The National Academy and the Canal Question

The idea that the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS) should play a role in the sea-level canal debate had gained prominence as marine researchers debated both among themselves and with the CSC about the potential harm wrought by colonizing species. Rumors that the NAS might appoint an investigative committee circulated at oceanographic and zoological conferences following the publication of Rubinoff’s pivotal 1968 Science article.5

Yet NAS involvement was not a foregone conclusion. The academy was established in the 1860s to provide the government with expert advice, which during its first century pertained mostly to the physical sciences. As the 1960s-era environmental movement unfolded, the academy faced pressure to admit more ecologists, especially in the wake of its advice reinforcing the status quo on chemical pesticides.6 LaMont Cole was the most outspoken about urging the organization to think ecologically. He vented to Ernst Mayr that a 1966 NAS report on the plant sciences had recommended allocating $1.5 billion over the next decade for molecular research “but nothing for ecology per se, and not a penny for acquiring study areas or preserving natural areas . . . It is this sort of thing that requires us to see that Congress and others know where to go for competent ecological advice, and that they learn to recognize when ecological problems are involved.”7 But for Mayr the problem went much deeper: “It is not ecology which is getting the short end of the stick, it is the life sciences.”8 Cole took Mayr’s reproach in stride, concluding, “I’ll try to be discreet and I wish you success boring from within.”9

Like a burrowing shipworm, Mayr did weaken academy resistance to entering the fray. In an April 1968 letter to the NAS president, physicist Frederick Seitz, Mayr invoked the elite private organization as the needed corrective to governmental mismanagement: “The forthcoming man-made mixing of the water masses, faunas and floras of the two oceans, is perhaps the most gigantic biological experiment ever undertaken by man. Considering the magnitude of the research required prior to the opening of this canal, it is deplorable how little thought and attention has been given to this problem up to now.” A committee backed by “the prestige of the National Academy” would be able to develop a comprehensive research plan and raise funds to implement it.10 Seitz invited Mayr to chair an ad hoc committee to address research on “ecological unbalances” for just one day, in July 1968.11 After further nudging, Seitz agreed, in May 1969, to establish a substantial committee, to be funded by the CSC.12

Getting to that point took a lot of work. Ripley’s team at the Smithsonian spent weeks with CSC personnel to craft an official letter from the CSC requesting the academy’s assistance.13 The document proposed an intricate set of goals. Because the CSC lacked the time and funds for nonradiological research, it recommended that the Smithsonian develop and execute a coordinated program of ecological studies, in concert with the advice of academy-designated experts. Academy approval of the Smithsonian role would, everyone hoped, spur Congress to appropriate the requisite funds.14

CSC Chairman Robert B. Anderson sent the letter to Seitz on December 6, 1968.15 Because the letter did not disclose that the commission had already invited the Battelle research organization to submit a $214,000 proposal to evaluate the sea-level canal’s nonradiological biological impacts using preexisting data, the discovery thereof caused embarrassment and irritation.16 Yet despite questions about duplication, the agreement proceeded.17 Too much was at stake to stop: the Smithsonian leadership had invested years campaigning for funds; the commission sought to disarm its ecologically oriented critics; and for the academy, the eighteen-month-long project provided an opportunity to expand its influence, as well as $50,000 during a tight period for federally funded research (the current equivalent would be over $365,000).18

Amid the last-minute negotiations, a devastating critique of the CSC appeared in the journal Science on January 10, 1969. The article painted an unflattering portrait of the commission’s executive director: “Sheffey does not view the potential environmental consequences of a canal as particularly serious. ‘The possibilities of any serious disruptions to nature are very remote, and the potential threat to biota is so insignificant that it doesn’t merit spending a lot of money on it.’ ” The article also quoted him as calling out the Smithsonian scientists for “taking an alarmist view to attract attention.”19 Sheffey protested that the journalist had misquoted him and had failed to convey CSC efforts to overcome its lack of funds for ecological research.20

Three days later, on January 13, 1969, the commission members debated the wisdom of funding the $214,000 program outlined by Battelle, which featured the development of a computer model to determine what would happen to marine species following the opening of an artificial waterway at sea level. Given the $3 million already devoted to radiological studies, would such data really affect the government’s decision about whether to build the new canal? No, answered Anderson, “but we would be able to tell the conservationists and other people who are concerned with this sort of thing what the probabilities were and whether there were steps such as fish nets that might or might not be employed” to prevent harmful biological effects. Four years after the canal treaty negotiator John Irwin had made a similar suggestion, Anderson admitted, “I don’t think we can afford to say that we have studied everything except the marine life disruption.”21

The other members agreed on the public relations value of funding the faunal-mixing model. Still stinging from his public reprimand, Sheffey pointed out, “We are already getting articles in the New York Times and the science magazines that we are not doing enough on it, and these people are much encouraged that we are contemplating doing it now.” Commissioner Hill, the hard-nosed water resources management expert, did not conceal his contempt for those asking about marine effects. The commission should have answers ready, he argued, because otherwise “there would be no restriction on the wild eyed nature groups in causing trouble,” and because “it gives us a little leverage to combat the uninhibited conservationists and the nature lovers—as the British call them, the birds and bees boys.” Hill conflated the scientific sea-level canal authors with political environmentalists, even though the scientists argued among themselves about whether the megaproject posed a threat to be opposed or a research opportunity to be seized.22

