The Panama Canal Treaty EIS

President Carter’s surprise announcement at the Yazoo City town hall on July 21, 1977, about the value of keeping U.S. options open for a future Panamanian sea-level canal, created a flurry of extra work not only for the treaty negotiators, but also for several executive agency employees. As the ambassadors raced against their August 10 deadline to strengthen the sea-level canal clause, officials debated how to meet environmentalists’ demands for a full NEPA review. On August 1, Marion Edey, one of the still-unconfirmed members of the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), the White House office responsible for reviewing environmental impact statements, wrote a long letter to Stuart Eizenstat, the president’s domestic affairs advisor, about the project’s environmental background.8 Edey was a well-connected member of the D.C. environmental lobbying circuit, having coestablished (with David Brower, the president of Friends of the Earth) the League of Conservation Voters in 1970. Although Department of Transportation officials had rejected the argument that the energy crisis justified reexamining the seaway proposal, Edey recommended proceeding with a “Quick E.O.P. [Executive Office of the President] State-of-Knowledge Review” to collate all the data from relevant agencies to determine whether to support Gravel’s bill for a new study by the Corps of Engineers costing $7 million (the current equivalent of nearly $30 million).9

On the same day, August 1, Presidential Science Advisor Frank Press provided Carter with his office’s summary of the sea-level canal ecology situation.10 Having received the president’s authorization to ask the National Academy of Sciences to conduct a new assessment, Press immediately conveyed the request to academy president Philip Handler.11 It was a tall order—to assemble seven years’ worth of work within eight weeks—but the academy agreed to sponsor a conference of experts in September and to prepare a report soon thereafter.

Press’s office apparently acted without having consulted the CEQ, as Edey wrote him on August 23 to outline the many questions her office considered paramount for the academy study. Ironically, her letter mentioned that Katherine Fletcher, the domestic policy staffer who had nudged the CEQ back in April in response to environmentalist George Alderson’s request, had suggested that the CEQ and the Office of Science and Technology Policy work together on the seaway issue.12 The failure of two White House agencies to communicate in a timelier manner revealed the disorganized executive-branch approach to the seaway proposal, as well as the mounting pressure by the Washington-based environmentalist community to subject the canal treaty to NEPA oversight.

In the meantime, on August 5, representatives of the CEQ and several of the concerned environmental groups met in Washington with the assistant secretary of state for oceans and international environmental and scientific affairs, Patsy Mink, to discuss the Panama Canal Treaty’s environmental impacts. State Department officials admitted they had not yet started the assessment.13 But just a few weeks later, on August 29, the draft EIS announcement appeared in the Federal Register, inviting interested parties to submit comments within thirty days. The National Academy’s new ad hoc group had not yet met, let alone issued its requested report to the president. Consequently, many of the eighteen federal agencies, nineteen private organizations, and seven individuals who responded to the Panama Canal Treaty draft EIS castigated the rushed job. Not only was the report short (forty-two pages, excluding the appendices), but the State Department violated the NEPA statute providing commentators forty-five days. The agency did reinstate the full period of public comment (that is, until October 13, 1977), but did not hold public hearings.14

Commentators criticized the draft EIS on several grounds, especially the superficial coverage of the sea-level canal. The Smithsonian Institution and the Center for Law and Social Policy (the public interest law firm that had litigated the Alaskan pipeline) took particular exception to the report’s breezy acceptance of the Anderson Commission’s conclusion that the sea-level canal posed acceptable ecological risks.15

The report also neglected the related issue of how supplementing the existing canal’s reservoir might influence marine species migration.16 Biologists influenced by the earlier seaway debate had passed resolutions calling on the Panama Canal Company to protect the waterway’s freshwater barrier by not pumping in salt water to maintain adequate levels during periods of water scarcity.17 After a record-setting drought in the winter of 1976–77 forced canal operators to restrict transits, however, scientists feared the proposal to augment the Gatun and Alajuela reservoirs with ocean water would gather momentum.18

Commentators called for the final EIS to provide detailed analyses about a variety of other issues. Panamanian decision makers and everyone concerned with the canal watershed needed much more information regarding the treaty’s proposed joint oversight commission for protecting the canal watershed; the provision of financial aid to Panamanian institutions dedicated to conservation, sanitation, and the rational exploitation of natural resources; and past and present land and watershed management practices in the Canal Zone.19 The notion of allowing Panama to develop its resources as Panamanians saw fit constituted an environmental parallel to the anticolonial rationale for the treaties, though it received little press attention.

Other than the Panama Audubon Society, the Gorgas Memorial Institute of Tropical and Preventive Medicine, and several Canal Zone civic councils, no Panama-based organizations submitted comments on the draft EIS. A U.S. nongovernmental organization, however, adopted an explicitly anti-imperialist approach to environmental management. International program director Michael Wright of the Nature Conservancy, a nonprofit known for buying private lands for preservation, declared, “The decision to preserve these unique Panamanian forests must ultimately rest with Panama.” Having recently visited the country, Wright expressed confidence in the Panamanians’ commitment to protecting the canal watershed from deforestation-induced erosion. Like other environmental groups, he recommended providing aid “to help mitigate the difficult economic choices such protection could involve.” Wright praised the treaty overall for providing an “admittedly unintended” opportunity to promote environmental stewardship and cooperation throughout Latin America.20

The Panama Canal Company and Canal Zone government, the quasi-colonial partnership doomed to oblivion by the new treaty, did not see any such value, not surprisingly. The environmental quality committee representing both entities excoriated the draft EIS for not employing a broad enough view of human ecology. Because the Zone’s U.S. citizens faced serious threats to their employment privileges and living conditions once Panama assumed jurisdiction, the final EIS, the committee said, should better attend to “the anticipated effects on this element of the human environment.”21 The presidents of five Canal Zone civic councils made similar points, and cast aspersions on the ability of Panamanians to act as responsible canal operators and watershed stewards.22

