The Tripartite Hydrocarbon Highway

Even after the Article XII fiasco, and after Congress rejected the bills proposed by Senator Gravel and Representative Murphy to conduct a new set of feasibility studies, President Carter remained intrigued by the promise of a seaway for conveying Alaskan oil to the energy-starved East Coast. As the hearings to enact enabling legislation for the Panama Canal Treaties heated up after the 1978 midterm elections, environmental groups renewed their efforts to convince Carter to change course. President David Brower of Friends of the Earth, along with the directors of ten other influential NGOs, sent the president a letter on January 30, 1979, asking him to follow through on the State Department’s intentions for the joint environmental oversight commission of the existing canal and to oppose any further congressional efforts to authorize a new study: “We see no need for haste and recommend that a decision concerning a Sea-level Canal study not be made part of the current implementing legislation.”2

Most members of Congress appeared to be on their side; when the House Committee on Merchant Marine and Fisheries asked the congressional Office of Technology Assessment to analyze the Panama Canal Treaty EIS, the parties agreed in the summer of 1978 not to address the sea-level canal. The Office of Technology Assessment staff did, however, consult with four of the biologists who had contributed to the 1960s debate (Rubinoff, Jones, Robins, and Sanders) and noted their concerns about the EIS’s lack of attention to the consequences of pumping seawater into the existing canal during droughts.3

The Panama Canal Act of 1979 did not authorize funds for new seaway feasibility studies, but it did echo the language of Article XII committing the two nations to study the issue. Otherwise, the congressional debates over implementing the treaties focused on military and economic issues. The enabling laws took effect just three days before the treaties entered into force on October 1, 1979, the first day the Panamanian flag flew alone over the former lands of the Canal Zone.

The possibility of cutting a new canal west of the Zone revived yet again in the new decade. Although the 1970 report of the Anderson Commission had generated revilement in the United States, the Japanese read it eagerly.4 By 1980, Japan’s postwar economic transformation was nearly complete, and it had embarked on a series of overseas development projects to secure strategic resources and its status as a global economic behemoth. The country’s thriving economy would benefit enormously from a second Central American waterway, as the president of the Japan Chamber of Commerce and Industry and former head of Nippon Steel, Shigeo Nagano, explained: “We can bring through the canal at far cheaper cost grains from the United States Midwest, coal from West Virginia, oil from Venezuela, iron ore from Brazil.”5

The estimated costs of building a sea-level waterway along the Route 10 site west of the Canal Zone had ballooned to $20 billion (including $8.3 billion for construction alone). But having a channel measuring 650 to 1,300 feet wide and 110 feet deep appeared worth it to the Japanese, whose ships accounted for over one-third of the Panama Canal’s traffic. The lock canal could not accommodate vessels larger than 40,000 tons, and thus a seaway large enough for 300,000-ton tankers—designed to carry raw materials going to the island nation and automobiles and consumer electronic goods leaving it—would represent the pinnacle of Japanese technological mastery.

Japan’s shipbuilding industry had exploited the 1967–75 closure of the Suez Canal by developing very large and ultra-large crude carriers and, later, specialized dredging technology for widening the Suez.6 During the 1970s, the Panama Canal had gone from being able to accept 90 percent of the world’s ships to less than 40 percent, and the number of vessels passing through had declined from 15,500 in 1970 to 13,200 in 1976 to 12,000 in 1978. Panama likewise had a great interest in not allowing the canal to become obsolete once it acquired full control in 2000.7

As the Panama Canal’s wealthy, second-largest user, Japan commanded the attention of the U.S. and Panamanian governments. In January 1980, several Japanese bankers and businessmen visited Panamanian president Aristides Royo to discuss a $30 million feasibility study.8 Five months later, in a Washington meeting with Prime Minister Masayoshi Ohira, Carter joked about the United States providing the engineering and equipment and Japan providing the money for a new sea-level waterway. He concluded that while it did present some environmental problems, they did not seem insurmountable.9

As in 1977, Senator Mike Gravel served as “the main catalyst behind this effort,” as an administration official informed the president’s assistant for national security affairs, Zbigniew Brzezinski, in March 1980. Anticipating that once again Gravel “might do an end-run to the President on this issue,” Carter’s lieutenants sought to manage the situation by “giving him a little bit more information” about the plan to inform the Panamanians and Japanese of the president’s interest in a tripartite feasibility study.10 The Alaskan senator had traveled around the world seeking financing opportunities for his passion project, even visiting Japan with Panamanian diplomat Eduardo Morgan, who declared, “If the feasibility study is positive, then the sea-level canal project cannot be stopped.” Gravel shared his thoughts in a 1979 interview with William Jorden, who as ambassador to Panama had played a major role in brokering the canal treaties and who was writing a book on the subject. “Had there been strong support either from the Panamanians agitating or the White House, I would have got legislation last year [1978] that would have brought about the study,” insisted Gravel. It was still not too late: “I feel that if we made a ‘go’ decision in ’81, that it could be completed by ’87.”11