The commissioners finally agreed to authorize the $214,000 expenditure, and to go up to $250,000 if need be, while dismissing Smithsonian official Sidney Galler’s criticism of the Battelle proposal as “a little professional jealously among biologists and agencies.” The commissioners also approved the $50,000 contract with the National Academy. As Sheffey explained, “To distinguish the two, the Battelle program is an action program for a product and an answer at the end of it. The National Academy program is [a long-term research] one to be executed only if the canal is built.”23

With the “birds and the bees boys” fire put out for the time being, the Anderson Commission turned to the problem of handling its strident nuclear consultants. Sheffey had started drafting the final feasibility report by emphasizing that much more research and development were needed to determine whether nuclear excavation could be used to dig a new canal. However, his “degree of negativism” appalled John Kelly and other AEC officials. Once again, Commissioner Hill did not mince words in his response: “Sometimes I think we went beyond what we should have done to help the experimental [nuclear excavation] program. But now we are up to the point where these statements that have been made are in conflict with what we know to be—and I say ‘know’ from a technical standpoint—either to be improper or that they clearly are not going to be resolved.” Hill had recently visited Livermore to discuss the issue of the Route 17 clay shales with Plowshare scientists, who had conducted follow-up chemical experiments regarding the soil mechanics in question. He left disappointed that “a lot of this was wishful thinking and not cold blooded technical analysis.” Therefore, the report should exude a negative tone “because the time is coming when we are deceiving people and telling them something we know can’t be met.”24

Yet another complex development facing the commission pertained to the Panamanian military government’s desire to resume the treaty reform process. Although the negotiations had been suspended since the 1967 leak of the draft treaties, Anderson met in his capacity as lead treaty negotiator with Panama’s dictator, General Omar Torrijos, in September 1969. Anderson explained to the canal study commissioners that Torrijos was no ordinary strongman, but rather one who saw himself as having deposed an elitist, unrepresentative government that had been in place for sixty years: “What he is trying to do, he says, is bring about more democracy by means of greater participation by the average citizen and less participation by the oligarchy of families. . . . I think we have to be somewhat tolerant of the other man’s view of democracy and not always try to export our own brand.”25 The Panama Review Group had already recommended to President Nixon that future canal negotiations seek definitive rights to a sea-level canal in Panama, though the treaty negotiations did not resume until after the CSC ruled out nuclear methods.26

Because the Anderson Commission and other insiders had avoided making the clay shales discovery known to Panama, a major discussion ensued at its final 1969 meeting, in October, about whether to endorse the next scheduled nuclear cratering shot, a 170-kiloton explosive known as Sturtevant. As in the case of Cabriolet and the other canal-oriented Plowshare tests conducted at the Nevada Test Site, strong arguments existed for not risking a violation of the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, especially after the 1968 Schooner debacle. Now even more was at stake for the U.S. with respect to its bargaining position with Panama. Commissioner Fields argued that the test should take place in order to maintain leverage and to support the Plowshare endeavor: “The one route that stands out, I think, is really [Colombia’s] Route 25 for [nuclear] feasibility. If you don’t test now and it becomes apparent to the world that you are not going to, there is no reason why you should continue with nuclear excavation technique, so you cut it off. And then you are dealing with Panama and you are at their mercy.”27 He also sought evidence in favor of combining Routes 17 and 25 across the Darién, a proposal recently advanced by Panamanian and Colombian officials—though they rejected nuclear methods.28 Fields’s colleagues did not share his eagerness to pursue the Sturtevant test.

By the time the commission held its next meeting, on January 22, 1970, another portentous political event had occurred. On the first day of the new decade, President Nixon signed the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), a six-page statute requiring federal agencies to consider environmental consequences and open up environmental project decision-making to greater public involvement. Congress had passed the law with little debate, and Nixon used the signing ceremony to speak only in general terms about reviving “a productive harmony between man and nature.”29 Not until months later did the law’s revolutionary implications for development proposals using federal funds or lands became shockingly clear.

Two weeks after Nixon heralded the opening of the “environmental decade,” an AEC commissioner, Theos Thompson, assured the attendees of a Las Vegas symposium on PNEs that the new law complemented rather than contradicted its mission: “The Act creates a three man Council on Environmental Quality within the White House to recommend environmental policies to the President and it requires all Federal agencies to take into account the environmental impact of all actions they propose. Of course as you know, the AEC has been doing this since its establishment.” As evidence, Thompson referenced congressional hearings held by the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy in 1959 on the biological and environmental effects of nuclear war, as well as the Project Chariot Alaskan ecological study. In his view, the Chariot harbor plan, like Plowshare’s other geoengineering projects, epitomized rather than contravened the NEPA mandate to “create and maintain the conditions under which man and nature can exist in productive harmony.” For Thompson, furthermore, environmentalists’ rejection of American ideals of progress and technological change constituted a possibly greater danger than threats to the environment per se.30 As would soon become evident, such attitudes echoed those of the CSC members.