Likewise, treaty opponent Senator James Allen of Alabama used the draft EIS to bolster his case against ratification. Urging his fellow senators to “listen carefully to the recommendations of environmental groups,” he delivered a speech on September 28, 1977, raising the specter of Panamanian-caused deforestation in the Canal Zone and the loss of environmental safeguards afforded by U.S. law. Because the draft EIS had also considered how Panamanian-imposed canal toll increases might affect environmental and economic well-being, Allen focused on the increased atmospheric pollution and higher consumer costs that would ensue if shippers of coal, petroleum, and other raw materials destined for U.S. markets avoided the canal in favor of overland routes.23

The final version of the EIS came out late in December 1977; it did not list any authors but identified William Mansfield III of the State Department’s Office of Environmental Affairs as the contact person. The report retained a heavy, though not exclusive, focus on how environmental changes under the treaty might impact U.S. interests. It provided detailed data on the jobs and commercial and defense infrastructure at stake, and concluded that deforestation and insect-borne disease constituted “the potential environmental consequences which would appear to justify the greatest concern.”24 Should current environmental management practices discontinue, both phenomena would harm U.S. and Panamanian residents and economic interests. The loss of the Zone’s forests would also threaten wildlife, including ten mammals and five birds listed under the U.S. Endangered Species Act of 1973.25

At the same time, the final text acknowledged Panama’s dilemmas as a developing country and its resolve to address environmental problems. It cited, for example, the request by RENARE, the Agriculture Ministry’s agency responsible for forests and national parks, for assistance in implementing a $20 million watershed management project.26 A brief section on the archaeology and environmental history of the Canal Zone also made the point that its forests were far from primeval: “Though it comes as a surprise to most people, some evidence indicates that at the time of the Spaniards’ arrival around 1500 A.D. the Indian population was so large that less of Panama was forested than was the case until very recently.” Therefore, the conquistador Balboa probably “passed through planted fields and not through solid forest, in crossing the isthmus to ‘discover’ the Pacific.”27 Such use of scare quotes by non-Indigenous authors was unusual for the time, several years before the Columbus quincentennial increased public awareness of the precolonial Americas as community-managed landscapes. Otherwise, however, the final impact statement did not provide the in-depth historical evaluation of environmental management practices that several commentators sought.

The final EIS did at least provide more data on the sea-level canal. The report summarized the conclusions of the Anderson Commission, Battelle, CERIC, and the 1970 Biological Society of Washington symposium, and included the terse conclusion of the National Academy’s recent update to the White House: while “the modest advances in knowledge” attained since 1970 could not be used to quantify the exact risks of ecological disruption to the Atlantic and Pacific biota, they justified the expense of implementing a barrier system designed to restrict species migration across the seas. The final EIS report also assured readers that the Panama Canal Company had no plans to pump seawater into its lakes, and that despite the treaty’s invocation of PNEs, “there is no consideration of employing nuclear devices in the possible construction of a new canal.”28

How the Academy Was Unmuted

The fall of 1977 was a whirlwind for advocates and opponents of the Torrijos-Carter Treaties. As the Carter administration embarked on its public relations campaign, the post-TAPS debate was heating up over building new west-to-east pipelines to distribute the surplus Alaskan oil, and the comments were rolling in on the draft EIS. The National Academy of Sciences was also hard at work; in a remarkable turnaround time after receiving the presidential science advisor’s request on August 1, an ad hoc group chaired by Alfred Beeton of the Great Lakes and Marine Waters Centers formed. The Beeton Committee held a conference of two dozen experts on September 1–2, solicited comments from almost two dozen more, and issued its eleven-page report on September 28.29

Some of the biologists who had played major roles in the 1968–70 discussions served on the new committee, most notably Ira Rubinoff and Peter Glynn of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI). Rubinoff, who became STRI’s director in 1973, had since come out against the seaway proposal, calling instead for the construction of a third set of locks with saltwater pumps, tidal gates, and a “toxic barrier” to kill fouling and migratory marine organisms.30 Other participants included Lawrence Abele, William Aron, John Briggs, C. E. Dawson, Sylvia Earle, Joel Hedgpeth, Meredith Jones, John McCosker, William Newman, C. Richard Robins, Richard Rosenblatt, Howard Sanders, Geerat Vermeij, and Gilbert Voss. Despite his rocky relationship with the scientific community, even John Sheffey participated, presenting on physical barriers to faunal mixing and on the Anderson Commission itself.31

The Beeton Committee report packed a lot of information into eleven pages, and provided the sea-level canal authors a fresh forum to explain why marine ecology mattered for maritime infrastructural development. Like the 1970 Mayr Committee on Ecological Research for the Interoceanic Canal (CERIC), the 1977 academy authors criticized the Anderson Commission for its notorious conclusion about the acceptable risks of adverse ecological consequences, and called for a barrier system to prevent the inevitable migration and colonization that would follow the opening of a sea-level waterway. But despite the passage of seven years, isthmian marine ecology had barely advanced. Few surveys had been conducted to identify the species capable of migrating, especially not in the deeper areas requiring special equipment and research vessels. Basic knowledge of marine parasites and disease organisms, even for commercially important organisms, remained sparse.

