregional, boundaries are much more sensible than the boundaries we’ve inherited from our colonial histories. Ecology should not necessarily trump culture, history, and identity (sorry for using the “t” word), but it should be factored into the ways we adapt to a world in which climate is destabilizing, setting off mounting migration pressures, and in which the infrastructure of everyday life will have to change radically or will suffer dramatically.

Canada, for all its historical and political distinctiveness, is a vast territory between three oceans whose human population mostly lives within 100 miles or so of the US border. Some of its more northerly places will, in the coming decades, open up to uses that they haven’t seen in known history. In a long-term perspective — which is not one that Trump is likely aware of, though some of his impulses might appear to be unconsciously reacting to it — some of today’s Americans might one day become some of tomorrow’s Canadians, geographically speaking. By the same token, and irrespective of Trump’s anti-immigrant diatribes, some of today’s Mexicans and Latin Americans might become tomorrow’s Americans. Borders are not permanent, and population movements will come, even if we manage to slow or halt them temporarily (and rather atrociously, in recent weeks).

Trump’s desire to forestall those movements in the south is complemented by a desire to encourage them in the north, a desire to erase the Canadian border so that Americans — his business cronies, in particular — can have their way with all that’s there. The reason why the contradiction — walling off the south whilst opening up the north — doesn’t seem to bother him is due in part to the racism it comes tinged with. But on some level, it indicates a recognition that climate change — which is the first elephant in this story, and one that Trump dare not speak its name — is downgrading the lands to the south and upgrading the lands (and waters) to the north. So Greenland and Canada have become desirable in a way they haven’t been in the past.

Here’s where the second elephant comes in. (Sorry, elephants: no offense intended.) “Sleeping with an elephant” is one of the metaphors Canadians have used for describing the Canada-US relationship for decades, at least since Justin Trudeau’s father, Pierre, told it to Richard Nixon in 1969. “Living next to you,” the prime minister reportedly told the president, is “like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt.”

Like Canada’s population, its economy is barely more than one-tenth the size of that of the United States. That economy is already thoroughly interlocked with its southern counterpart. If we could put politics aside, we’d have to acknowledge that it makes much more sense to trade across the Canada-US border — between British Columbia and the northwest states (Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and California); between the Atlantic Provinces and New England; between Ontario and New York, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Minnesota; and so on — than it is to trade between Newfoundland, at one end, and Haida Gwaii, Canada’s most recently recognized sovereign Aboriginal Pacific archipelago, at the other. The fact that Newfoundland and Haida Gwaii produce the same goods (seafood, lumber, and summertime tourist options) is part of the issue. Neither produces tropical fruits, but Californians and Floridians do, and they are geographically much closer to one of Canada’s coasts than the opposite coasts of Canada are to each other.

Unlike the last hundred years, the longer term does not foresee a lessening of distance. As fossil fuel use declines (which it must) and as transportation costs get higher (unless and until renewables can fly our airplanes and power our ocean liners, which is unlikely anytime soon), shipping costs will rise, and local and regional transportation networks will replace transnational shipping routes.

For all its ridiculousness, then (and let’s not underestimate that), Trump’s “America First” agenda would appear to tacitly recognize that the world is becoming a less reliable and less predictable place, and that self-reliance will become more, not less, important in the future. Tearing up international agreements is not the way to get to a better future, but reconsidering our immediate cross-border relations is. (And needless to say, bullying those on the other side of the border is also not the way to do that.)

51st state or 11th province?

So here’s a response to Trump’s idea that Canada become the “51st state.”

Leaving aside the fact that a single state the size of Canada, with its 40 million people and its territory larger than the entire US, would be indigestible to the 50 current states, the 51st state idea is a non-starter for at least one other obvious reason: that it’s being suggested by an aggressor, rather like Putin suggesting the same for Ukraine.

If given the option of joining the United States, only 10% of Canadians currently support the idea; 90% are opposed. In mid-January the numbers were about 15% supporting and 77% opposing, so Trump’s statements seem to have made a difference. In fact, Trump’s assertiveness on the matter has dramatically reshaped Canada’s political landscape, so that the party that was recently expected to win the next general election quite handily — Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives, who had been 20 points ahead in the polls as recently as two months ago — is now neck and neck, and more likely trailing, the reinvigorated, governing-minority Liberals. (The Trump-Musk-Vance team’s actions are reinvigorating the center-left in a number of other countries as well.)

Thinking creatively about the border, however, and taking into account the starkly divided nature of the American citizenry, another idea suggests itself: that parts of the US might prefer joining Canada.

It’s not an altogether novel idea. Polls show that a far higher number of Americans are interested in joining Canada than of Canadians joining the US. For instance, nearly 30% of Californians, Oregonians, and Washingtonians actually support the idea of their own states joining Canada — and that’s data from mid-January, so by now those numbers will most certainly be higher. More than a third of Canadians currently support that idea, with the number being higher in British Columbia, the province that would be most obviously affected.