Thompson concluded his speech by praising Plowshare’s great potential “to improve the quality of our environment, enrich our understanding of the ecology and natural resources and enhance our efforts to achieve a productive harmony between man and nature”—in other words, to meet the broad goals of the NEPA statute. However, his claim that the AEC had always paid careful attention to the environmental consequences of its mission did not speak to earlier scientific debates over thermal pollution, ocean dumping of radioactive waste, and other threats posed by nuclear plants to nonhuman organisms.31 The closing remarks that a Plowshare official, Livermore physicist Glenn Werth, made at the 1970 Las Vegas conference reiterated the failure of the atomic bureaucracy to reckon with the values embodied by NEPA and the modern environmental movement. He repeated the old arguments about the economic savings of nuclear canal construction while also proposing to use nuclear energy to clear smog, tap non–fossil fuel energy sources, and preserve scenic landscapes by storing wastes underground. “If we have the foresight to set aside emotional irrationalities,” Werth asserted, “we can move forward using nuclear energy and nuclear explosions to improve our environment.”32

The ability of AEC officials to continue moving forward with their visions of harnessing atoms for peace, however, soon faced formidable challenges. In 1971 “an upstart environmental organization,” the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, used NEPA to contest the AEC’s process for licensing a new nuclear power plant in Calvert Cliffs, Maryland. The court case produced a landmark decision that transformed the commercial nuclear industry and warned all federal agencies to comply with NEPA’s procedural requirements.33 The Calvert Cliffs verdict forced the AEC to suspend reactor construction for seventeen months as it filed the appropriate impact statements, leading a legal scholar to ask in late 1972 whether NEPA constituted an “environmentalist Magna Carta” or a “coup de grâce” to the atomic energy establishment.34

In the meantime, as publicity in the early months of 1970 intensified for a series of Earth Day events on April 22, the Nixon administration allowed the meteorological window for conducting the Sturtevant test to pass. Yet Plowshare proponents continued to try to convince the canal study commissioners that Route 17’s clay shale soils could be safely excavated with nuclear devices. Having conferred with Soviet nuclear scientists during recent trips to Moscow and Vienna, Kelly reported good news at the commission’s March 1970 meeting. While the Soviets had not responded to his team’s questions about clay shales on their home territory, at the subsequent International Atomic Energy Agency conference on PNEs, “they showed up in Vienna with reports and said they did not understand the U.S. concern on this problem of slope stability in clay shale material because they had a large amount of experience.” The Soviet physicists presented evidence that “slopes produced by explosions in clay shales were tremendously more stable than those produced by more conventional excavation techniques.” Kelly considered their explanation reasonable: “The explosion squeezes the water out of it [the clay]. It becomes pretty hard and impervious and it does tend to stand better than if you just scrape pieces off.” The commissioners took the claims with a grain of salt. “In spite of the optimism expressed by Mr. Kelly of the Russian experience,” asserted Hill, no nuclear explosions had occurred long enough in the past to provide long-term evidence of erosion-resistant slopes.35 Four months later, his patience fully eroded, Hill delivered a stern rebuke to his fellow commissioners for having “played along with” Kelly’s optimistic expectations about PNEs for far too long.36

By the spring of 1970, the commission was equally fed up with the scientists seeking CSC funds to explicate the seaway’s potential consequences for marine life on either side of the isthmus. At the March meeting, Sheffey admitted that though the Battelle contractors were still at work, he had a good idea of what their result would be: they would conclude that the discernable threats, such as invasions of coral-eating starfish, were minimal. “The alarmists, like Dr. Briggs and Dr. Rubinoff,” on the other hand, “are going to continue to scream that thousands of species are threatened, but they can’t prove it.” Replied Eisenhower, “Every time civilization has made a move, opening the West or anything else, it has changed nature.” Hill mentioned an article he had read about activists in Death Valley, California, who were trying to stop a development project based on the discovery of “some diminutive fish . . . that roots in the mud in one creek out there,” a probable reference to pupfish conservation efforts initiated decades earlier by the ichthyologist Carl Hubbs.37 Despite the extreme rarity of the aquatic species, efforts to list it as endangered did not impress Hill: “What difference does it make? None,” he answered.38

One month before the highly anticipated Earth Day teach-in events of April 1970, the commission members agreed that the final report should include a statement that the faunal-exchange problem should not be allowed to block a decision in favor of a sea-level canal. Added one of the engineering consultants, “The one thing you can do to get them [alarmist scientists] off your back is going to come from the National Academy study, which is a program of investigations that you should pursue in the years to come to answer all these questions. As long as you offer them an opportunity to study, they are happy.”39 It was an ironic declaration given the role that scientific evidence had played in undermining the Chariot project in Alaska.

