Ship of Joules

Newspaper editors do not often get the chance to use sixty-point font. But July 18, 1968, was no normal day for the state of Alaska. “arctic oil find is huge” announced the Anchorage Daily News.10 After years of exploratory drilling, and months of rumors, the Atlantic Richfield and Humble Oil companies confirmed they had discovered North America’s largest field of subaqueous oil in Prudhoe Bay on the North Slope. The state government, which had only come into being in 1959, soon announced its intention to sell leases to corporations with the expectation of windfall taxes; the September 1969 auction of 450,000 acres netted over $900 million (over $6.5 billion today when adjusted for inflation).11

The discovery posed the huge question of how to get the oil riches to the rest of the nation’s voracious energy consumers. A pipeline could be built through Canada to the northern tier of the midwestern United States, but that would require bilateral control and cooperation. For those seeking to keep it all in-state, a more expensive line could be constructed 800 miles south to the ice-free port of Valdez for transferring the oil to tanker ships. More dauntingly, a harbor could be excavated in Prudhoe Bay for East Coast–bound icebreaking supertankers to carve out the fabled Northwest Passage. So seriously was this last option taken that one of the major corporate players tested the 4,500-mile-long polar sea route by spending $54 million (the current equivalent of almost $380 million) to retrofit and send the S.S. Manhattan from Chester, Pennsylvania, to Point Barrow and back during the summer and fall of 1969.12 In the meantime, Project Plowshare’s unflagging advocate Edward Teller proclaimed at a Houston press conference that the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory at Livermore was ready to use PNEs to engineer an offshore atoll-style harbor, so long as the oil companies paid for it. That did not happen, and “the second Alaskan ‘instant harbor’ remained, like Chariot, forever an imagined geography.”13

By October 1970, all the corporate leaseholders united behind the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System (TAPS) proposal. TAPS would preclude the need for international pipeline right-of-way agreements and offer a variety of transit options. Tankers could travel from Valdez to refineries of the continental West Coast or energy-starved Japan, which received more than 80 percent of its oil from the Middle East. Or tankers could offload their hydrocarboniferous cargo at a proposed pipeline terminal in Central America for reshipping to Gulf Coast and Caribbean refineries. Finally, because the Panama Canal could not accommodate ships larger than 65,000 deadweight tonnage (dwt), supertankers of 70,000 to 189,000 dwt could convey North Slope oil eastward by traveling around Cape Horn or transferring their cargo to smaller ships transiting the Panama waterway, a process known as lightering.14 Assuming the TAPS plan was a foregone conclusion, the oil companies began ordering pipe from Japanese steelmakers without the required federal permits.15

They got a rude awakening when environmental groups sued to halt construction, citing their authority to do so under the National Environmental Policy Act. Congress had passed the law in December 1969, and many of its supporters probably deemed it a mere feel-good nod to the rising environment movement.16 Even the executive director of the Sierra Club, who had provided the lead testimony before the Senate Interior Committee, later admitted that he “did not foresee the importance of its requirement that agencies document the impact of their proposals on the environment and inform the public of their findings.”17 But environmental groups soon grasped that NEPA’s “action-forcing mechanism,” the environmental impact statement (EIS), gave them powerful leverage in the courts.

Barely three months after President Nixon signed NEPA on January 1, 1970, the Washington-based Center for Law and Social Policy filed a lawsuit on behalf of three organizations—the Wilderness Society, Friends of the Earth, and the Environmental Defense Fund—to force the Interior Department to conduct a more detailed study of TAPS’s environmental repercussions as well as an assessment of alternate routes. The original TAPS report, issued on March 5, 1970, had sparked the litigation because it concluded, based on only eight pages of evidence, that the pipeline would have no major effects.18

In what became the first major NEPA-inspired lawsuit, TAPS opponents focused on the threats that the hot-oil pipeline posed to Native American land rights, permafrost, and caribou, as well as the danger of oil spills occurring along the sea route from Valdez and the pros and cons of alternative Canadian routes to the Midwest. In response, the Interior Department issued a new 246-page draft EIS in January 1971, which many citizens outside the scientific and academic communities denounced at public hearings in Washington and Anchorage for failing to take the wide range of potential environmental consequences seriously.19

Some environmentally inclined stakeholders invoked other possible unintended consequences. In particular, Minnesota’s Democratic senator Walter Mondale, who later became Carter’s vice president, led the fight for a Trans-Canadian Pipeline on environmental and economic grounds. Mondale predicted that if TAPS supporters prevailed, a large surplus of oil would flood the West Coast’s refineries. He also alleged that the Alaskan oil consortium sought to use the planned Valdez TAPS terminal not to benefit U.S. consumers but rather to export up to a quarter of the precious resource to Japan.20

The Interior Department’s Final Environmental Impact Statement, released in March 1972, covered six volumes. It predicted that the pipeline infrastructural system, including the haul road, oil field, and tanker ballast treatment facility, would have a variety of unavoidable effects during construction, operation, and maintenance. Adverse environmental effects such as permafrost thawing, oil spills, and loss of wildlife habitat would likely occur, but so would socioeconomic changes “which many would classify as beneficial.”21

Unsatisfied, the plaintiffs used the forty-five-day comment period to gather further evidence and prepare their next round of challenges. Congress initiated new hearings based on a court decision that the report did not meet the requirements of another relevant law, the Mineral Leasing Act. But by July 1973, the pipeline’s friends in Congress had had enough. Alaska Senator Mike Gravel introduced an amendment that exempted the project from further environmental review, culminating in a dramatic tie-breaking vote by Vice President Spiro Agnew in July.22 The path was cleared for the pipeline, and Congress had checked its own initiative to subject megaproject planning on federal lands to greater public oversight.