The Beeton report also called for a more complex approach to predicting the seaway’s consequences for ocean life. The earlier controversy’s focus on extinction events and charismatic species like the yellow-bellied sea snake and the crown-of-thorns starfish emphasized the direct effects of seaway construction at the expense of indirect effects on local marine communities. Just as the original Panama Canal had destroyed local mangrove forests, sea grass beds, and coral reefs when crews dumped masses of dredge spoil along the coasts, changes which in turn affected the members of multiple marine food chains, a sea-level waterway would affect nutrient dynamics, food webs, and species abundance by altering oceanic currents and sediment flows. State-of-the-art computer models, in concert with updated taxonomic information, offered promise for determining such localized effects. But otherwise, because the “imposing uncertainties” identified by the sea-level canal authors remained unresolved, the new academy analysis reiterated the importance of integrating marine ecology into any future engineering feasibility studies.32

Science Advisor Frank Press conveyed the report highlights to the president in early October, along with a mild warning: “I would recommend that you bear in mind the issue of potential ecological effects in your discussions and public statements and, as appropriate, acknowledge that the issue will require further detailed study.”33 Three days later, Carter faced the question of how committed he really was to the oil-crisis canal, when the director of the Office of Management and Budget, James McIntyre, requested his input regarding Gravel’s bill to authorize the Army Corps of Engineers to conduct a new study. “As you consider it,” counseled McIntyre, “the proposal should be viewed in the larger context of (a) the impact of the proposal upon obtaining Senate consent on the Treaties and (b) how the proposal would be received in Panama.” On the plus side, he considered $7 million “a relatively small price to pay” for an updated assessment of the sea-level canal, especially if the energy crisis worsened enough to justify construction, now estimated at $6.2 billion. Yet a compelling counterargument could also be made: “Administration support for a sea-level canal study by the Corps—even though not a commitment to construct—will be strongly resisted by environmentalists who are concerned about potential adverse environmental and ecological effects from mixing waters from the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, e.g., introduction of poisonous Pacific sea snakes into the Atlantic.” After implicitly referencing the Beeton report, McIntyre emphasized the project’s questionable economic returns, even in the context of increasing energy-transportation problems.

Carter’s two options appeared at the end of the memorandum, under the heading “Presidential Decision.” At some point, in his careful script, he checked and initialed the second choice: “Do not support legislation to authorize study.”34 It must have been a difficult choice for Carter, having raised so much fuss among the treaty negotiators just weeks earlier. Yet he must also have known that he had secured Gravel’s vote for ratification, leaving him free to concentrate on other senators—a vital task given that public opposition to the treaties was running two to one.35

Most analyses of the ratification campaign focus on the rapid, unexpected rise of the New Right, and the immense pressure grassroots neoconservative groups exerted on undecided senators to vote against the treaties.36 Environmentalist NGOs might not have possessed the resources to flood senatorial offices with millions of letters about the treaty EIS, but NEPA afforded them leverage by enabling them to sue federal agencies for producing inadequate environmental impact statements.37 Although Carter’s team had shown little interest in environmentalists’ concerns about the treaty earlier in the spring and summer, that started to change in the wake of the September 6 telegram publicity. At one of the first post–signing ceremony ratification campaign events held by the White House, on September 15, 1977, environmental groups constituted six of the thirty-two civic organizations represented.38 Carter’s subsequent decision in early October not to authorize Gravel’s bill for a new sea-level canal study probably reflected a deeper appreciation of the proposal’s controversial history, as conveyed by the National Academy’s Beeton report.

Coverage of the Beeton Committee findings by high-profile venues generated unflattering publicity for the administration and Article XII. New York Times science writer Walter Sullivan, who had covered the debate seven years earlier, published an article on October 10 that began, “The revival by President Carter of the proposal for a sea-level canal across Central America has evoked renewed concern among marine biologists about the effects of unimpeded access between the tropical Atlantic and Pacific.”39 The London-based New Scientist addressed the new scientific report as well as the antiseaway advocacy of Friends of the Earth. Describing the group’s interpretation of the seaway as “a sinister move on the part of the oil lobby,” the magazine quoted from a scathing editorial by President David Brower that appeared in the November 1977 issue of Not Man Apart, FOE’s newsletter.40 Brower’s piece accused the Carter administration of “a breakdown in decision-making.” Likely drawing on his close relationship with Edey, he excoriated Carter for promoting the project without having solicited CEQ’s recommendations or directing an EIS to be conducted before the treaty talks began. Instead, days before the treaty signing, “an obviously inadequate draft EIS was released by the State Department,” thereby preventing the administration from making an informed decision in accordance with NEPA.41

Brower alleged that Carter had responded “to the persuasion of a senator whose vote he wanted for ratification of the treaty,” citing Gravel’s public admission that he had met with the president to discuss Panama issues shortly before the Yazoo City pronouncement. In Brower’s view, the Alaskan senator tried to circumvent Congress, the CEQ, and the public by persuading Carter to have the sea-level canal written into the treaty, thereby mandating a new government-funded feasibility study. The allegations gained a much larger audience when New Scientist republished his biting conclusion: “Proponents of the treaty have urged Friends of the Earth to be silent on the sea-level canal provision because it was put into the treaty only to satisfy Senator Gravel.” Even so, argued Brower, “when one Senator can talk a president into a commitment that flies in the face of long-standing and well-documented environmental and scientific objections, we cannot stand by silent.”42

More bad publicity addressed the ways in which megaprojects compounded the problems of tropical developing nations seeking to accelerate modernity. In December 1977, a widely distributed Washington Post article by a World Bank ecologist, Robert Goodland (the first person hired in that position), framed the sea-level canal as one component of a “triple threat to Panama ecology.” The country also faced massive changes due to a proposed highway through the Darién Gap and the newly completed Bayano Hydroelectric Complex, which displaced thousands of Indigenous people in the eastern portion of Panama west of the Darién. The three huge projects embodied the challenges of reconciling economic development with respect for human rights and environmental quality.43