Yet no one else in Congress shared his enthusiasm, leading Gravel to a sad prediction: “And so it will just languish around until about 1990. Everybody will wake up and recognize it is highly obsolete and say, well, hell, we ought to do something, and we will have missed 15, 20 years.”12 Jorden later interviewed Deputy Secretary of State Warren Christopher about whether he foresaw a sea-level canal being built in the next twenty years. Christopher replied that it depended on how much Japan would want to contribute and pointed out that Gravel’s defeat in the 1980 Alaska primary had removed from Congress the one member most committed to the issue.13

Following the May 1980 Carter-Ohira meeting, Japan, Panama, and the United States agreed to begin discussions on how to implement the tripartite study. The deliberations did not begin, however, until the administration of Ronald Reagan, who defeated Carter in the November 1980 election. By the time representatives of the three nations met in 1982, another major change had occurred: the Panamanian government had contracted with a U.S. company to build a pipeline near the Costa Rica border to transport North Slope crude oil eastward. Completed in 1981 with private financing, the eighty-one-mile-long Trans-Panama Pipeline proceeded without any state-mandated environmental review.14 (By contrast, after five years of regulatory delays and environmentalist lawsuits, the U.S.-based Sohio oil company canceled its proposed $1 billion California-to-Texas pipeline and port in 1979.)15

The Trans-Panama Pipeline dimmed but did not kill the sea-level canal; following six meetings, the three nations established the Commission for the Study of Alternatives to the Panama Canal in 1985. Like the Anderson Commission of 1965, it had an ambitious five-year agenda to analyze the impacts of a sea-level canal, modifications to the present one, and overland options such as pipelines or container-rail transit. Unlike the previous group, however, the new commission was explicitly tasked with determining the environmental and social, as well as the economic and political, impacts of such alternatives.16

Yet the questions raised in the 1960s about nonnative marine species exchange remained inchoate, underfunded, and unfamiliar, even to its Japanese boosters.17 When the U.S. ambassador to Japan, Mike Mansfield, asked Shigeo Nagano about the sea-level canal’s environmental problems, Nagano replied: “We have no intention of using nuclear explosions in the construction.” Mansfield, a former Democratic senator from Montana (who had retired just before the canal ratification votes), explained, “I’m asking about what will happen when the waters of the Pacific and the Atlantic oceans flow together and the marine organisms which have been separated for hundreds of millions of years mix together.” Nagano was dumbfounded, a sign that the scientific and environmentalist communities still had much work to do in Japan—and elsewhere.18

Ecological sensitivity was also in short supply at a 1986 international gathering in Anchorage, Alaska, devoted to megaproject planning. Organized by a Swedish think tank, the International Federation of Institutes for Advanced Study, the conference featured presentations on such projects as a moon city, a dam across the Bering Strait, an Alaska-Norway ice highway, a river diversion network from the Pacific Northwest to thirty-three U.S. states and Mexico—and the Panatomic Canal. Then in his late sixties and working as a private consultant, John Sheffey reminded the audience of the benefits of nuclear dynamite, while conceding that a thirteen-megaton charge “would rattle windows 105 miles away.” Regardless, political obstacles now posed “insurmountable problems” to nuclear geoengineering. Likewise, laughed the ice road proponent, the biggest hurdle would be having to file an environmental impact statement.19

After Reagan officials of the Council on Environmental Quality and the Environmental Protection Agency declined to help draft the terms of reference for the tripartite seaway study commission, the State Department asked the Smithsonian Institution to step in. The Smithsonian representatives remained focused on the need for a biological baseline survey because the isthmian coasts and oceans remained woefully underresearched: “Everything that follows must be founded upon a firm taxonomic and ecological base. Only when this is done, can we properly assess the possible environmental effects on an interoceanic canal or any other alternative.”20

The needed scientific work remained unfinished, however, and by 1990 the prospects for the sea-level canal faded once again.21 The Japanese stock market crash of 1989 led to a “lost decade” of growth and the end of its Lessepsian ambitions for a second Panama Canal.22 Moreover, the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1989 to remove the dictator Manuel Noriega—whom officials accused of threatening the Panama Canal’s neutrality—refocused attention on whether the nation could manage the original waterway within a decade, let alone build a new one. After the 1979 transfer of the Zone lands to Panama, many of the embittered Zonians who remained in the country blasted the Panamanian government for not cutting the grass properly, and reminisced about the Zone’s similarity to “a beautifully manicured golf course,” a function of the Panama Canal Company’s well-funded mosquito-control practices and large groundskeeper force.23 More substantively, Panama had to deal with the problem of cleaning up unexploded ordnance left behind by the U.S. military and with implementing new forms of canal watershed management.24

