Christine Keiner’s research while affiliated with Rochester Institute of Technology and other places

As the Panama Canal approached its fiftieth anniversary in the mid-1960s, U.S. officials concerned about the costs of modernization welcomed the technology of peaceful nuclear excavation to create a new waterway at sea level. Biologists seeking a share of the funds slated for radiological-safety studies called attention to another potential effect which they deemed of far greater ecological and evolutionary magnitude – marine species exchange, an obscure environmental issue that required the expertise of underresourced life scientists. An enterprising endeavor to support Smithsonian naturalists, especially marine biologists at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, wound up sparking heated debates – between biologists and engineers about the oceans’ biological integrity and among scientists about whether the megaproject represented a research opportunity or environmental threat. A National Academy of Sciences panel chaired by Ernst Mayr failed to attract congressional funding for its 10-year baseline research program, but did create a stir in the scientific and mainstream press about the ecological threats that the sea-level canal might unleash upon the Atlantic and Pacific. This paper examines how the proposed megaproject sparked a scientific and political conversation about the risks of mixing the oceans at a time when many members of the scientific and engineering communities still viewed the seas as impervious to human-facilitated change.

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. https://doi.org/10.1093/envhis/emv165

From the early 1960s through the 1970s, the U.S. government spent considerable capital investigating the feasibility of replacing the Panama Canal with a non-lock waterway, a plan originally spurred by the economic promise of nuclear engineering. The proposal generated a storm of protest among scientists who faulted officials for downplaying its risks, but because the megaproject never came to fruition the sea-level canal debate has been all but forgotten. However, the controversy is worth remembering as a foundational initiative of environmental diplomacy between the United States and its strategic ally, Panama, and for the ways in which a group of researchers stimulated interest in marine biotic interchange and tropical ecology at a time when such subfields remained on the margins of academia. Led by biologists associated with the Smithsonian Institution, who had struggled to promote tropical research since taking over the Panama Canal Zone’s Barro Colorado Island in 1946, the controversy featured the then-novel issue of non-native marine species exchange as a potentially greater threat than radioactive fallout. Framing the proposed canal as a fait accompli, Smithsonian biologists and administrators publicized the situation as a unique opportunity for promoting the isthmus as a strategic site for investigating the biogeographic origins, maintenance, and loss of tropical marine biodiversity. Though their risky strategy irritated diplomats, engineers, and some fellow biologists, the Smithsonian provocateurs succeeded in forcing officials to acknowledge the project’s environmental costs, and in demonstrating the social relevance of trans-isthmian ecological and evolutionary research long before the “biodiversity crisis” or “invasive species” became household words. The sea-level canal controversy serves as a useful lens for examining the changing postwar roles of scientists in international environmental politics, with respect to identifying both new perceptions of risk associated with megaprojects and to raising awareness of the importance of tropical marine and invasion biology.

Over the past decade, marine environmental historians have begun to mobilize the major themes of "traditional" environmental history-wilderness and the frontier-to provide insight into our neglected oceans, and the changing nature-culture interactions therein. Yet while practitioners of environmental history, with its powerful focus on landscapes of the American West, have assimilated scientific perspectives to varying degrees, the same is not true of marine environmental historians. Because scientific research has permeated political, cultural, and economic understandings of saltwater and freshwater resources over the past 150 years, analyzing human relationships with watery geographies during the modern era requires critical dialogue between the natural and social sciences. However, as essential as biology, physics, chemistry, anthropology, and the history and sociology of science are for elucidating key questions of marine environmental history, we must guard against creating barriers for those without formal training in science or in fields providing critical perspectives on science. Given the tensions that have risen between historians and scientists in innovative initiatives to improve marine management, moving toward mutual goals requires a closer look at the positioning of marine environmental history vis-a-vis science in particular and academia overall.