The Committee on Ecological Research for the Interoceanic Canal

In the meantime, the Science exposé that had portrayed Sheffey as antipathetic to ecological questions generated more press. The Nobel prizewinner Joshua Lederberg devoted his weekly Washington Post science column to the proliferation of “mega-experiments” with global yet unknown environmental effects, as epitomized by nuclear testing and the chemical pesticide DDT, and to the concomitant political need for ecological research. Predicting the sea-level canal’s consequences for oceanic life required a range of approaches, old and new: “As a molecular biologist interested in evolution,” he wrote, “I would at least insist that large samples of present marine life at various stations be carefully frozen for later examination.” Lederberg urged the CSC not to allow diplomatic, engineering, military, political, and financial issues to bury the scientific ones.40

That was precisely the point of the contract with the National Academy establishing CERIC, the Committee on Ecological Research for the Interoceanic Canal. In the spring of 1969, Mayr, who had agreed to chair the committee, met with several advisors, including Wallen and Galler of the Smithsonian, John Wolfe of the AEC, and marine and hydrological scientists associated with the National Science Foundation, U.S. Geological Survey, and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, to discuss the committee’s scope and membership.41 They identified dozens of research questions pertaining to marine biota, the biology of species dispersal, and the physical parameters governing water movement through the canal as well as the conditions on either side of the isthmus.42 Above all, stressed Mayr, “at this stage it is most important to counteract the widespread impression that the potentiality of ‘fall-out’ is the only, or at least major, problem of the Sea-level Canal.”43

Following a months-long process to pin down the membership, CERIC’s first formal meeting took place in July 1969 at the academy’s stately headquarters in Washington, D.C. The ten members seem to have been chosen, primarily by organizational affiliation, by NAS executives, with input from Mayr. While he did not succeed in having Rubinoff appointed as the Smithsonian representative (a position filled by David Challinor, who succeeded Galler as the assistant secretary for science in 1971), Mayr did gain representation for two Caribbean university marine biology programs.44

However, left off the list was an institution with a strong stake in the matter, the University of Miami’s Institute of Marine Science. The school employed Gilbert Voss, Frederick Bayer, and C. Richard Robins, one of the teams subcontracted by Battelle, the private organization that had won out over the Smithsonian in the 1965 competition for AEC funds. The Miami researchers had initiated transisthmian oceanographic trawls long before receiving any of the canal study funds, and they were still working on their report for Battelle when CERIC came into being.45 As Challinor later testified before Congress, CERIC’s dismissive attitude of the Miami group seemed to relate to their sampling techniques and their assessment that most species exchange through a sea-level canal would likely be minimal and noncatastrophic.46 Routine academic elitism and rivalry probably also played a part.

Mayr wanted an eminent ecologist to serve on the committee and convinced his younger colleague Edward O. Wilson to do so. As codeveloper of the innovative theory of island biogeography, the insect systematist aimed to revolutionize ecology by linking it with genetics and biogeography.47 Wilson had also participated in a foundational 1964 symposium at the Asilomar Conference Grounds in California on the genetics of colonizing species, presenting on the invasive—or as it was then called, imported—South American fire ant.48

At CERIC’s first workshop, held in August 1969 in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, Mayr explained the committee would proceed on the assumption that the sea-level canal would actually be built. The CSC allowed him to share its major recommendations, which would not be publicized for another eight months: conventional, not nuclear, explosives would be used; the new waterway would be built in Panama along Route 10, ten miles west of the existing canal; and construction would begin around 1982, allowing researchers just over a decade to complete the baseline studies to be outlined by CERIC.49

The group spent its first meeting discussing both the optimal scope of the research program and specific hypotheses about dispersal and colonization. Wilson’s presentation, for instance, noted the repeated failure of intentional species introductions, and the need for field and laboratory experiments to determine the qualities of successful colonizers. As for the range of research to be recommended, some participants expressed fear that not enough qualified experts existed to carry out a large-scale research program; others sought to “think and act big” to impress Congress in order to attain the funds, which would then help train the requisite taxonomists, biogeographers, and ecologists.50

The CERIC membership met three additional times, in October 1969, in January 1970 for a week in Panama, and in April 1970, but the bulk of its work was handled by Staff Officer Gerald Bakus, a coral reef specialist who relocated from California to Washington to take on the immense job.51 To assess the current state of knowledge on selected Central American marine biota and how human effects might change them, Bakus contacted nearly two hundred specialists with exhaustive requests for information.52 One informant complained he would need six months and “at least $10,000 plus perquisites” to do the job.53 Even getting the CERIC members to draft and comment on their assigned report sections was difficult.54 On the other hand, the Miami researcher Voss later complained his team was never contacted, despite the years they spent surveying isthmian waters on the R/V Pillsbury and searching the literature in obscure libraries.55 Bakus might have assumed the Battelle-funded team members were not willing to share their data, signifying the mutual mistrust of the two scientific groups contracted to assist the CSC.56

Despite their different ecological predictions, both groups agreed the sea-level canal should contain a precautionary barrier incorporating physical, thermal, or freshwater obstacles to marine migrants. Mayr had made a point of asking the CSC to investigate the feasibility of such structures, and he drew on a recent event that seemed sure to capture their attention, the July 1969 moon landing: “It is a situation somewhat analogous to the potential risk of astronauts bringing a highly dangerous pathogen from the moon to the earth. Even if such a danger had only a very small probability, it should be avoided at all possible cost.”57

