The Force of Things: Landscape Design and the Panama Canal

The construction of the Panama Canal (1904–14) was the iconic Fitzcarraldian project of its era. Famously described as “the greatest liberty Man has ever taken with Nature,” the lock canal was designed to lift ships up and over an isthmian mountain range, thereby connecting the Atlantic and Pacific by water—an astonishing technical feat. Its opening was presented as irrefutable evidence of the world-making power of engineering and an index of modern humans’ increasing liberation from geography. Despite the canal’s status as a symbol of the historical human triumph over nature, today it demands constant large-scale environmental initiatives—dredging sediment, controlling invasive water plants, and managing land use— to function as designed. From this perspective, the history of the Panama Canal should be understood as the ongoing production of a regional environment conducive to transit, rather than as a century-old conquest. This history illustrates that by reorganizing land and water, infrastructures have the power to alter how and whom environments serve, giving rise to ecological distribution conflicts.

The year 2014 marked the centennial of the opening of the Panama Canal. Its construction is often narrated as a tale of triumph in which the US government conquered tropical nature using modern science and technology: dominating diseased landscapes, unpredictable rivers, and even physical geography itself. In this Forum, we combine environmental history with the histories of science, technology, and empire to complicate that well-known story. The essays that follow explore the new ecologies that emerged around the canal during its construction and the decades that followed. We collectively show how the US Canal Zone, the Republic of Panama, and the borderlands that separated them became ecological contact zones and important sites for imagining, understanding, and managing tropical environments trans- formed through human activity. Rural and urban residents, health officials, natural scientists, and tourists discursively and materially constructed different environments on the isthmus. Their efforts were facilitated and hindered by the US government’s numerous environmental management projects, from flooding artificial lakes and depopulating the Canal Zone to sanitizing cities and creating nature preserves. However, this did not mean that physical and hu- man geographies readily conformed to imperial plans. As the contributing authors show, city dwellers, farmers, mosquitoes, microbes, flowing water, growing forests, and invasive species disrupted and reshaped state projects. Approaching the Panama Canal’s history in this way challenges inherited assumptions about the iconic waterway and raises questions about the potential social and environ- mental consequences of twenty-first-century infrastructure projects.

The Panama Canal requires an enormous volume of fresh water to function. A staggering 52 million gallons are released into the Atlantic and Pacific oceans with each of the 35–45 ships that transit the canal daily. The water that facilitates interoceanic transportation and global connection falls as rain across the watershed surrounding the canal and is managed by an extensive system of locks, dams, and hydrographic stations. These technologies – which correspond with the popular understanding of infrastructure as hardware – were largely constructed during the early 20th century. Since the late 1970s, however, administrators and other concerned actors have responded to actual and potential water scarcity within the canal system by developing a managerial approach that integrates engineered technologies and new techniques of land-use planning and environmental regulation across the watershed. Through this process, techno-politics and environmental politics have become increasingly inextricable in the transit zone. Whereas canal administrators previously emphasized the control of water in its liquid state, watershed management emerged as an attempt to manipulate water flows through the legal protection of forests and restriction of agriculture. As forested landscapes have been assigned new infrastructural functions (water storage and regulation), campesino farmers have been charged with a new responsibility (forest conservation) often at odds with their established agricultural practices. Consequently, I bring together scholarship on infrastructure in science and technology studies and political ecology in anthropology and geography to examine why, how, and to what effect landscapes around the canal have been transformed from agricultural frontier to managed watershed. I suggest that the concept of infrastructure is a useful theoretical tool and empirical topic for analyzing the politics of environmental service provision. By paying attention to the contingent history of engineering decisions and the politics embedded in the changing socio-technical system that delivers water to the canal, we can better understand the distributional politics of environmental service provision in Panama today.

The construction of the Panama Canal is generally imagined as an earth-moving effort, but excavation was only one of many processes of environmental transformation associated with the project. The US government also reorganized environments within and beyond the Panama Canal Zone—the large transportation enclave then under its quasi-colonial jurisdiction—through water management technologies and exclusionary territorial policies. Ironically, many newcomers—even natural scientists—were prone to perceive the Zone’s engineered landscapes as pristine nature. Why did Panama’s transit zone, a region with a long human history, appear more—not less—natural to many visitors and recent settlers during and after canal construction? First, the landscape was transformed between 1911 and 1914 through the flooding of the massive Gatun Lake, which submerged evidence of the past. This coincided with the US government’s decision to implement a depopulation policy across the Canal Zone, which precipitated demographic change and reforestation. Second, newcomers perceived Panama’s environment through a Euro-American nature aesthetic that recognized some forms of human modification and elided others. Through material transformation and cultural era- sure, the US government naturalized their control and occupation of landscapes sedimented with history.

The year 2014 marked the centennial of the opening of the Panama Canal. Its construction is often narrated as a tale of triumph in which the US government conquered tropical nature using modern science and technology: dominating diseased landscapes, unpredictable rivers, and even physical geography itself. In this Forum, we combine environmental history with the histories of science, technology, and empire to complicate that well-known story. The essays that follow explore the new ecologies that emerged around the canal during its construction and the decades that followed. We collectively show how the US Canal Zone, the Republic of Panama, and the borderlands that separated them became ecological contact zones and important sites for imagining, understanding, and managing tropical environments transformed through human activity. Rural and urban residents, health officials, natural scientists, and tourists discursively and materially constructed different environments on the isthmus. Their efforts were facilitated and hindered by the US government's numerous environmental management projects, from flooding artificial lakes and depopulating the Canal Zone to sanitizing cities and creating nature preserves. However, this did not mean that physical and human geographies readily conformed to imperial plans. As the contributing authors show, city dwellers, farmers, mosquitoes, microbes, flowing water, growing forests, and invasive species disrupted and reshaped state projects. Approaching the Panama Canal's history in this way challenges inherited assumptions about the iconic waterway and raises questions about the potential social and environmental consequences of twenty-first-century infrastructure projects.