Much more was thus at stake than invasive sea snakes and starfish. Rubinoff and another Smithsonian official, Ross Simons, made that clear when the special assistant to the president, Joseph Aragon, paid them the compliment of asking for their take on the environmental issues raised by the Panama Canal Treaty. The two scientist-administrators urged the administration to provide technical and financial assistance for natural resource management, noting that “such an initiative would be welcomed from Panama as long as it did not appear to be an ‘imperialistic’ scheme.” They also called for the joint commission specified in Article VI to include a robust scientific basis and to make the most of an opportunity for a new era of hemispheric partnership: “The tropics are being destroyed with extreme rapidity, a situation which in the long-term could have the same social and economic consequences as our current energy problems. We in the temperate zone should recognize that we cannot divorce ourselves from the tropics.” As for the seaway, “perhaps the most emotional issue to environmentalists,” Rubinoff and Simons advised Carter’s team to assure them that no decision would be made in the absence of further scientific study.44 Representatives of the most vocal environmental groups had also been calling for such assurance, though they would likely have objected to being described as emotional.

Reassuring the Antiseaway Community

As the administration’s ratification initiative ramped up late in 1977, perceptions intensified that environmental organizations might mount a court challenge to demand a more thorough treaty EIS.45 Although the State Department did not produce the comprehensive impact study environmentalists sought, officials agreed to develop a formal statement to accompany the release of the final EIS in December. The document, developed with input from environmental lobbyists, would clarify U.S. intentions regarding key points of diplomatic concern and thereby facilitate “support for ratification of the treaties by the environmental community,” as a confidential memo by several of the major environmental players spelled out on December 14, 1977.46

A major figure who took credit for pushing this process along was David Ortman, who had received George Alderson’s files when he took over as the research associate of the Washington office of Friends of the Earth. As he later asserted, “In the FOE D.C. files on the Panama sea-level canal are State Department memos expressing concern after calls I would make to the State Department, that the environmental community might scuttle the treaty efforts.”47 In the aforementioned November 1977 issue of Not Man Apart, Ortman wrote a long critique titled “Mingling the Two Oceans” that evinced considerable insider knowledge, which spoke to the close relationship between FOE personnel and CEQ member Edey. He also recognized the irony that “the biggest opponents” to the sea-level canal since the 1960s “were not the biologists or the environmentalists, but rather those people who are convinced that we should not give up the Canal Zone,” a reference to Representative Dan Flood, Senator Strom Thurmond, and other adversaries of treaty reform.48 On the other hand, Ortman did not seem to fear aiding such antienvironmental politicians; all that mattered was preventing the terrible seaway scheme from coming to fruition.

Ortman’s analysis recapitulated the important point that “the possible ecological effects extend far beyond the sea snakes.” Such threats included larger oil spills by the massive tankers that would use a sea-level channel, the need to deepen U.S. ports to accommodate these vessels, and the effects on the urban ports of Panama City and Colón of reducing traffic through the existing canal. Better solutions for reducing reliance on foreign oil existed than spending $10–20 billion on a huge public works project in Panama: “How much insulation and solar space and water heaters would the money spent on a sea-level canal buy? How many homes could be retrofitted to burn less oil?”49 Ortman also challenged Gravel for ignoring the project’s secondary environmental effects, overstating its military rationale, and underestimating its cost. His final theme echoed an argument Congressman Flood had made long before: “Besides Senator Gravel, President Carter, and Secretary of State Vance, who advocates for the colossal construction project? Well, engineering-industrial groups for one, manufacturers of heavy earthmoving machinery, dredging combines, and contractors.”50

Ortman and fellow FOE staff were not the only ones who pressured the State Department. The Sierra Club, one of the oldest conservation groups in the United States, also played a big role. It had only begun expanding its international presence since 1970, yet had achieved great success using NEPA to challenge foreign megaprojects slated to be built with U.S. funds.51 In particular, the club and three other organizations sued the U.S. Department of Transportation and Federal Highway Administration in 1975 to demand a better EIS for the proposed completion of the Pan-American Highway through the Panama-Colombia border. The plaintiffs sought a greater focus on preventing the spread of hoof-and-mouth disease (aftosa) from South American livestock across what had long functioned as a biogeographical barrier—the dense rainforests of the Darién. Because the disease threatened to kill off a quarter of the North American cattle herd—a $10 billion loss—it gained a lot of traction. A U.S. district court agreed that both the draft and final impact statements failed to adequately address aftosa, as well as the cultural survival of the affected Guna and Chocó tribes.52 The rulings precluded construction of the 250-mile-long route for over two decades, and the Darién still remains the only incomplete stretch of the road from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego.53

Top representatives of the Sierra Club, FOE, and the Center for Law and Policy met with State Department officials three times in 1977 to address the treaties’ environmental protection measures and the agency’s compliance with NEPA (on August 5, November 18, and December 20).54 “While we believe we have been able to allay their concerns,” wrote Deputy for Panama Canal Treaty Affairs David Popper to Deputy Secretary of State Warren Christopher on December 21, “they would like a statement of assurances from you which they could use with their directors and members to win their support for the Treaties.”55 Actually, the environmentalists wanted Carter’s secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, to deliver the message via a major speech.56 Vance had a deep knowledge of U.S.-Panama affairs, having served as the Panama Canal’s sole shareholder (as secretary of the army) and Lyndon Johnson’s deputy secretary of defense during the 1964 Flag Riots. Instead of a high-profile speech by the nation’s top foreign policy official, however, the environmental community had to settle for a glorified cover letter by the second-ranking foreign affairs leader, which was still not too shabby.