Another seemingly ideal opportunity to convince the CSC to recommend a precautionary approach occurred in December 1969. John Briggs, the most conservation-oriented of the sea-level canal authors, organized a symposium at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Boston that featured presentations by Sheffey, Voss, Topp, and other sea-level canal authors. Yet to Bakus’s surprise, the symposium speakers “almost unanimously agreed that there would be only slight biological effects from interoceanic dispersal.”58 Rubinoff attributed the optimism to ignorance of basic concepts such as competitive exclusion, the principle that two species vying for the same resource cannot coexist.59 Bakus concluded that many speakers overlooked evolutionary mechanisms of species dispersal, and attributed some of the disagreements about the likely patterns of migration, colonization, and competition to diverse disciplinary outlooks.60 Almost a decade later, the malacologist Geerat Vermeij made the related point that “the direction and the magnitude of any biotic migration through a Central American sea-level canal are likely to differ among taxonomic groups as well as among organisms from different communities,” hence the need for “greater insight into the properties of natural history of individual organisms and species” as opposed to “studies on abstract group measures such as diversity or community stability.”61 Vermeij spoke to a fundamental conundrum of postwar ecology—despite the growing interest in developing predictive models, the low prestige of old-fashioned naturalist-based disciplines hampered efforts to acquire basic yet crucial information.62

The AAAS scientific speakers did acknowledge one specific danger, the crown-of-thorns starfish. The topic was on the minds of marine biologists because the Indo-Pacific Acanthaster planci was preying on the coral of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, and the first major paper on the topic had just been published by one of the sea-level canal authors, Richard Chesher.63 In his presentation, Voss stated that a little-known eastern Pacific species, Acanthaster ellisi, appeared almost identical to A. planci; a Central American sea-level canal might thus enable A. ellisi to prey on Caribbean corals.64 A few months later, STRI’s coral reef ecologist, Peter Glynn, confirmed the first Acanthaster outbreak west of the Gulf of Panama, leading Briggs to predict, “If the crown of thorns got into the Atlantic, there would be a very great risk of damage all the way from the Florida Keys to Rio de Janeiro.”65

The other dramatic species that captured public attention was the eastern Pacific yellow-bellied sea snake. To quantify the invasion potential of a specific organism, Rubinoff had shifted his attention from gobies to the physiology and ecology of Pelamis platurus, a venomous organism that periodically appeared in large numbers along Panama’s Pacific shores. By offering the snake to potential Atlantic predators, Rubinoff and his collaborators sought to predict how fast it might colonize the Caribbean Sea and adjacent Atlantic Ocean. Their experiments indicated that Atlantic predators were much more likely to attack the serpents and die than Pacific carnivores, and thus following the construction of an unobstructed channel, natural selection would favor predatory fishes disinclined to attack sea snakes.66 Due to its ability to drift and feed at the surface, Pelamis might not only invade the Caribbean and Atlantic but also ride the Gulf Stream all the way to the English Channel.67

For Sheffey, it made no sense to focus on an organism that did not seem to pose problems in its native habitat and that had not already transited the existing canal: “I have been swimming many times on the Pacific side of Panama, in Hawaii and in the South China Sea off Vietnam. Until I met Rubinoff I had never heard of the sea snake, and to this day I have been unable to find anyone who has ever heard of anyone being bitten by one.”68 But for Rubinoff, the Pacific sea snake constituted a “conspicuous example” of just one of the many species capable of being transmitted in large, reproducible numbers through a sea-level canal, and one that could help people conceive of the problem of invasive species. As he acknowledged to a colleague, “there are many less conspicuous organisms which may cause greater economic problems to commercial enterprises.”69 These points would generate much attention later in the 1970s, when the sea-level canal proposal reemerged in a very different political context.

An Elastic Collision

After an intense year, by the spring of 1970 CERIC’s report was near completion. The 231-page document outlined detailed ecological, systematic, and oceanographic studies to be conducted prior to seaway construction, including the establishment of a faunal bank to store samples of organismal tissues for genetic analysis. The preliminary research program would require at least ten years, an initial capital outlay of $4 million, and annual budgets of about $2 million, to be paid for by “a new system” of environmental cost accounting borne by the waterway’s users. The committee also called for a precautionary faunal barrier, concluding, “The construction of a sea-level canal in Panama is a gigantic experiment with natural ecosystems whose consequences are unforeseeable.”70

But most of these points wound up being overshadowed by a front-page Washington Post article that proclaimed “A-Canal Dealt Blow.” Appearing nine days before the hyped Earth Day events of April 22, 1970, the article quoted Mayr on his personal opposition to nuclear excavation, and implied that the academy biologists possessed far more power than in actuality by leading with the statement, “The dream of a future sea-level Atlantic-Pacific canal blasted out cheaply by nuclear explosives has been dealt a severe blow—maybe a fatal one—by a group of biological advisers to the canal study commission.”71 The portrayal distressed Bakus and the academy leadership, but Mayr conceded only that they should have tape-recorded the interview: “None of the recommendations of our committee were ‘leaked’ to the press and I carefully refrained from any value judgments. . . . All this will blow over in a couple days. So cheer up!”72

Far from blowing over, the situation got Congress’s attention, though not the kind everyone had hoped for. Representative Dan Flood used Mayr’s words to denounce the wastefulness of the CSC and to reiterate his long-standing argument for expanding the existing canal. The previous autumn, upon learning of the forthcoming AAAS meeting, Flood had contacted the biogeographer Briggs to urge him and other biologists to send him copies of their articles (and to write to their senators and representatives that the U.S. Constitution granted Congress, not the president, the power to dispose of U.S. territory).73 As was his custom regarding any publicity threatening U.S. interests in Panama, Flood entered the canal ecology articles into the Congressional Record, providing a new source of ammunition to his colleagues on the political right who opposed any change in U.S.-Panama relations.74