The TAPS debate held important lessons for environmentalists. Despite their deep disappointment, some took solace in having forced the designers to implement important changes, such as building parts of the forty-eight-inch-wide pipeline above tundra areas vulnerable to melting and around caribou points of passage. They had also forced the oil companies and Interior Department to pay a high price for not proactively complying with NEPA. Equipment sat exposed to the intense Arctic elements for three winters, and government officials received bad press. Advocacy groups also learned about the value of employing lawyers and lobbyists to work the halls of power in Washington, developments that undermined the power of local grassroots approaches but also reaped judicial successes and demonstrated NEPA’s status as “a great equalizer in the hands of skilled litigants.”23

After October 1973, the OPEC embargo made it much harder for environmentalists to mount effective protests against fossil fuel infrastructure projects. OPEC retaliated against the United States for supporting Israel during the 1973 Arab-Israeli War by cutting off the flow of oil, sparking a crippling recession. Environmentalist action turned to conservation and the development of renewable energy sources and more efficient cars and mass transit. In the meantime, TAPS construction proceeded with little attention paid to ensuring that the transportation network that would be needed to distribute North Slope petroleum would meet the same high environmental standards as the pipeline itself.

Reduced U.S. consumption of fossil fuels following the embargo had its own unintended consequences. By the time the monumental eight-hundred-mile pipeline was completed, and the first barrels started flowing in the summer of 1977, federal officials faced an embarrassing dilemma. The predicted West Coast glut had come to fruition, mainly because most of the area’s refineries could not handle the North Slope’s high-sulfur crude.24 However, the oil companies’ goal of selling the surplus to Japan was now impossible because Congress had banned oil exports as part of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline Authorization Act, any reversal of which would look like an unpatriotic corporate giveaway.25 As an administration official explained President Carter’s quandary, “How can he approve exporting oil to Japan from a pipeline built for national security reasons and still convince the American people that there is an energy crisis?”26

Another set of environmental and political issues compounded the problem of transporting oil eastward. Following the Santa Barbara oil rig blowout of 1969, California and Washington had enacted stringent water and air pollution laws that stymied initiatives to build new transcontinental pipelines.27 Of the four oil infrastructure projects on the table in 1977, the most publicized environmental conflict involved the Standard Oil Company of Ohio (Sohio), controller of 50 percent of the North Slope reserves. Seeking to end the costly work of lightering through the Panama Canal, Sohio proposed to build a new terminal at Long Beach, California, to access an existing natural gas pipeline to transport five hundred thousand barrels of crude oil per day to Midland, Texas, the western terminus of a crude pipeline network stretching to the Northeast.28 Yet despite the support of the Carter administration, the California Air Resources Board and California Energy Commission objected that the terminal would increase air pollution in the smoggy Los Angeles basin and that repurposing the Midland pipeline for oil would jeopardize the state’s natural gas supplies.29

The embargo had another shocking effect—for the first time since World War II, the number of ships transiting the Panama Canal fell, from 15,500 in 1970 to 13,500 in 1976. Shippers of petroleum and petroleum products had been a major source of traffic and income for the canal, so much so that the Anderson Commission had surveyed the twenty major U.S. oil companies regarding the nuclear sea-level canal idea in 1968.30 While the Panama Canal Company preferred to keep tolls low so as to stimulate maritime trade (a custom long deplored by Panama, which received a cut of the proceeds), the need for revenue led it to raise tolls for the first time in its sixty-year history, in 1974 and again in 1976.31 Shippers complained about the increases, which totaled about 50 percent.32

The OPEC ban reduced the number of oil-carrying ships through the Panama Canal, as did the closure of the Suez Canal following the 1967 Six-Day War. The eight-year-long shutdown accelerated the trend toward larger tankers, which could compensate for the longer trips around the Cape of Good Hope by carrying heavier cargoes. Likewise, these superships made it more economical to bypass the Panama Canal in favor of the lengthy South American Cape Horn route. For example, a 100,000-ton ship could load coal at Norfolk, Virginia, iron ore in Brazil, and oil in Nigeria, and then deliver the cargo to Japan by traveling around the southern edge of Africa. Although such a trip took thirty-eight days, it was cheaper than sending a fully loaded 50,000-ton ship for the twenty-five-day voyage to the Far East via Panama. Due to the rapid expansion of supertankers, by 1976 over 1,300 of the world’s 22,500 merchant vessels were too wide for the Panama Canal’s locks, and another 1,700 ships exceeded the draft limits when loaded to capacity.33 How should Panama and the United States respond?