Christopher issued the “Statement on the Panama Canal Treaties and Environmental Protection” on January 12, 1978. The document declared that Article XII provided only “for a study of the feasibility of such a canal without making a decision or commitment that a sea-level canal will be built,” which would include a full EIS addressing the reports of the National Academy. The text also downplayed the likelihood of nuclear excavation techniques ever being used, “both for environmental reasons and because of the terms of the nuclear test ban treaty.”57

The language in Christopher’s statement regarding Article VI, the section committing the two nations to respect environmental goals, was more questionable. He identified Article VI “as an integral part of the Panama Canal Treaty,” a dubious claim given the pact’s overriding focus on the operation, defense, and transfer of the waterway and associated lands and property. The statement also conveyed the State Department’s intention that the Joint Commission on the Environment “shall have the staff and financial support it needs to be effective” and include among its U.S. members “leading science and environmental figures as well as others from the private and public sectors.”58 But because the treaty did not include such specific language, Congress would likely have to approve legislation to implement the plan.59

Regardless of what might happen in the future, Christopher’s statement performed an important function for the antiseaway environmental community: it validated the 1960s-era sea-level canal authors and the political activists who took them seriously. Recalling the scientific demands for natural-history inventories of the isthmus, the document asserted that the U.S. and Panamanian governments would cooperate to collect baseline data “showing the current state of Canal Zone ecosystems, including air and water quality, marine life in the adjacent oceans, and flora and fauna.” Another nod to the debate of the previous decade cited two older treaties as a legal precedent for U.S.-Panama environmental cooperation, including the one that established Barro Colorado Island, the original home of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, as a nature monument in 1940.60

The Sierra Club was relatively pleased with the outcome, as articulated by its international committee chairperson, Nicholas Robinson.61 The lawyer had a history of pressuring the State Department and other U.S. foreign affairs agencies to comply with NEPA; as he argued in 1974, Congress intended the law to extend beyond the territorial boundaries of the United States. That was not to say that NEPA permitted interference in the internal affairs of other nations. “Rather, the aim is to assure that the United States itself is never responsible for unanticipated environmental injury anywhere. NEPA provides a restraint on U.S. action, not on the actions of other countries.” The law required all federal agencies, no matter their scope, to act “with as full an awareness as possible of their impact on the systems of the biosphere.”62

Robinson criticized the State Department for waiting too long to initiate the Panama Canal Treaty EIS—it should have started during the Nixon administration, but at least senators could consult it prior to the ratification vote. While the agency had under previous leadership “flouted NEPA more than it followed the act’s mandate,” the Carter administration’s actions represented “a solid step toward reversing that pattern.” Robinson lamented the public lack of attention to the treaties’ environmental dimensions, while making the ironic admission that the sea-level canal provision committed the United States “to so little” that the failure of environmentalists to achieve their desired language was “of little importance.” As for the joint commission outlined by Article VI, environmental groups would have to ensure that the enabling legislation met the State Department’s ambitious objectives. But first, of course, the pacts had to be ratified.63

By late January 1978, as the ratification campaign approached fever pitch, the sea-level canal option was becoming a white elephant. Despite strong support among some of their colleagues for it, the leading protreaty senators, Robert Byrd of West Virginia and Howard Baker of Tennessee, expressed to Christopher their willingness to delete it in order to “pick up votes,” especially that of one senator, Robert Griffin of Michigan. Christopher cautioned them against this maneuver on the grounds that the article was in the national interest, and that any deletions would put the treaty at risk of further revision. Because Griffin appeared to be turning against the treaties anyway, Baker agreed to shelve the plan for the time being. When informed of these developments by Secretary of State Vance, Carter reiterated his support for the sea-level canal article: “It’s important, I believe, to hold this in the treaty.”64

As Carter wished, the sea-level canal clause remained, but it became an anticlimactic nonissue during the final months prior to the ratification votes in the spring of 1978. By early February, sixty-two senators had committed to support the treaties, twenty-eight opposed them, and ten remained undecided. To obtain the requisite sixty-seven votes, the administration made many last-minute concessions, including one that infuriated the Panamanians and almost derailed the whole process—a reservation introduced by Arizona senator Dennis DeConcini allowing the United States to use military force in Panama to keep the canal open, if necessary, after the year 2000. The Senate approved each of the pacts with one vote to spare; the Neutrality Treaty passed on March 16 and the Panama Canal Treaty on April 18 with identical roll calls.65 It had been a bruising fight, requiring Carter officials to provide statements of reassurance not only to environmentalists fearing a future sea-level canal but also to reluctant treaty supporters fearing the loss of the perpetual unilateral right to defend the waterway.66

The Posttreaty Seaway Hearings

After the rancorous ratification campaign, Senator Mike Gravel remained convinced that a sea-level canal offered the best solution to modernizing the Panama Canal and to transporting North Slope oil from Valdez to tankers bound for the ravenous refineries of the East and Gulf Coasts. Although the Trans-Alaska Pipeline was only transmitting a few hundred barrels per day, energy analysts expected that number to skyrocket in the near future.

On May 4, 1978, the Senate approved moving forward with Gravel’s bill to provide $8 million for a new commission to conduct a full NEPA review of the seaway project. Though he had previously ignored the risks of marine species exchange, the measure included a flora, fauna, and ecosystem inventory of the Panamanian isthmus and assessment of the ecological effects of marine species movement. The bill allocated three years for the commission to complete all its work, including the economic and technological feasibility studies.