In the meantime, the CSC and CERIC locked horns over the focus of the final CERIC draft. Baffled by the “alarmist viewpoint” expressed despite the AAAS session’s optimistic assessment, Sheffey urged a more balanced discussion of both the potential dangers and mitigating factors.75 But CERIC members pushed back, especially Scripps cirripedologist William Newman, for whom recommending a biotic barrier was no more alarmist than suggesting a fish ladder for a dam.76 Newman later publicized Sheffey’s letter to the group and accused him of having had “an elastic collision with knowledge in his argument that the Crown-of-Thorns starfish (and, therefore, presumably many other organisms of which we know little or nothing) already would have established itself in the Caribbean were conditions there favorable for it.”77

Newman’s exposé appeared in a volume titled “The Panamic Biota: Some Observations Prior to a Sea-Level Canal,” which grew out of a March 1970 conference organized by invertebrate zoology curator Meredith Jones of the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. Along with essays by other sea-level canal authors was one by the University of Miami biologist Voss blasting CERIC for disrespecting his team’s hard work. Their 480-page report featured marine isthmian species inventories compiled from literature reviews, trawling cruises, and interviews with biological oceanographers.78 While Battelle funded most of the analytical phase, for the field operations the researchers had scrambled for support from other sources.79 On these data the authors based their controversial conclusion that no “valid biological reason” appeared to exist for opposing a nonnuclear-excavated waterway, especially not “if certain safeguards are built in.”80 In turn, Battelle used the Miami report to inform a separate report to the CSC that mathematically modeled the potential transport of water, chemicals, sediment, and planktonic organisms between the oceans, concluding, “It is highly improbable that blue-water species like the sea snake and the crown-of-thorns starfish could get through the canal except under the most unusual circumstances.”81 By specifying “blue-water” organisms of the pelagic zone, the Battelle contractors overlooked numerous species of the deeper demersal and benthic zones near, and at, the bottom of the sea.

Such distinctions were lost on the CSC members and engineering consultants. Meeting in July 1970, they scorned CERIC’s argument for a thermal species barrier, an expensive method of preventing species exchange via hot water. Nor did the commission appreciate CERIC’s insistence on making value judgments regarding the risks at hand. Rather than simply recommending studies to be conducted, the academy group argued that the dangers of marine species exchange justified the installation of biotic barriers. By contrast, as Sheffey had predicted, the Battelle group fulfilled its narrow mandate of providing advice, which happened to fit the commission’s view that the marine ecological risks of building the seaway appeared tolerable.82

To reconcile the two groups’ different views in the final report, Sheffey asked the commissioners for policy guidance, which revealed their inability to grasp the rising political influence of the modern environmental movement. Stated Commissioner Hill, “If we had to go to a decision tomorrow, I would say forget the ecological hazards, that they are minimal; but we don’t have to make a decision tomorrow, so maybe we can get something for the fellow who has to make the decision. . . . Until this group of ecologists and wave of hysteria dissipates, you have to live with it.” Sheffey also asked for advice about whether to include “the ecology discussion” in a separate chapter or as part of the longer chapter on technical and financial considerations. Eisenhower’s recommendation that he need not worry about the shortness of the ecological chapter would soon come back to haunt the group.83

While the commission members favorably interpreted the lack of data on the potential disastrous effects of seaway-induced biological invasions, they did not do so for PNEs. In fact, they spent one of their last meetings grappling with their own rapid evolution on the issue. “Really we were created with the idea that we were going to dig a nuclear canal. This gets overlooked,” stated Chairman Anderson at the twenty-eighth meeting in July 1970. “In your narrative form,” he told Sheffey, “let’s try to recreate a part of the [pronuclear] atmosphere . . . [of 1964–65]. I must say I was part of it.” Replied Eisenhower and Storey, respectively, “I was too” and “I was strong for it.” In his blunt manner, Hill summarized the sea change that had washed over them during the past five years: “There was no expectancy when we started out that we were going to find that Route 17 was an impossible situation. . . . all of the work on 17 and most of the work on 25 was to demonstrate the feasibility of nuclear excavation. . . . I think the [nuclear excavation] chapter should describe that and what we did to prove it, and then it came about that we proved the opposite of what we expected.”84

The fifth commissioner, Fields, expanded on Hill’s assessment by addressing fundamental differences between the science and engineering of nuclear excavation. Route 17 had appeared optimal to the Livermore physicists, the developers of the nuclear cratering technology. But they failed to anticipate a key issue due to a lack of ground truthing: “They have always had the problem in the atomic energy field when you move from the basic science into the engineering.” It was the engineering studies that exposed the clay shale permeating much of the preferred Panamanian route. And yet the AEC and Livermore scientists still believed they could overcome the clay shale conundrum—so much so that they accepted the claims of their Soviet counterparts over the American engineers. “But you find that the better of the engineering people will be against them, that in the foreseeable future you won’t like this clay shale. So you have the scientists and the engineers against each other.” Could the commissioners settle such differences? No, concluded Fields.85