The Seaway’s Post-PNE Resurrection

The negotiators of the 1964–67 program to replace the Hay–Bunau-Varilla Treaty had devoted one of the three draft treaties to a future sea-level canal. But by the time the two nations resumed serious talks in 1973–75, the futuristic waterway had been all but forgotten. The Anderson Commission’s 1970 recommendation against nuclear excavation, the 1971 U.S. National Security Council memo addressing the sea-level canal’s ecological issues and lack of military and foreign policy benefits, and the shipping industry’s disinterest in any solution requiring high tolls had sapped U.S. enthusiasm for what had once appeared an ideal technopolitical solution. Moreover, a strong sense on both sides that any new canal—however unlikely—would have to be sited in Panama dissipated the U.S. leverage that had prevailed in the previous treaty talks.34

Even so, the diplomats retained language allowing for eventual cooperation on a sea-level waterway. As U.S. co-negotiator Sol Linowitz later explained, when the treaty negotiations had resumed under President Nixon, “Panama had agreed to give the United States the right to build a sea-level canal, and our draft of the principles had locked it up in iron, as lawyers do when an issue is really moot and there has been no dispute about it.”35 The principles, known as the 1974 Kissinger-Tack Agreement after Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Panamanian Minister of Foreign Affairs Juan Antonio Tack, provided guidelines for nullifying the 1903 treaty, including one that future efforts to increase the canal’s capacity would be bilateral. Subsequently, in 1975 President Ford directed his negotiators to seek the longest possible period for a U.S. option to increase canal capacity, either by adding a third lane of locks or building a sea-level canal.36 It was not that Ford sought to build a new waterway anytime soon, but rather that he wanted to prevent any other nation—particularly Japan, the canal’s second-largest user—from doing so, since technological and economic changes might eventually render such a project viable and useful for the United States.37

Ford suspended the negotiations as the 1976 presidential campaign heated up, during which his Republican primary opponent, former California governor Ronald Reagan, discovered that the issue of maintaining U.S. control of the Panama Canal made for a powerful talking point among conservative audiences.38 However, Democrat Jimmy Carter won the election, with strong support from environmentalists. He immediately made the Panama Canal Treaties a centerpiece of his foreign policy agenda, retaining Ford’s negotiator Ellsworth Bunker (a former ambassador to Vietnam) and appointing Linowitz (a former ambassador to the Organization of American States) as co-negotiator, for a six-month term to end on August 10, 1977.39

Carter’s action upset Representative Dan Flood, then in his twenty-second year in the House. Treaty reform, Flood warned in a private letter, “could well be your ‘Bay of Pigs’ and prevent your renomination or re-election,” an ominous reference to President Kennedy’s disastrous failure to overthrow Fidel Castro’s government in Cuba in 1961. Flood also tried to appeal to Carter’s environmentalism by invoking the biologists whom he had previously invited to testify: “The old idea of a sea level canal is irrelevant and strongly opposed by major conservation organizations, as well as engineers, because of the danger of infesting the Atlantic with the poisonous Pacific sea snake and the crown of thorns starfish as well as the other factors.”40

Flood had good reason to presume Carter would find the biological rationale compelling. During the 1976 campaign, Carter’s team had cultivated the environmental vote by hailing his record as governor of Georgia. After being persuaded by environmental and conservation groups to reverse his support for an imminent Army Corps of Engineers dam on the Flint River, Carter incurred the wrath of many Georgians by vetoing the project. But it raised his national profile, and solidified his resoluteness as chief executive to eliminate wasteful pork barrel water projects—a goal that combined his interests in environmental quality and fiscal conservatism.41

Flood, a conservative Democrat, had little interest in environmental issues—except for when it came to his passion project of preserving the Panama Canal Zone. He and other opponents of treaty reform had been mobilizing the ecological arguments against the sea-level canal proposal for years.42 At a 1973 hearing, his Republican colleague, South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond, also used the concerns of the Smithsonian scientists to advance his own reasons for expanding the existing waterway: “The American housewife is already feeling the effects of the disappearance of Peruvian anchovies, apparently from overfishing, which were a major source of cheap fishmeal for chicken feed. Opening up the isthmus to a sea-level passage could well be opening up a Pandora’s box for the world’s food supply.” By contrast, Thurmond argued (not incorrectly), “major environmental groups look upon the Terminal Lake–Third Locks plan as a positive step in averting ecological disaster.”43 But because conservative treaty opponents did not otherwise support environmental causes, the scientific community saw through their selective use of their data.44

