Weeds: New Ecologies of the Panama Canal and the Canal Zone Biological Survey

The construction of the Panama Canal (1904-1914) has often been characterized as modern man’s ultimate “conquest” of tropical nature through science and technology. To be sure, engineers, administrators, laborers, and technologies collectively transformed landscapes across an entire region by excavating massive volumes of soil and reorganizing a major river. In this paper, however, I argue that rather than focus exclusively on the environmental “effects” of the construction project, we should also attend to the hybrid forms of nature produced through the process. New locks and dams interacted with known and unacknowledged webs of relationships among humans and non-humans. The ecologies that emerged were neither a replica of engineers' blueprints, nor an elevated version of the flooded world that had formerly existed along the Chagres River. As construction approached completion and the US government depopulated the rural areas of the Canal Zone between 1910 and 1913, the area underwent a reverse colonization as new plants and animals occupied the clearings produced through engineering and governance. Post-construction landscapes facilitated the expansion of some actors (fish, recreationalists, natural scientists, and water hyacinths) and reduced opportunities for others (big cats, deer, and small farmers). This paper draws on the observations of US natural scientists as they collected specimens and surveyed a region undergoing rapid change. I focus specifically on the Canal Zone Biological Survey, a multidisciplinary effort funded by the Smithsonian and provided with scientific personnel by US governmental agencies to document the rapidly changing isthmian environment between 1910 and 1912. By focusing on this survey in particular, I situate the construction of the waterway in the natural scientific concerns and practices of the period and explore how canal administrators, engineers, scientists, and rural people engaged one another.