The CSC delivered its 1,074-page tome to President Nixon on December 1, 1970, eight anticlimactic months after the revelations that technical uncertainties and international skepticism had rendered nuclear excavation unfeasible, and two weeks after insiders imparted the key recommendation to the media.86 Most of the volume presented military and economic justifications for conventional construction of a $2.88 billion, 550-foot-wide sea-level channel with tidal gates along the Route 10 site just west of the Canal Zone.87 The commissioners had rejected the idea of adding a third, wider lane of locks to the existing waterway because it would buy only twenty years before ships exceeded the new locks once again and would require pumping in massive quantities of seawater. Furthermore, even if the original canal were operated free of tolls, economies of scale would likely lead the shipping industry to divert the bulk of traffic to much larger ships by the turn of the twenty-first century.88

Although the commissioners considered the Route 10 location disadvantageous due to the need to acquire new lands, it was the shortest of the five routes considered and the only Panamanian one that would not interfere with the existing canal. Route 10 would also go through Gatun Lake, thereby preserving a freshwater obstacle to marine species exchange, as presented in a chapter that would have been unthinkable in 1965: “Environmental Considerations.” Moreover, in accordance with NEPA, the appendices included brief environmental impact statements for the proposed routes.89

Yet in their accompanying classified letter to the president, the commissioners made no mention of environmental issues. Rather, they addressed the sea-level canal in the context of future treaty negotiations with Panama and the unquantifiable benefits of ensuring U.S control of a modernized isthmian canal system for several decades thereafter. The existing canal had contributed to U.S. national security and enabled the United States to influence the economic development of several Latin American countries, the transportation costs of many U.S. exports and imports, and the trade patterns of all nations using the canal. Though the astronomical costs of building a new sea-level waterway with conventional methods could not be recompensed quickly by tolls, the commissioners concluded, the “risk of financial loss” would be offset by maintaining U.S. control of the Panamanian transportation corridor. Accordingly, because “pressure upon the United States to abandon its position in Panama will continue,” a new sea-level waterway would “offer an internationally acceptable justification for our continued presence in Panama.” Negotiating “a generous treaty” to allow continued U.S. operation and defense of the existing canal, eventual construction of a wide and deep sea-level channel, and a long period of U.S. control thereafter for amortization “could combine to produce more tranquil relations into the foreseeable future.”90

The U.S. ambassador to Panama, Robert Sayre, congratulated Anderson on the final, public report, describing the Panamanian reaction to it as positive. Although officials expressed concern about the additional lands that would have to be obtained, and the possibility of creating another artificial river with no bridges over it, the report’s focus on the value of building the new waterway in Panama generated positive press. “Of course,” acknowledged Sayre, that was not the whole story: “No one has read the foreign policy and defense annexes which may create some sparks when they become general knowledge.”91

In the United States, the news that Lyndon Johnson’s CSC had recommended building a new sea-level canal in Panama with ordinary bulldozers and dynamite unleashed a tidal wave of condemnation. Representative Flood asserted that “there was never any doubt that when the commission finished that would be their conclusion” and that the group “wasted bags of money” surveying remote routes in eastern Panama and Colombia that it knew could not be used for the new canal.92 On the other side of the political spectrum, biologist and environmental activist Barry Commoner derided the canal scheme’s monumental scale and the concept of peaceful nuclear applications: “Plowshare has been a $138 million exercise in futility. It has foundered in the environment.”93 Thirteen years after Plowshare’s genesis, the idea that nuclear excavation had been doomed to failure was already becoming conventional wisdom.

The CSC report’s skimpy analysis of environmental issues angered the CERIC and Smithsonian scientists who had lobbied on behalf of preliminary ecological research for so long. The environmental impact statements were repetitive and superficial, and the “Environmental Considerations” chapter constituted only four pages, almost half of which addressed the assessment of the Battelle Memorial Institute and associated University of Miami team, with only one sentence noting CERIC’s work. While conceding it would be possible to install a temperature or salinity barrier “should future research indicate the need for a biotic barrier in addition to tidal gates,” the commissioners concluded, “the risk of adverse ecological consequences stemming from construction and operation of a sea-level Isthmian canal appears to be acceptable.”94 In a year that had featured the first Earth Day celebration and mainstream coverage of the environmental movement’s suspicion of technology and technocracy, such a conclusion seemed to confirm the growing reputation of engineers as “diligent destroyers.”95

Science responded once again with a scathing critique. Subtitled “How the Academy’s Voice Was Muted,” it emphasized the CSC’s privileging of the Battelle-Miami’s upbeat analysis, and featured an academy-leadership-defying interview with Mayr that included the quote, “We said that great danger would result from building a sea-level canal, though we can’t prove it. But they turned it around and said that, since we can’t prove it, the danger is minimal.”96 After asking why the commission “largely ignored” CERIC’s views, the author, science journalist Philip Boffey, argued that the academy was also to blame for allowing itself to be “mouse-trapped into a restricted role in which its voice was inevitably muted.”97 In other words, the academy leadership fell down on the job by not reserving the right for CERIC to recommend against canal construction, and by focusing too much on containing leaks rather than allowing CERIC members to communicate with the press in a timely fashion.

