Sea Snakes and Sovereignty: The Panama Sea-Level Canal Debate and Its Contributions to Cold War Environmental Diplomacy and Tropical Marine and Invasion Biology

From the early 1960s through the 1970s, the U.S. government spent considerable capital investigating the feasibility of replacing the Panama Canal with a non-lock waterway, a plan originally spurred by the economic promise of nuclear engineering. The proposal generated a storm of protest among scientists who faulted officials for downplaying its risks, but because the megaproject never came to fruition the sea-level canal debate has been all but forgotten.  However, the controversy is worth remembering as a foundational initiative of environmental diplomacy between the United States and its strategic ally, Panama, and for the ways in which a group of researchers stimulated interest in marine biotic interchange and tropical ecology at a time when such subfields remained on the margins of academia. Led by biologists associated with the Smithsonian Institution, who had struggled to promote tropical research since taking over the Panama Canal Zone’s Barro Colorado Island in 1946, the controversy featured the then-novel issue of non-native marine species exchange as a potentially greater threat than radioactive fallout.  Framing the proposed canal as a fait accompli, Smithsonian biologists and administrators publicized the situation as a unique opportunity for promoting the isthmus as a strategic site for investigating the biogeographic origins, maintenance, and loss of tropical marine biodiversity.  Though their risky strategy irritated diplomats, engineers, and some fellow biologists, the Smithsonian provocateurs succeeded in forcing officials to acknowledge the project’s environmental costs, and in demonstrating the social relevance of trans-isthmian ecological and evolutionary research long before the “biodiversity crisis” or “invasive species” became household words.  The sea-level canal controversy serves as a useful lens for examining the changing postwar roles of scientists in international environmental politics, with respect to identifying both new perceptions of risk associated with megaprojects and to raising awareness of the importance of tropical marine and invasion biology.