Unlike in the 1960s, by the mid-1970s the U.S. environmentalist community had an institutional base that several of the largest organizations used to assert a voice in the growing debates over modernizing the canal and U.S.-Panama relations. Friends of the Earth (FOE) played a prominent role, beginning in 1973 when the sea-level canal idea attracted renewed attention at congressional hearings on the efforts of Flood, Thurmond, and others to allocate $850 million for a third lane of locks for the original waterway.45 FOE was a young organization, having been founded in 1969 by the former executive director of the Sierra Club David Brower. Taking strong stands against TAPS, chemical warfare in Vietnam, nuclear energy, and other technologies of the postwar era, the group’s membership grew to twenty-seven thousand within four years.46 Its legislative director, George Alderson, had become such a congressional fixture that a member of the House Interior committee joked about calling him by his first name. Alderson had also helped organize the successful environmentalist coalition against the federal supersonic transport program, and later authored a guide to citizen lobbying.47

During both the Ford and Carter administrations, as a leading employee of FOE and then of the Wilderness Society, Alderson endeavored to mobilize the insights of the 1960s-era marine biologists. As a fellow environmentalist put it in 1977, “George Alderson has done the nation and the world great service by paying more attention to the Sealevel Canal [sic] than anyone else in the conservation-environmental establishment.”48 The former biology major, who had begun his career in the late 1960s at the Sierra Club and then followed Brower to FOE, became alarmed when the president of the Panama Canal Company testified before Congress in 1973 in mild support of building a sea-level channel at an unspecified future point.49 While shipping industry representatives objected that such a waterway would lead to increased tolls, Alderson sought to elevate ecological matters to the level of economic ones. In letters to the House Panama Canal subcommittee chairs requesting the opportunity to testify at future hearings, Alderson asserted that expanding the original waterway would serve commercial maritime needs “without allowing disruption of the marine ecosystems in the adjacent waters,” and noted that no environmental impact statements for modernizing the Panama Canal had yet been filed.50 He included a recent article from Defenders of Wildlife News by John Briggs, the University of South Florida zoogeographer who had described the seaway in 1969 as a potential biological catastrophe. Briggs had since participated in an international conference devoted to the biological effects of interoceanic canals, held in Monte Carlo in 1972, and remained convinced that a seaway could cause “a huge and irrevocable loss of perhaps thousands of species native to the Eastern Pacific.”51

Alderson had spearheaded an earlier censure of the sea-level canal in April 1975, when he helped organize ten environmental groups to telegram President Ford that “it would be premature and reckless to enter a new treaty with Panama that would authorize or permit construction of a sea-level canal.”52 Two years later, soon after President Carter took office, Alderson began lobbying the administration to integrate environmental concerns into the treaty negotiations and to reject the sea-level canal project once and for all.

Alderson tried to get the White House’s attention by writing to the Domestic Policy Staff’s environmental expert, Katherine Fletcher. She had participated in Earth Day 1970 and, after completing her undergraduate biology degree, worked in Washington lobbying for environmental legislation and in Colorado opposing oil-shale development there.53 In March 1977, she was consumed with the congressional fallout of the water projects hit list, among other issues.54 But the seaway, Alderson emphasized, would be far worse than any of the dams in question: “I’m not sure whether it’s in your bailiwick, but the government has been edging into a $3-billion water project that could be a bigger fiasco than any we’ve seen yet. It’s the proposed Sea-level Panama Canal, which is an almost unnoticed topic of the Panama treaty negotiations.”55 Alderson asked her to consult with three agencies regarding the seaway’s environmental and economic effects: the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), the executive agency responsible for reviewing environmental impact statements; the Office of Management and Budget; and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the employer of a scientist who had coauthored an important article about the ability of canals to facilitate nonnative species exchange.56 Fletcher responded two weeks later, in April 1977, that she was forwarding his letter to CEQ and Office of Management and Budget and would like to learn more about this “very interesting situation,” but otherwise remained noncommittal.57

The following month, Carter received a persuasive letter from a pro-sea-level canal senator, Mike Gravel. The Alaska Democrat had gained a national following among liberals for entering the Pentagon Papers into the Congressional Record in 1971, but angered environmentalists for sponsoring the 1973 amendment to exempt the Trans-Alaska Pipeline Authorization Act from further environmental review. Gravel had learned about the sea-level canal just recently, during a March 1977 fact-finding trip to Panama. He “picked up the cause,” having become convinced that it offered the best solution to the problem of distributing Alaskan oil to the energy-hungry East and Gulf Coasts.58

In his May 5 letter to the president, the senator advised delaying the treaties’ ratification because the question of who possessed sovereignty over the Canal Zone remained a “burning emotional issue in both the United States and Panama.” In the meantime, he said the administration should work with Congress to authorize Carter to “take certain unilateral steps to improve the situation with Panama.” In particular, the Army Corps of Engineers should update the Anderson Commission’s 1970 report. Other recommended actions echoed those of previous administrations, such as transferring some lands and responsibilities for operating the canal to Panama.59