Boffey later published an important book about the National Academy of Sciences that blew the whistle on the close ties among many of its expert panels and special interests, but in this case he himself might have been too beholden to his informant. As Mayr acknowledged in his private correspondence, he had contacted the journalist in frustration over the academy’s delay in releasing his committee’s conclusions.98 When the CSC publicized portions of its final report in advance of the December 1 deadline, Mayr had assured Rubinoff that once distributed, the CERIC report would “have far more authority than such statements in the press.”99 But the academy did not print enough copies, not even for the committee members.100

Boffey’s other major criticism of the Anderson Commission, that it minimized the structure’s ecological risks, was shared by other historical actors and analysts.101 However, the report did call for further study of “a number of possible environmental problems” if the government decided to proceed with the project at some point in the future.102 It is not fair to say that “the voices of concerned biologists, and CERIC’s year-long study, were not heeded” by the CSC or that its final report “dismissed all the risks” raised by the sea-level canal authors, nor that “the controversy over the sea-level canal came to a close not because of scientific data or environmental risk, but because of politics” associated with the diplomatic transfer of the Canal Zone and waterway.103 Such assessments reflect the viewpoints of specific historical actors, especially Mayr and the science reporter he contacted to produce the “How the Academy’s Voice Was Muted” editorial.

Later in his career as a historian of biology, Mayr provided a robust endorsement of revisionist history that hinted at his own conflicting roles as actor and analyst: “Written histories, like science itself, are constantly in need of revision. Erroneous interpretations of an earlier author eventually become myths, accepted without question and carried forward from generation to generation. A particular endeavor of mine has been to expose and eliminate as many of these myths as possible—without, I hope, creating too many new ones.”104 As a participant in the sea-level canal controversy, Mayr used his journalistic access to shape a particular viewpoint, one that remains cited to this day. Yet by preserving his private correspondence for future scholars, Mayr the historian left the door open for deeper interpretations to emerge.

Conclusion

It is a great irony that the Atlantic-Pacific Interoceanic Canal Study Commission is now so closely associated with the “environmental considerations” of the proposed sea-level canal, or rather the lack thereof. The commission’s work wound up highlighting the increasing importance of environmental criteria in public works planning. Throughout 1971, congressional opponents of renegotiating the U.S.-Panama treaty publicized the scientific questions about the dangers posed by otherwise-obscure marine organisms. As Flood demanded, “Why does the State Department ignore the marine ecological angle involved in constructing a saltwater channel between the oceans, which recognized scientists predict would result in infesting the Atlantic with the poisonous Pacific sea snake and the predatory crown-of-thorns starfish and have international repercussions?”105 The International Affairs section of the Office of the Deputy Under Secretary of the Army received numerous queries on the CSC report, the overwhelming majority of which addressed the ecological effects of a sea-level canal. Consequently, State Department officials speculated that the Senate would focus “significant attention on the ecological aspects of the sea-level canal option in its consideration of any new treaty.”106

The under secretary of state raised awareness of the issue among the highest levels of U.S. government. A classified National Security Council memorandum issued during the summer of 1971 asserted, “Greater attention must be focused on the question of the ecological impact of construction of a sea-level canal.”107 The lead author was none other than John Irwin, the former deputy treaty negotiator and New York Zoological Society trustee who had tried to convince the commission six years earlier not to neglect the marine ecological angle. Granted, the memo also asserted that defense and foreign policy goals no longer justified construction. The biologists’ concerns did not shut the project down, but they did constitute another important rationale against it, especially in the context of a new era of statist environmental management.

The Canal Study commissioners navigated a difficult course during the five years of their tenure. Scientific discussions of the environmental risks posed by the sea-level canal did influence federal officials and policy makers in unexpected ways, and the CSC took a more nuanced approach to the question of environmental considerations than one of complete dismissal. Despite tensions and biases, its engineering agents and executive director worked for years with the Smithsonian and National Academy to increase the congressional appropriation for marine ecological research.

The CSC members did indeed fail to appreciate the problem of marine invasive species, and they failed to differentiate between scientists seeking financial support to study the potential effects of a proposed megaproject and activists seeking to shut the project down due to the presumed ecological risks. Nevertheless, the commission’s blind spots about marine bioinvasions—a topic that would not gain widespread scientific and popular attention until later in the twentieth century—should not diminish how its leaders overcame their own technocratic embrace of Project Plowshare.

The CSC wound up caught between two eras, the high-modernist period of extreme faith in science and technology, and the new environmentalist age of increasing public suspicion of large-scale technological solutions. The U.S. National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 required federal decision makers to quantify the environmental costs of development, and thus imposed an enormous cultural change on entrenched bureaucratic agencies that had hitherto been incentivized to ignore such costs. Unlike the Army Corps of Engineers and the Atomic Energy Commission, the CSC was an ad hoc organization with no public constituency, whose authority diminished after Johnson’s presidency. But it still had friends in Congress and commanded front-page newspaper coverage in 1970. Its ultimate refusal to make a recommendation for nuclear excavation technology, despite its enthusiasm just five years earlier, speaks to the rapid shift in values and expectations regarding environmental planning and policy-making.108

The Atlantic-Pacific Interoceanic Canal Study Commission was no model of democratic environmental decision-making, but neither was it as callous and hubristic as has been alleged. Its adaptively technocratic approach to determining the feasibility of the sea-level canal, and the proper role of nonanthropocentric ecological science therein, provides a clearer, more accurate view of the failure of an iconic high-modernist project to take root in the postwar era.