Challenges of Postcolonial Environmental Management

Despite the challenges of the twenty-two-year-long transition, the 1999 transfer of the canal proceeded smoothly, earning the Panamanian government praise for doing a far more effective job of operating it than the United States.25 When it came to the long-postponed issue of modernizing the waterway, however, environmentalists criticized the Autoridad del Canal de Panamá (ACP), the government agency that replaced the Panama Canal Company, for replicating the undemocratic, heavy-handed decision-making processes that had prevailed previously. In 2006, the government held a referendum on whether to add a third lane of locks (measuring 180 feet wide and 60 feet deep, as opposed to 110 feet wide and 42 feet deep) at a cost of $5.25 billion, a plan related to the one advocated for decades by Representative Dan Flood. The decision grew out of several 1990s-era meetings that deemed a sea-level canal too expensive.26 Although the “Sí” (Yes) measure to expand the existing channel passed by an overwhelming 80 percent, only 40 percent of eligible voters participated, and opponents expressed concern that corruption and costs would spiral out of control.27

Allegations that officials manipulated the voting process to ensure a favorable outcome, and the fact that the ACP did not complete the required EIS until nine months after the referendum, led to strong criticism from local and international observers. In the words of environmental legal scholar Carmen Gonzalez, “the EIA [environmental impact assessment] process was reduced to an empty ritual, a technical justification for a decision made at the highest levels of government and subsequently ‘approved’ in a ‘democratic’ referendum rather than a tool to inform and enhance public and governmental decision-making over Panama’s single most important resource.” Although Panama had sought for decades to escape the oversight of the United States, the colonial construct created by the canal remained palpable. As Gonzalez argued in a 2008 assessment, the ACP promoted a technocratic rather than democratic model of environmental impact assessment—a process that privileged compliance with preestablished regulatory standards rather than public involvement.28

The ACP completed the massive project over budget and two years behind schedule, in 2016. To address the problem of the canal’s dwindling water supply, the engineers devised an innovative system of water-exchanging basins that enables the locks to reuse up to 60 percent of the water, rather than washing it all into the sea. However, pressure on the Gatun and Alajuela Lake water storage system remains high, especially in drought years. The expanded waterway’s environmental effects are by no means confined to Panama, since ports around the world have deepened their harbors and made major infrastructural changes to accommodate the NeoPanamax vessels, whose carrying capacity is three times that of the previous generation of Panamax ships.29

Environmentalist concern and scientific interest in the Panama Canal as a model system for testing predictions about tropical marine invasions revived during and following the third-locks expansion of 2007–16.30 Resulting studies, many funded by the Smithsonian, have confirmed that while most marine species cannot tolerate Gatun Lake’s fresh water, hull fouling or ballast water may have facilitated recent invasions of macroinvertebrates and as yet undetected species.31 Related experiments have elucidated the apparently greater ecological resistance of the tropics to marine invasive species than the temperate zones.32 Yet researchers are still struggling to understand the fundamental question posed by the sea-level canal authors—how nonindigenous marine species manage to expand their range into new environments once transported there by human-mediated processes.33 These questions are more urgent than ever; with the Panama Canal’s doubled capacity for shipping traffic, marine species introductions will likely increase worldwide, especially in receiving ports of the U.S. Gulf and East Coasts.34

Atlantic and Pacific marine biotic mixing has also begun to escalate via the Bering Strait as the Arctic sea ice melts. Russian and other stakeholders began investing billions of dollars to develop a “Suez of the north,” but little if anything for environmental impact assessment.35 Smithsonian biologists have led efforts to address this research-policy gap, using language reminiscent of the sea-level canal controversy: “Reconnection of the Pacific and Atlantic Ocean basins will present both challenges to marine ecosystem conservation and an unprecedented opportunity to examine the ecological and evolutionary consequences of interoceanic faunal exchange in real time.”36 In this current moment of environmental crisis and intellectual opportunity, the conversation opened by the sea-level canal biologists fifty years ago remains deeply relevant.

The first official vessel to transit the new locks, an enormous Chinese vessel packed with almost 9,500 containers en route to the Pacific, heralded a new geopolitical era. Other milestones followed with the first U.S. liquefied natural gas (LNG) shipment to China in August 2016 and the first instance of three LNG tankers transiting the canal on the same day, in April 2018. Transported in NeoPanamax vessels, U.S. LNG had not been profitable in Asia prior to 2016. Since the canal expansion, the industry has expanded rapidly, developing new facilities and terminals to facilitate the booming commodity, a result of the concomitant hydraulic fracturing shale gas revolution in the United States.37