A civil liberties framework infused Gravel’s ensuing forty-six-page report to the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, which outlined the political and technological outmodedness of the existing waterway. He focused on the need to rectify the historical injustice perpetuated by the United States against Panama and argued that the U.S. did not own the Canal Zone, a “colonial-socialistic enclave” incommensurate with American values. Gravel rejected the argument that Panamanian control would lead to the waterway’s ruin. He also presented data he had commissioned demonstrating the canal’s diminishing value due to its inability to accommodate the new class of post-Panamax supertankers.60

Having outlined the case against retaining U.S. control of the existing canal, Gravel presented five reasons for developing a new interoceanic waterway at sea level, any one of which in his view justified the project. First, the need to transport the oil and natural gas resources of his own state eastward would enhance the economic viability of a wide sea-level canal. Such a waterway, which he proposed to be fully owned by Panama, would resolve the thirteen-year-old stalemate in treaty negotiations, reduce U.S. dependence on foreign energy sources, preclude massive U.S. investments in new east-west oil pipeline systems, and strengthen U.S. defense capacities by allowing the navy’s thirteen post-Panamax aircraft carriers to transit in the event of a national security crisis.61

Although he addressed the report to the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, and despite President Carter’s well-known environmental concerns, Gravel made no mention of the furor over the biological questions raised by the 1960s-era sea-level canal debate. Nor did he ground his concerns about energy security and infrastructure needs in the language of environmental issues. Alderson was livid, having learned about Gravel’s concurrent efforts to secure the support of the Army Corps of Engineers and Department of Transportation for a three-year, $7 million reanalysis of the seaway. As Alderson notified Fletcher in mid-May, “His staff was not well informed on the environmental problems involved, but explained that all he wants is a study—the old refrain.”62 One of Alderson’s colleagues also pressured Fletcher to persuade her bosses “to oppose this turkey,” which Gravel had probably forgotten had begun “as an AEC pipedream.”63 Responded Fletcher, “You can be assured that the Administration would not be lightly led into the support of this multi-billion dollar project,” a letter that would later be used by FOE in a congressional hearing.64

Gravel’s lobbying paid off when he scored a twenty-minute meeting with the president in the Oval Office on July 13, 1977.65 In preparation, the State Department urged Carter to affirm that they could win ratification via a massive public relations campaign, and that waiting any longer to take action on the treaty would risk violence with Panama and “offer domestic opponents opportunity to torpedo it.” The briefing paper’s final point reminded Carter to tell Gravel that the new treaty would provide an option for the U.S. to build a sea-level canal, but otherwise the document’s background section included no information about the proposal’s checkered history.66

That seemed to be the end of it, but eight days later, on July 21, 1977, Carter brought up the sea-level canal idea in an unexpected venue. At a town hall in Yazoo City, Mississippi, a citizen implied that he opposed granting Panama control of the canal and relinquishing the Canal Zone because the area would provide vital military assistance in the event of a third world war. Carter explained his rationale for new diplomatic arrangements between the two countries, and then went a step further by stating, “My guess is, that before many more years go by, we might well need a new canal at sea level, that can handle very large ships.” While President Lyndon Johnson’s administration had studied the multibillion-dollar project, Carter explained, the need to transport Alaskan oil and gas in huge tankers to the Gulf and East Coasts had since then intensified the need for a wider waterway.67 The following day, after attending an energy conference in New Orleans and helicoptering to an offshore oil rig, Carter elaborated that the Alaskan oil situation had transformed the notion of what kinds of infrastructure were economically “shocking and unreasonable.” The $8 billion spent by private industry on TAPS, and the $12 billion projected for an Alaskan natural gas pipeline, had put the Anderson Commission’s estimate in perspective.68 The $2.88 billion cost of the Route 10 seaway had seemed beyond the pale in 1970, but now, even when adjusted for inflation at $5.29 billion, it seemed much less objectionable.69

The president’s invocation of the futuristic seaway surprised everyone involved, even himself. As the New York Times reported the day after the Yazoo City event, “Administration officials said today it was possible an option for a sea-level waterway might be agreed to as part of the negotiation for a new canal treaty, but they were obviously startled that President Carter seemed to treat it as a matter under serious consideration. Senator Mike Gravel, Democrat of Alaska, had revived the idea recently.”70 Journalists stopped short of sharing Carter’s admission to having devoted little attention to the idea until then. At a question and answer session with members of the press in New Orleans on July 22, after one reporter asked for more details regarding his rationale for supporting a new oil-conveying seaway, Carter responded, “I told you at least as much as I know,” prompting laughter from the crowd. He then made the point that a new canal would not be exorbitant compared to other alternatives and the $8 billion price tag for TAPS, concluding, “I’ve not gone into the question in any depth and I’m not prepared to answer any further.”71

Staff members of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy scrambled to meet the request of their boss, geophysicist Frank Press, to prepare a short memo on the seaway’s ecological effects. As one wrote, “Both Frank and I remember that it was suggested that there could be some rather serious ecological consequences—sea snakes on the Pacific or the Atlantic side (one or the other) making their way to the other ocean.”72 The ensuing document to the president began with the words, “Your recent statements on a sea level canal in Central America will revive discussion of the potential environmental effects of such an endeavor,” and summarized the 1970 assessments of the Anderson Commission and Mayr Committee. Press concluded with an offer to initiate an update by the National Academy of Sciences, which Carter approved.73 During the late summer and fall of 1977, a multitude of agencies and organizations rushed to contribute to the revived discussion.