The same question could be asked of the northeast coastal states (at least all of New England, New York, and down to New Jersey, Maryland, Delaware, and D.C.), and probably of all states that border Canada (though we might think twice about North Dakota and Idaho). Annexing them to Canada would leave the lower midwest and southern states, from Florida to Arizona, to Trumpland, as Trump would inevitably want to rename the (t)rump state that would be left behind.

Canadian op-ed writers have already waxed poetic about which states they would happily welcome into Canada, with Michigan, Washington, and New York among the leading contenders. (As a longtime Vermonter, I would vouch for the existence of a pretty broad counterculture of secessionist Vermonters who would proudly follow Bernie Sanders to a healthcare-for-all union with the country that shares the border to their north.)

The reasons in favor of this kind of Canadian annexation should be obvious to most non-Trumpians. It would eliminate tariffs, lower the cost of many goods, and provide its citizens with easier and cheaper access to warmth in the winter and coolness in the summer, all of which would be good for the Canadian economy. Certain characteristics of Canada — universal health care, the continuing presence of a federal infrastructure for education and other public goods, both under attack by the Trump administration — would make it politically attractive for the seceding Americans. And it would be better for the world in general. (If you don’t think so, you’re probably a Republican.)

Perhaps the most obvious reason to worry about this option would be that the US would then be even more firmly in the grip of a militaristic imperial power grab. Keep in mind, however, that the US military is funded by taxpayers, and currently the two states of California and New York alone pay nearly a quarter of the federal tax burden. Adding Massachusetts, Michigan, Illinois, and several other states would bring that percentage to 50% or more. Suddenly an expanded Canada could be a huge military force — a force for good, since a gene for Canadian expansion doesn’t really exist — while the remaining (t)rump state of America could have its maritime access reduced to the “Gulf of America” and a shrinking, hurricane-prone piece of the mid-Atlantic. Controlling the Panama Canal would suddenly start to look like a fading dream, and Greenland like a figment of Trump’s imagination.

We could have fun with such visions.

The longer-range view

From a bioregional perspective, however, it’s not so much a question of redrawing the borders of nation-states, which are usually too large and too artificial — constructs of colonialism more than anything — than it is a matter of reconfiguring the jurisdictions of governance in ways that recognize the patterns by which matter, energy, and culture flow together in more or less sustainable ways.

As environmental planner Robert Thayer puts it in Life Place: Bioregional Thought and Practice, bioregions “can be defined in terms of distinct communities of life, both human and nonhuman, where implicit conditions suggest particular ecological adaptations.” Cultural histories are important in the shaping of regions, but ecocultural histories — which in North America includes the longer-term Indigenous histories that pre-existed the Euro-colonial invasion — can be inspirationally at least as important. We’ve seen, for instance, how the loss of Indigenous fire regimes has contributed to wildfire preponderance in the western United States today. Something similar can be said for management of forests, coastal and riverine fisheries, subsistence livelihoods in deserts and tundra, and plenty more, all of which will become more important as industrial farming depletes our soils, and as fossil fuels are replaced by locally attuned renewable energy systems.

It makes sense for certain kinds of politics to be built around ecological features — river valleys, mountain regions, coastal ecosystems, the Great Lakes, the Great Plains, and so on — and for others to be coordinated across and between these, with nested mechanisms for representation and decision-making at multiple scales. (Nobel prize winning economist Elinor Ostrom’s work on Governing the Commons is as good a place as any for beginning a more sensible rethink of how we govern the management of the resources that make life possible for all of us.) What this means, ultimately, is that notions of national sovereignty — the kind that would protect Canada from the economic warfare of a Trump administration, but that, in its anti-globalist form, also fuels much of the popular support for Trump in the first place — can only go so far. It will ultimately need to be supplemented, and in time even replaced, by ecological sovereignty, that is, by a bottom-up and lateral approach to governance that recognizes the ecological, biological, and territorial foundations for the kind of human society that makes most sense in a given place. (On “ecological sovereignty,” see note ¹).

My point in all of this is that President Trump’s wackadoodle approach to rethinking the world order could be seen not only as the problem, to be resisted, but as an opportunity, to be made use of — through a kind of Aikido-like strategy where we work with the energy unleashed by his disorder to turn things to our benefit. We might think of this as a variant of what Naomi Klein has called disaster capitalism, except that its very different goals would make it disaster post-capitalism, or disaster environmentalism (as I called it during Covid), with even elements of disaster anarchy, in that good sense of “mutual aid and radical action,” though it requires more coordination than anarchists are typically known for.

How could we do that?