The LNG gas boom played out against the backdrop of plans to build the largest canal in history, a new Atlantic-Pacific link spanning Nicaragua. In 2013, the country’s government announced that it had granted a fifty-year concession to a Chinese billionaire to finance the $40 billion, 170-mile-long channel, leading to speculation that it was a joke.38 But after President Daniel Ortega claimed in December 2014 that construction had already begun, the international scientific community mobilized against the megaproject. Environmentalists and biologists from the Nicaragua Academy of Sciences, STRI, and elsewhere around the world raised grave concerns about the project’s effects on water resources and biodiversity, and urged the government to consider the environmental guidelines and human rights laws that now govern infrastructure decision-making in many countries.39 The protests led the Nicaraguan leadership to authorize an environmental and social impact assessment, though critics deemed it superficial. The country’s highest court paved the way for the work to resume by dismissing the last environmentalist challenges in 2017. By then, however, the Chinese concessionaire had lost most of his telecom fortune and Panama had reestablished diplomatic and economic relations with China (and dropped them with Taiwan), intensifying assumptions that the plans had crumbled.40

Since Nicaragua announced its plans for the Grand Canal, other nations have upped the ante by proposing even larger maritime highways. Proposals to cut supersize canals through Thailand and Iran have raised concerns that the economic, national security, and political rationales will drown out environmental discussions.41 The Nicaragua outcome thus holds high stakes for mediating hubristic plans for carving through continents to suit powerful interests. More broadly, conservation biologists and environmental and human rights activists argue that moving beyond the “global era of massive infrastructure projects” that deliver enormous benefits only for the lucky few requires convincing planners and investors to apply realistic assessments of ecological, social, economic, and political risks, and to otherwise resist perpetuating “megaproject imperialism.”42

Focusing on the immediate economic and geopolitical payoffs of proposed megaprojects, however, is a hard habit to break. When he overrode his own experts’ recommendation to build a sea-level canal across Panama in 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt cited the need to canalize the isthmus as soon as possible, and left the question of keeping up with expected increases in ship sizes to future generations. The Panama Canal’s operators did begin building a third lane of locks in 1939, but after World War II scuttled the project, U.S. officials spent the rest of the century debating whether it made more economic, military, and political sense to engineer a new channel at sea level. When Panama obtained control in the twenty-first century, it chose to resume the 1939 endeavor at a cost of $5.25 billion. Because the waterway’s overall revenues now exceed $2 billion per year, the investment appears more than worthwhile.

Yet Panamanian officials must now contend with problems inconceivable to Roosevelt and his successors. Global climate change is rendering it much more difficult to manage all kinds of infrastructural systems built during periods of relative climatic stability. Recent severe drought events have lowered Gatun and Alajuela Lakes, which supply fresh water both for the canal and for Panama’s growing population, enough to force limits on cargo ships and thereby forfeit millions of dollars of tolls. For the canal to remain viable, officials must now consider building expensive, disruptive new networks of reservoirs, dams, and tunnels for storing and transporting fresh water.43 As anthropogenic carbon emissions alter climate patterns, the assumption that technocrats can easily manage unintended ecological consequences is no longer tenable. Knowledge about likely bioenvironmental effects is now essential, not merely desirable, for making sound infrastructural investments.

LARGE-SCALE PROJECTS REQUIRE the convergence of many forces—political, economic, technological, scientific, and environmental—to take shape. It is also the case that grand infrastructural visions of the future sometimes fail to crystallize despite powerful coalitions in favor of them. Checking the technocratic impulse to solve complex problems with environmentally disruptive technological solutions requires political will, analytical rigor, and awareness of the options foreclosed by high-modernist plans for accelerating modernity.

Throughout its many phases, the Central American sea-level canal inspired visions of development that held both liberating and constricting implications for the anticipated host countries. The seaway proposals of the 1960s and 1970s served different U.S. presidential goals for improving relations with Panama as the original waterway and the Canal Zone slid into technopolitical obsolescence.

The proposals also had important, unexpected repercussions for environmental management and associated concepts of progress. Environmental scientists and activists did not cause the cancellation of the seaway in any of its iterations. They did, however, use the proposal to open up new discussions about the harmful consequences of maritime-induced bioinvasions, and about the kinds of science needed to quantify and predict the negative effects of marine invasive species on ecological and economic systems. They also influenced later generations; most relevant to current events are the biologists who put pressure on President Johnson’s Canal Study Commission, setting an example that informed scientific responses five decades later to the proposed Nicaragua Grand Canal.44

Unbuilt projects merit attention for many reasons, including the ways in which the planned and improvisational work underlying them influenced decision-making at the time and in ensuing eras. The resurgence of the sea-level canal proposal at strategic points in the intertwined history of the United States and Panama provides windows into moments of diplomatic, technological, scientific, and environmentalist transformation. Such historical moments in turn remind us of the value of envisioning alternative futures, and of questioning technocratic prescriptions that promise to modernize landscapes and societies without ensuring environmental quality and equal justice for all.