The House of Representatives, where antitreaty sentiment remained strong, held three days of hearings to consider Gravel’s plan in June 1978. Despite little enthusiasm for the proposal, one representative conceded, “I must admit that Alaskan oil and its importance to the entire Nation is a whole new factor, relatively speaking, in consideration of a sea-level canal.”67

Gravel’s testimony came back time and again to the present canal’s technological obsolescence. In response to questions about the decreased annual transits, and to Senator Jesse Helms’s claim that 98 percent of the world fleet could still go through the Panama Canal, Gravel used data he had commissioned to argue the opposite. Despite the drop in the number of ships, he argued that actual tonnage through the canal did meet earlier predictions due to the increase in average vessel size. However, because of its reliance on supertankers, the oil industry could no longer make the most of the Panama route, and thus the canal could only be said to have accommodated 42 percent of the world shipping fleet in 1977, a figure that would likely drop to 7.64 percent by 2000. Besides, Big Oil would not be the only beneficiary of a deep and wide new waterway; the U.S. construction, steelmaking, shipbuilding, dredging, coal mining, and West Coast timber industries would also profit. “Let us look at the economics of the future, and not the past. I would rather the Congress not fight about something that is obsolete,” Gravel implored his colleagues, in spite of the arduous campaign to replace the archaic 1903 treaty.68 He failed to see that for the antiratification forces, the original canal remained a living symbol of U.S. power, both in terms of past glories and future uncertainties in a post-Vietnam political culture.69

Gravel also tried to persuade his House colleagues that a new seaway would enable the navy’s largest aircraft carriers to cross the isthmus at a moment’s notice, rather than having to rush to a dangerous hot spot by way of Cape Horn: “You cannot put a price tag on it, because you do not know whether that 10 days would be the difference of [forestalling] nuclear holocaust in the world.”70 By invoking a national security nightmare in the vein of the Cuban Missile Crisis, he put a Cold War spin on the original military rationale for linking the oceans, the Spanish-Cuban-American War of 1898.

When grilled about the project’s environmental effects, Gravel revealed his terrestrial bias. The opposition of California and Washington politicians and citizens to building new ports and pipelines to transfer Alaskan energy “to the bowels of this country” meant, Gravel said, that “we are going to be faced with what we are doing today, which is essentially carrying the oil around the central part of the Western Hemisphere, in buckets.” Rather than fighting environmentalists over creating new inland pipeline systems—which would be prohibitively expensive regardless—why not make the most of the oceanic/isthmian route? Building the requisite infrastructure across the part of the continent that was only 50 miles wide (in Panama) as opposed to where it was 2,500 miles wide (across the transcontinental United States) offered the least damaging solution to conveying the vital cargo eastward. If the seaway caused marine species exchange or extinction, it was an unavoidable trade-off of economic prosperity: “It is an [inevitable] ecological displacement, over maybe some fish, or something else.”71

Gravel’s less garbled point that it would be difficult to overcome the environmentalist opposition to new transcontinental pipelines was significant given his own role in curtailing environmental critiques of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline five years earlier. His TAPS battle scars might have taught him a hard lesson about the persistence of environmentalist opposition, or he sincerely believed that investing in a sea-level canal made more sense than expanding the nation’s oil pipeline infrastructure. Either way, it fit the description of Gravel’s reputation in the Senate (which ended when he lost the 1980 primary election) as a “maverick” and “loose cannon.”72

Subsequent witnesses discussed the many significant world changes that had occurred since President Johnson’s Canal Study Commission had released its final report. But one thing that had not changed was the frustration of many biologists upon seeing the proposal reemerge with only token attention to baseline research. Two of the Smithsonian biologists who had lobbied for years for the natural-history inventories, administrator David Challinor and invertebrate zoologist Meredith Jones, testified on the second day of the hearings. When asked if the $3 million needed for a decade-long investigation would be worth it if the sea-level canal were ruled out on economic and national security grounds, they affirmed so by focusing on the value of the isthmus for addressing one of biology’s most fundamental concepts, the origin of species. As Jones explained, “here we have a readymade workshop for determining what is a species, in that at one point there was a continuous fauna from the Atlantic to the Pacific.” Analyzing how fish, urchins, and numerous other organisms had changed after being separated by the isthmian land bridge for some three million years would provide new insights for evolutionary biology.73

University of Miami fish biologist C. Richard Robins also testified on the importance of providing research funds, especially to continue surveying the Panamanian coasts and to analyze understudied existing collections of tropical oceanographic animal specimens. Robins had contributed to the infamous Battelle report that downplayed the threat of faunal mixing, and still seemed to harbor resentment against the biologists who had dismissed his team’s labors. In addressing the importance of providing opportunities for non-U.S. researchers, he made a not-so-subtle dig at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute: “On occasions when my colleagues and I have visited the University of Panama or have talked elsewhere to their scientists, we have always heard that they felt left out of scientific activities in their country by the Americans.”74 STRI, for which the Panama Canal Treaty included a special protective provision, had indeed attracted criticism for not including enough opportunities for local students and scientists. Under Rubinoff’s leadership, STRI increasingly expanded its Panamanian employment, training, and education programs, actions which helped the institution negotiate additional agreements with the government of Panama in 1985, 1997, and 2000 to continue operating in the former Canal Zone.75