Canada’s new prime minister, Mark Carney, can put his attention on fighting tariffs with counter-tariffs, on removing some of the obstacles to inter-provincial trade (the kind that would connect Newfoundland to Haida Gwaii, at its greatest extent), and on seeking to strengthen trade partnerships with the EU, the UK, China, and other potential partners. But he could also seek to break up the US by dividing the blue states from the red states. Instead of penalizing Michigan, Minnesota, and New York with a 25% electricity surcharge the way Ontario premier Doug Ford has done, Canada could charge surcharges or counter-tariffs on states, cities, and companies that play along with Trump, and give breaks to those who criticize or legally challenge the Trump administration’s actions.

That needn’t just be limited to red-state booze — which has already been taken off so many Canadian shelves. It could also be done by working directly with cities and states to develop regional trade deals — effectively, “policies in waiting” — that would undo the damage of Trump’s federal policies, either now (to the extent possible) or on the day that Trump is voted out of office.

Canadians, in other words, can play American politics. It’s perhaps that kind of thing that might deter union leaders like United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain from warming up to Trump when his workers have more to gain from playing along with Canadian companies than working against them.

I live within minutes of the US border, opposite the lovable backwoods peninsular “exclave” of Point Roberts, Washington. I’d love to be able to continue to visit our friends there rather than treating them like Trump-era exiles — the kind of separation they already endured, rather painfully, during the period of Covid travel restrictions. If there’s any place in the US that should be annexed to Canada, it’s Point Roberts, which sticks out into the sea like a sore thumb from the Tsawwassen Peninsula south of Vancouver. But I also appreciate the fact that it’s resisted the encroachment of Vancouver’s housing sprawl, something that other beachside coastal communities have not done nearly as well. Local details matter. Local protections sometimes, too.

I also live in the Salish Sea bioregion. If there’s any place where Canadians and Americans have much more in common than divides them, it’s this kind of place. From space, the Salish Sea looks like a great oval eye surrounded by mountain ranges that deposit water into a tidal sea that circulates salmon, whales, tidal life, container ships carrying goods to and from Asia, and about 9 million people. It’s small as seas go, but contains about 400 islands.

In its details, this region is absolutely unique. But in its generalities, it is like so many others: a rich, ecologically distinctive place in which people like to move around, and where the national border seems an irrational stop on that movement. In the context of the history of our two countries, the border is far from irrational, and Canadians (more than Americans!) need to maintain it in order to ensure that their systems of governance — and culture, and everything else — retain their integrity in the face of that much larger, and sometimes very cranky, elephant.

But ultimately it’s the regional relationships that will redeem us. Trump’s elephantine movements on the world stage — those of a rogue adolescent, not the considered movements of a kind matriarch (not all elephants are the same) — are more likely to bring about the collapse of the US than any kind of bellowing triumph. And Canadians could prepare, actively, for that to happen. That means preparing for the next phase of world politics which, if world politics is to survive in human form, will have to be ecological.

In other words, we shouldn’t assume that Trump will succeed. In the long run, the global elephant in the room — of climate change — will scramble the efforts of the trumpeting elephant to the south. We should instead acknowledge the former elephant and let it guide us, explicitly, in our responses to the twitches and grunts from below (to again cite Trudeau the elder). Together, we can find allies with whom to plan ahead for a rearrangement of our affairs toward a more ecologically viable future: one in which the richness of every bioregion can flourish in its own right, welcoming those who would help realize its vision, and neighboring regions be strengthened through alliances that recognize the strengths of each.

Ultimately, this means decolonizing both Canada and the United States — and Russia (that vast imperial leftover from Europe’s colonial phase), and China, and every other place on earth — where decolonization means uprooting ourselves from the fossil-fueled trajectory of industrial civilization and regrounding ourselves in the habitability conditions of each biologically specific “critical zone” that makes up the Earth. We would do that with those who live here, with those who’ve lived here for centuries, and with those whose future we live for and help shape.

If what we need today is not just a present to react against, but a future to look forward to, then why not start imagining that future into existence now?

1. I should note that my use of the term “ecological sovereignty” does not follow environmental philosopher Mick Smith’s use in his 2011 book Against Ecological Sovereignty, where Smith defines the term as “human dominion over the natural world.” If anything, it’s closer to the opposite. Smith is following the Westphalian nation-state (and Schmittian) models, by which sovereignty is the sovereign control of a state over its entire territory, with “ecological sovereignty” simply meaning state sovereignty over ecological resources. I’m following the expansion of the term “sovereignty” within Indigenous thought, ecological jurisprudence, and post-Latourian discourses, to mean something like the sovereignty of the land itself including the people whose relations with it best represent its interests. For a few perspectives on the term, see Mawyer and Jacka 2018; Boulot and Sungaila 2012; the Sustainability Directory’s detailed elucidation of the term; and the Anthropocene Curriculum’s Field Station 2. ↩︎