Article XII

Carter’s sudden espousal of the sea-level canal annoyed the treaty negotiators, who considered it settled and subordinate to resolving differences over the U.S. military bases, canal annuities to Panama, and many other issues. It now became the major obstacle to reaching a final agreement.74 Bunker and Linowitz warned Secretary of State Cyrus Vance that revising the sea-level canal provision would harm the negotiations by signaling a stronger U.S. intention to build it than the Panamanians had been led to believe, and by diminishing potential congressional support for the new treaty.75

On the other hand, argued the assistant secretary of state for congressional relations, the prospect of future access to a sea-level canal might induce some reluctant senators to vote for the treaty: “People may feel more comfortable if they see the possibility that we and the Panamanians may be building toward a promising joint enterprise in the future rather than simply disengaging from an unsatisfactory past relationship.”76 Following a meeting with several senators a week later, Vice President Mondale informed the White House chief of staff that “there was considerable sentiment for a new sea level canal” and thus “we should consider sharpening and strengthening the language in the current draft under negotiation which would give the U.S. right of first refusal for a new canal.”77 An unnamed administration official reiterated this idea by telling a journalist, “Politically, a sea-level canal in the treaty makes it a little easier to sell to Congress.”78 As the protreaty Senator Fritz Hollings explained to his South Carolina constituents, due to rising construction costs and the need for larger canal capacity, “With hindsight now we realize that rather than working for thirteen years to renegotiate the old treaty, we should have insisted on a new sea-level canal. This would have been wide enough for all our warships as well as the largest oil tankers. Then the sovereignty, sabotage and other problems would have been moot.”79 Of course, the 1964–67 negotiations did give the U.S. the right to build such a waterway. Despite his historical amnesia, Hollings exemplified the venerable view that complex political problems could be resolved via a technological approach.

But shoehorning the sea-level canal provision into the almost-complete treaty was complicated. Bunker and Linowitz tried to obtain a U.S. veto over canal construction by a third country in Panama until the treaty’s expiration on the last day of 1999. In response, at an August 5 conference in Bogota to finalize the Panamanian terms, Torrijos and the presidents of Colombia, Venezuela, Mexico, Costa Rica, and Jamaica called for the United States to reciprocate by agreeing not to negotiate with other Central American nations to build a new interoceanic route during the life of the treaty. The Latin American presidents appealed to Carter to accept the condition; otherwise, Panama would walk away from the table.80

The Panamanian negotiators later charged that U.S. insistence on the right to exclude other nations from excavating a sea-level channel through Panama jeopardized the treaty talks, an allegation that U.S. officials downplayed. Whether it constituted a full-blown “crisis” or routine “horse trading,” the issue did incite intense discussions at the eleventh hour.81 After poring over the Anderson Commission report, Carter’s advisors privately noted, “There is little likelihood that if we chose to build a sea-level canal it would be anywhere else but Panama. Although it might be argued that the option to build a canal in a third country gives us added leverage over Panama, any hint of using such leverage would provoke such an adverse reaction in Latin America that, in effect, we couldn’t use it.”82 Extracting the kinds of concessions that had appeared possible during the previous decade was now out of the question.83

For others, however, the forfeiture of U.S. rights to negotiate with rival Central American nations for a sea-level route made no sense. In his case for the canal treaties, for instance, Hollings ended his spiel for the sea-level waterway by asserting, “What is unexplainable is the provision that forbids us to negotiate a new canal anywhere but Panama.”84 South Dakota representative Larry Pressler cited the 1970 Canal Study Commission report to argue for the Colombia route due to its lower cost and ability to “break up Panama’s monopoly on interoceanic transit, which would tend to reduce the potential for economic blackmail.”85 The Chicago Tribune, the newspaper that had published leaked drafts of the 1967 treaties, described the provision that obligated the U.S. not to build a canal through another country as “a real puzzler” and an indication that “Panama must have some reason to think we might not be happy with the way the [present] canal is run. . . . Like the wealthy lady whose fiancé refused to marry her unless she gave him power over her investments, we find this treaty provision distinctly disconcerting.”86

By rejecting the engineering and political assessments that Panama offered the best place for a seaway, such arguments overlooked the possibility of another nation (Japan especially) cutting its own deal with Panama, a prospect that concerned Carter. As he later explained in one of many presentations designed to sell the treaties to skeptical audiences, “This is a clear benefit to us, for it ensures that, say, ten or twenty years from now, no unfriendly but wealthy power will be able to purchase the right to build a sea-level canal, to bypass the existing canal, perhaps leaving that other nation in control of the only usable waterway across the isthmus.”87