Although no other researchers presented at the hearings, some harsh assessments by scientists made their way into the official record. William Newman’s acerbic 1972 reflection on the relationship between the Anderson Commission and CERIC appeared as “Attachment D,” and a private letter to Beeton from John McCosker, one of the few biologists who had published on the Panama Canal as an avenue of faunal exchange since the 1960s controversy, conveyed his distress regarding the megaproject’s revival: “I am disappointed, chagrined actually, to discover the resurrection of the Sea-Level Canal concept. I would have thought the previous exercise was satisfactory to demonstrate the futility of such an experiment before adequate baseline data had been collected.”76 This sense of disgust was captured in a separate publication by Gilbert Voss, one of the University of Miami biologists who had angered the CERIC scientists, in which he exclaimed, “not another sea-level canal!”77

Representatives of the environmentalist and conservation communities testified on the third and final day of testimony. Ortman of FOE delivered a sharp denunciation of the sea-level canal on several fronts, and his Not Man Apart article was entered into the record along with the telegram delivered to the White House on the eve of the Torrijos-Carter signing ceremony. A representative of the Izaak Walton League of America, a venerable organization of about fifty thousand anglers—almost twice as many members as FOE—also spoke. Both argued that Gravel’s bill did not afford adequate attention to ecological research due to its three-year timeframe, far less than biologists had requested.

One of the most interesting testimonies came from John Sheffey, the former executive director of the Anderson Commission. He remained convinced that a sea-level canal would be a better investment than the third-locks expansion project, which would be rendered obsolete as ship sizes once again increased. Yet he did not think it necessary to spend $8 million for a comprehensive new study. Instead, Sheffey supported an alternative bill by Representative John Murphy of New York to spend two years and $1 million to determine the feasibility of a new interoceanic waterway in accordance with Article XII; if the president then decided to proceed with the project, Congress would provide an additional $2 million to conduct an EIS in accordance with NEPA.78

When asked why the environmental study should not begin immediately, Sheffey showed that he still conflated the scientific sea-level canal authors with political activists, and that he expected scientific studies to convey a high degree of certainty: “My judgment, based upon the knowledge I acquired from the environmentalists during the 1965–1970 studies, simply is that they cannot tell you, over any length of time, definitively, whether or not there will be environmental harm to the ocean populations by making the canal.” He continued, “There is no possible way to make a laboratory model similar to the oceans, nor is any reasonable length of time sufficient to reliably predict what will happen.” The Rubinoffs and others had conducted breeding experiments in tanks and had towed species through the canal to start to provide a quantitative basis for predicting the effects of marine species mixing. For Sheffey, however, the fact that “some of the impacts will not be known for 50 or 100 years” justified long-term ecological risks in favor of immediate economic benefits. He considered the Erie Canal a case in point: even if people had known in the nineteenth century about the damage invasive sea lampreys would cause to the Great Lakes ecosystem, it would still have been worth building.79

Sheffey saw no reason to waste money on research for a megaproject that might not ever come to fruition—in other words, he did not understand the point of NEPA. As he saw it, once the president had decided for economic, military, and political reasons to build a sea-level canal, scientists would have plenty of time to conduct baseline ecological studies during the fifteen-year process of negotiating, planning, and building it. Even the needed geophysical studies, including in-depth analyses of subsurface geology, slope stability, and the hydrodynamics of ships moving through confined waters in variable currents, could await executive consent. When asked by an incredulous congressional staffer if he would support a decision to build a seaway without having completed a geophysical analysis, Sheffey replied, “Sure. We know we can solve the problems. There are not any unsolvable problems that could develop. Slope stability is merely a matter of excavation.”80 That he was as untroubled by the risks of triggering landslides as by unleashing oceanic bioinvasions exemplified the high-modernist mentality that an advanced state could manage any unintended consequence, ecological or otherwise.

At the hearing, Sheffey also provided deeper insight into President Johnson’s reasons for supporting the sea-level canal, or at least his perceptions thereof. Once built, its relative invulnerability to sabotage would preclude on-site U.S. defense forces, and its comparative ease of operation and maintenance would enable the host country to quickly assume day-to-day operations. In the meantime, during the many years of construction, the waterway would sustain U.S. hegemony in the region: “We thought that Panama, in return for the huge investment in Panama, would give us the right to build and control a sea-level canal for a longer period than we could continue to control the lock canal. The economic case for it, as you see in our report, was marginal; the political and military cases for it were quite good.”81

Sheffey had made a similar, controversial point regarding the Anderson Commission in 1970, when he let slip classified information about the group’s recommendation to the president. As Representative Flood had fulminated to his colleagues, Sheffey told a Wall Street Journal reporter that a major purpose of the sea-level canal was to achieve “excellent treaty relationships” between the two countries and to end the clashes over canal operation and sovereignty.82 At the 1978 hearing, a congressional staffer followed up by asking if Johnson’s proposal was “simply a gimmick to enable us to maintain a U.S. presence in the Canal Zone because our policy makers had lost the determination to hold onto the existing canal.” Sheffey bristled at the word gimmick, replying that Johnson had promoted the project “for the same reasons that the Senate has now ratified the new Panama treaties”—to facilitate the eventual transfer of the original canal to Panama. Johnson’s vision of the future seaway had held indubitable benefits for the United States, but that did not make it a scam; as Sheffey explained, the president had been advised that a seaway was “probably feasible and could facilitate longer U.S. tenure of a canal and reduce the military risk of our ultimate departure from the Isthmus.”83

In a separate interview conducted in 1979 by former ambassador to Panama William Jorden, Sheffey elaborated on the technological context of the seaway proposal: “Johnson really made this decision, I believe—the decision to negotiate [new treaties with Panama]—I believe under the very strong conviction that a very inexpensive sea level canal by nuclear explosives was in the cards.” Fifteen years after the Flag Riots of 1964, Sheffey still smarted from having believed the hype about PNEs. As he confided to Jorden, the Plowshare physicists Edward Teller and Gerald Johnson had oversold the nuclear canal to Johnson’s administration and many members of Congress, persuading Sheffey to change his life and career so as not to miss out on such an exhilarating endeavor.84

As for his argument for authorizing only a limited new study of the sea-level canal’s feasibility, Sheffey emphasized the long history of commissions that had investigated the canal question. “The isthmus has been studied for 300 years, and our study was an updating, in effect of the [19]47 studies” by the Panama Canal Company, which in turn had built on studies dating back to 1906 and earlier. “They all were built on the past, and there is not a lot of new knowledge to be acquired. The new things are economic and political, not technical.”85 It was a remarkable revelation of how quickly the promise of nuclear excavation technology had faded.

