In 2007, I attended the annual Border Governors Conference in Puerto Peñasco with Governor Schwarzenegger, and I remember sitting in on conversations where the subject kept circling back to water. Northern Mexico was dry, drier than it should have been, and wasn’t receiving the same quantities of water from the Colorado River that historically flowed into the Sea of Cortez. Too often the Colorado wasn’t even reaching the U.S.-Mexican border. That conversation has stayed with me, because it was an early lesson in something that is easy to forget in Washington or Sacramento. Water, air, flora, and fauna don't stop at borders, and neither do the consequences of ignoring that fact.

That's why I think the Trump Administration's decision earlier this year to withdraw the United States from the Commission for Environmental Cooperation, alongside dozens of other international bodies, is a mistake. The CEC was created in 1994 alongside NAFTA and carried forward when the three countries renegotiated their trade relationship into USMCA, as a standing venue where Canada, Mexico, and the United States could coordinate on environmental issues that no one of them could manage alone. The CEC exists, not because international cooperation is automatically good, but because the CEC happens to be doing quiet, practical work that serves American interests directly, in ways that are easy to overlook until they're gone.

This summer wildfires burning in Canada have sent smoke drifting over Chicago, New York, and other American cities, triggering air quality warnings for millions of people who have never been near a forest fire. Responding to that spike in pollution requires shared data, shared monitoring, and a shared understanding of emissions across the whole continent, not three separate national systems improvising in isolation. The CEC has spent years building exactly that kind of infrastructure through its air quality and emissions inventory work, giving American regulators a clearer picture of where smoke is coming from and how it's likely to move. That's not a favor to Canada. It's a tool that helps American public health officials do their jobs.

For decades, untreated wastewater from Tijuana has flowed into the Tijuana River Valley, closing beaches, sickening residents, and fouling the air in San Diego County. Fixing it has required sustained bi-national engagement, and this year alone Americans have relied on the CEC's citizen submission process, which lets residents and organizations formally challenge a government, in this case Mexico's, for failing to enforce its own environmental laws. That's a real accountability tool, and it exists because the CEC exists. Walking away from the institution doesn't make the sewage crisis go away faster. It removes one of the levers Americans have been using to pressure Mexico to act.

None of this makes the CEC glamorous. It's a relatively unknown institution, funded by modest contributions from all three governments, and it isn't going to solve climate change or generate headlines on its own. But that modesty is part of the case for keeping it. The CEC isn't a symbolic gesture toward international cooperation. It's a working piece of infrastructure that quietly makes it easier for the United States to get things it wants, cleaner air over American cities and less sewage in American water, from neighbors it has no choice but to keep sharing a continent with.

This is exactly the argument I hope to make at this year's North Capital Forum in Mexico City this September, where I will be moderating a session on sustainability that will dig into the real challenges and opportunities of trans-national cooperation across North America. If the argument in this piece holds, that our environmental fates are genuinely shared and that institutions like the CEC quietly serve American interests, then reversing the withdrawal decision shouldn't be a hard call. It should be one of the easier ones this administration has in front of it.