The final compromise over the sea-level canal provision denied the United States an exclusive right to build a waterway anywhere but in Panama while granting the U.S. veto power over construction of such a route in Panama by any other nation before the end of the century. In the sardonic words of Ambassador Linowitz, who conveyed his exasperation over the “implausible prospects of the sea-level canal” in his 1985 memoir, “in effect it added up to the same thing.”88 Later in August 1977, after the announcement that the two countries had reached agreement on all the major diplomatic principles, the New York Times published an embarrassing account of the frustrations that Carter’s Yazoo City comment had caused for both diplomatic teams.89

Another awkward, unforeseen consequence of Carter’s words played out as dozens of Latin American and U.S. dignitaries assembled in Washington, D.C. to celebrate the signing of the Torrijos-Carter Treaties. The day before the ceremony, on September 6, 1977, eleven organizations spanning the spectrum of environmentalist advocacy telegrammed the White House with an urgent plea to reject Article XII of the Panama Canal Treaty. The majority of the telegram participants were decades old and well known for their advocacy of protecting natural resources and habitat: the National Parks and Conservation Association, Izaak Walton League, Wilderness Society, Defenders of Wildlife, and Federation of Western Outdoor Clubs. A second subset of the signing groups embodied the newer focus on pollution prevention: Environmental Action Inc., the Environmental Policy Center, and FOE, which probably led the telegram effort. The third subgroup consisted of organizations devoted to animal welfare: the World Wildlife Fund, Fund for Animals Inc., and International Society for the Protection of Animals.

The telegram conveyed information both old and new. It quoted from the 1970 report by the National Academy’s Committee on Ecological Research for the Interoceanic Canal (CERIC) and reminded the president of the 1975 telegram opposing any treaty option involving a sea-level waterway. The coalition objected that the State Department had only released a draft EIS of the Panama Canal Treaty days earlier and that the academy had not yet issued its updated report for the White House. Due to the lack of information needed to address such a serious environmental issue, they argued the government should reject the option to develop that which represented “not only an economic loss but a likely environmental disaster as well.”90

A parallel media outreach initiative resulted in a nationally syndicated editorial subtitled “A Passage to Ecological Disaster.” The op-ed summarized the major findings of the 1960s-era debate, called out Senator Gravel for ignoring the issues raised by CERIC, and observed that “President Carter’s expressed enthusiasm for the eventual construction of a sea-level Panama Canal doesn’t sound like the Jimmy Carter that environmentalists have come to know, and more often than not, admire.”91

Indeed, less than four months had passed since Carter had delivered a major environmental message to Congress. The thirty-six-page document outlined a wide range of initiatives pertaining to pollution control, human health, energy, the urban environment, and population growth. It even included a plan to restrict “the importation of exotic species.” As he explained, “In the past 150 years, hundreds of foreign wildlife species, both plant and animal, have been introduced into the natural ecosystems of the United States,” many of them “highly detrimental to public health, agriculture, and native wildlife.” Consequently, on that date, May 23, 1977, Carter issued an executive order to prohibit the establishment of exotic organisms on federal lands and waters, and directed the secretaries of agriculture and the interior to develop legislation to address the problem.92

Although Article XII seemed to contradict key environmental goals of the Carter administration, the environmentalists’ last-minute telegram did not stop the signing ceremony for the treaties. The event took place on September 7 in the grand Hall of the Americas at the Washington headquarters of the Organization of American States (fig. 7.1). Eighteen Latin American heads of state attended, as well as a bipartisan group of U.S. dignitaries including President Ford, President Johnson’s widow Lady Bird Johnson, and former secretaries of state William Rogers and Henry Kissinger. Near the end of his brief remarks, President Carter stated, “In the spirit of reciprocity suggested by the leaders at the Bogota summit, the United States and Panama have agreed that any future sea-level canal will be built in Panama and with the cooperation of the United States. In this manner, the best interests of both our nations are linked and preserved into the future.”93 Otherwise neither he nor Commander Omar Torrijos mentioned the environmental implications of the two treaties, an unsurprising omission given their preeminent focus on military and economic security.

But as the diplomatic process gave way to domestic politicking for the ratification of the accords, Carter could not ignore the environmentalists’ antiseaway publicity indefinitely. Although he had embraced Senator Gravel’s vision of the sea-level canal as a utilitarian solution to serious problems regarding the U.S. energy supply, the proposal, as it had in the 1960s, raised difficult questions about the relationship between oceanic health and maritime infrastructure. The Senate ratification campaign would soon force him to realize that federal officials could no longer dismiss such esoteric questions as easily as in the pre-NEPA years of the previous decade.

Conclusion

Although the emergence of nuclear excavation technology had revived the dormant dream of an isthmian sea-level canal in the late 1950s, the demise of PNEs in the early 1970s did not lay it to rest. In fact, the seaway idea outlived by several years the postwar enthusiasm for using buried thermonuclear bombs to overcome the economic and technical burdens of monumental engineering projects. Project Plowshare funding finally ended in 1977, seven years after the Anderson Commission concluded it could not recommend atomic ditch-digging. While conventional construction did pose much higher costs than those originally calculated for peaceful nuclear explosives, by the mid-1970s the economic and political calculus had changed. The $8 billion Trans-Alaska Pipeline created a new benchmark for public and private stakeholders about what constituted reasonable expenditures for critical fossil fuel facilities and infrastructure.