The economic and political circumstances of the 1970s did indeed differ significantly from those of the earlier periods during which powerful stakeholders had invoked the sea-level canal as an ideal solution to the problems of isthmian transportation, and U.S. control thereof. Yet Sheffey employed a very narrow conception of what amounted to “new knowledge.” Each phase of the controversial proposal generated novel understandings of nature and of how to engineer nature for diverse human goals. These insights in turn transformed anew the ideas of progress underlying the vision of the seaway of the future, giving rise to multilayered repercussions that would influence megaproject decision-making and statist environmental management in unforeseen ways for years to come.86

Conclusion

Sheffey misidentified the scientists who contributed to the 1965–70 sea-level canal discussions as environmentalists, yet by the time of the 1978 hearing, two of the most prominent biologists had embraced an activist role. Rubinoff spoke out against the project in an article that appeared in a 1975 volume associated with the United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea, a nine-year-long forum that led to an international agreement governing multiple aspects of marine resource use.87 More broadly, as STRI’s director from 1973 to 2008, Rubinoff championed many initiatives to elucidate and protect Panama’s marine and terrestrial biodiversity and to integrate the institute into Panama’s scientific and educational community.88

Edward O. Wilson, the Harvard biologist who served on the National Academy’s first canal committee, also inched toward advocacy in the succeeding years. He cited the sea-level canal “as an example of the worst thing that biologists might let slip by them” in a 1974 Harvard Magazine article that he later described as his “first venture into conservation activism.” He also called it his first explicit application of island biogeographical insights to conservation planning.89 To build a waterway capable of mingling the Atlantic and Pacific biotas “would be playing ecological roulette with all cylinders loaded.”90 Since then, the theory of island biogeography, which he codeveloped prior to the canal debate, has become what Wilson proudly calls “a foundation of modern conservation biology,” a mission-oriented discipline devoted to maintaining and restoring biodiversity.91

The renowned evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr, who worked with both Rubinoff and Wilson at Harvard and who chaired CERIC, did not participate in the 1970s-era controversy, nor did he address it in his later books on the history of biology. When Mayr died in 2005 at the age of one hundred, Rubinoff paid homage to his forgotten leadership of the National Academy committee. A journalist exaggerated Rubinoff’s words, writing, “If it weren’t for Mayr’s tenacity, the proposed canal would have destroyed 3 million years of isolated evolution.”92

The story was, of course, not so simple. Many other stakeholders during the decade after Mayr stepped away from the debate worked to ensure the government paid as much attention to the megaproject’s ecological effects as to its economic, military, and geopolitical ones. The National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 enabled citizen environmentalists to mobilize the insights of biologists in powerful, unexpected ways. Adapting to the NEPA requirements entailed a steep learning curve for the State Department and White House. The hurried, uncoordinated response to the environmental groups protesting the sea-level canal provision of the Panama Canal Treaty cast in sharp relief the rapid evolution of NEPA-influenced environmental management during the “environmental decade.”

The Carter administration spent a mountain of political capital to actualize the Panama Canal Treaties for both idealistic and pragmatic reasons. Transferring ownership of the canal and buffer zone righted the wrongs inscribed in the unjust 1903 treaty and eradicated an offensive relic of colonialism by recognizing Panama’s sovereignty over all its lands and resources. At the same time, the treaties ensured continued U.S. access to the interoceanic waterway and the right to send in troops to defend it if threatened.93 Despite all the blowback suffered by protreaty forces for their supposed surrender of an invaluable asset, the United States retained a significant stake in its long-term investment.

Lesser known provisions of the Panama Canal Treaty committed the United States and Panama to study and negotiate a sea-level waterway and to coexecute the agreement in environmentally sensitive ways. Carter and his diplomatic team sought to promote a more equitable relationship between the superpower and the small yet strategic nation, though they stopped short of immediately transferring all U.S. rights over the canal and its watershed to the Panamanian government. They also precluded Panama from negotiating with other wealthy nations to build a better seaway during the treaty’s twenty-two-year life span, and did not ensure that the treaty EIS analyzed Panama’s options for managing the canal watershed. At the same time, administration officials scrambled to prevent U.S. environmentalists seeking a stronger EIS from using NEPA to file a lawsuit against the State Department, an action that would have attracted adverse publicity and provided even more ammunition to conservative antitreaty interests.

Against all odds, the isthmian sea-level canal idea remained viable after both the demise of PNEs and the ratification of the new agreement with Panama. The seaway proposal survived because it performed important kinds of work for many different stakeholders in the context of the mid-to-late 1970s U.S. energy crisis. It provided an option for modernizing maritime transportation, for incorporating environmental values into public works planning, for prioritizing neglected forms of biological research, for considering the proper scope of extraterritorial environmental protection, and even for upholding remnants of the imperialistic status quo. Far from being a mere gimmick, the sea-level canal proposal provided powerful visions of alternative futures for those who skillfully deployed it.