The bioenvironmental context had changed as well. The Alaskan oil pipeline, in concert with the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, set new expectations about the proper scope of what the 1965–70 Anderson Commission had called “environmental considerations.” No longer could a four-page assessment such as theirs suffice, since NEPA enabled environmentalist groups to sue federal agencies for failing to evaluate the potential environmental impacts of projects planned for public lands or with public funds. The men appointed by President Johnson to investigate the seaway’s feasibility would have been amazed by the multivolume EIS issued by the Department of the Interior and Federal Task Force on Alaskan Oil Development in 1972.

Granted, Congress had demonstrated its authority to check the rapid rise of environmentalist influence on federal megaproject planning by exempting TAPS from further such review in the summer of 1973. Perhaps President Carter had this in mind, as well as the shockwaves caused by the subsequent OPEC embargo, when he stunned his advisors by speaking out in favor of a treaty clause regarding U.S.-Panamanian cooperation to develop a second canal at the level of the seas.

Soon after the signing of the Torrijos-Carter Treaties, an anonymous administration official explained the president’s surprise announcement at the July 21 town hall as a function of Carter’s “desire to establish himself as a statesman of vision and an activist for new, challenging ideas and projects.”94 Despite the obvious public relations framing, the statement rang true in many respects. Even in his May 23 environmental message to Congress, Carter had emphasized the need to develop the outer continental shelf’s federal oil and gas reserves “in an orderly manner, reconciling the nation’s energy needs with the fullest possible protection of the environment.”95 Carter’s techno-enthusiasm had deep roots; before resigning his commission as a naval officer in 1953, he worked under Admiral Hyman Rickover on the early stages of the U.S. nuclear submarine program.96 His subsequent success in agribusiness also featured early adoption of cutting-edge technologies, from prescription fertilizers to streamlined peanut-shelling equipment.97

A reporter described Governor Carter in 1971 as “an enigma and contradiction,” an assessment that still applies to significant aspects of his presidency, including his environmental record.98 The notorious water projects hit-list episode was but one case that confounded his environmentalist constituency. In August 1977, outraged congressmen from both parties presented Carter with an appropriations bill that restored support for all the water projects for the 1978 fiscal year. The president’s reluctant signing of the bill frustrated environmentalists, as did later initiatives to address the energy crisis, including one to fast-track synthetic fuel plants, refineries, and facilities.99 Carter’s support for the sea-level canal should be seen within this context of supporting federal environmental regulations and projects, but not when they conflicted with his top priority of economic recovery.100

Understanding why Carter endorsed the sea-level canal in spite of its well-publicized ecological risks requires us to consider not only the dire economic conditions of the 1970s but also the still-inchoate intellectual and political context of marine conservation biology. As revealed by his executive order restricting the introduction of foreign plants and animals, Carter possessed a keen appreciation of the potential threats posed by nonnative invasive species. However, the executive order’s framing with respect to the federal agencies overseeing agriculture and public lands, and his own farming background, suggests that Carter and his environmental lieutenants viewed nonnative species through a terrestrial rather than marine lens.

The specific insights of the late 1960s-era biologists regarding marine species exchange profoundly influenced environmental organizations opposing the sea-level canal in the mid-1970s, and yet the science of marine invasion biology—and marine conservation biology more broadly—remained underfunded and underdeveloped. Oceanography, fisheries science, and other marine disciplines still focused more on providing data to facilitate the development of ocean resources than on elucidating their biological diversity and vulnerability to human activities.101 Along these lines, it is possible that Carter’s time in the navy during and after World War II—when naval officials, the shipping industry, and scientists alike sought to use the oceans, whether for fish and mineral extraction, nuclear waste storage, or national security purposes—shaped a view for him of the oceans as invulnerable to overexploitation.

That is not to say that Carter, nor others who sought to maximize the productivity of the seas, did not care for the life within. As a sonar officer searching for Soviet subs with state-of-the-art listening equipment, he learned how to identify dolphins, shrimp, and different species of whales and fish based on their “chatter and songs.” Later in his life, Carter shared moving details of his seven years in the navy: “Before submarines were equipped with nuclear power and snorkels, they stayed mostly on the surface. Our hours on the bridge, in the conning tower, or in the sonar room allowed each of us to know the ocean and the heavens in a unique way.”102

Of course, knowing the ocean from the vantage point of a Cold War submarine did not necessarily facilitate an appreciation for the murky details of marine bioinvasions. Carter’s naval national security worldview, engineering mindset, trusteeship approach to governing, and commitment to solving the energy crisis by both conserving and producing energy—as well as his need for canal treaty ratification votes from every possible source of support—likely all played important roles in his advocacy of the sea-level canal.