Abstract
Reviewed by: Aaron G. Victoria, University of Florida, USA
There are stacks of publications that are dedicated to the engineering tasks in the construction of the Panama Canal. Ashley Carse, however, sets out to tell a different history of ‘the big ditch.’ He redirects the reader’s attention to the technical and government efforts to establish the landscape to construct and maintain the canal, while foregrounding the lived experiences of these efforts at the rural margins. Carse situates this history in the realm of post-global flows theory. He shows how the canal project forges complex relationships of interdependence between environment–community–politics instead of overly simplistic impact-oriented dichotomies of connection/disconnection or conquest/resistance.
An argumentative thread that runs through Carse’s work is that infrastructure is never complete. Nature continues to grow, political interests change and regional communities adjust. For Carse, this is especially true for the Panama Canal – which requires constant maintenance and preservation to ensure its functionality. He demonstrates this by focusing on the overlapping interactions between campesinos (e.g. peasants), the Panama Canal transportation infrastructure and the Panamanian government’s rural development programme as they contend within the same geographical space, currently known as the Panama Canal watershed. It is an approach that seeks to complicate emerging connections across infrastructural networks and conceptualize scale as an ongoing achievement that is always being reworked.
One of the more valuable aspects of Beyond the Big Ditch for readers of transport history is Carse’s engagement with the Pueblos Perdidos (Lost Towns) of the old and new Gatun Lake (Ch. 7). In this chapter, the ethnographic richness of the project peaks. Carse tells the story of the town of Limón as a community historically connected to the transit economy of the Canal Zone. Prior to the construction of the Panama Canal, Old Limón emerged around the economic opportunities of Chagres river transit at the confluence of banana farms and railroad traffic. By the beginning of the 20th century, political interests shifted towards an interoceanic canal. The canal crews flooded the river to create the primary water reservoir for the lock system that would enable the transit infrastructure to function. Carse illustrates how systematic flooding submerged the riverside towns – including Old Limón – and their residents resettled along the new shorelines of Gatun Lake, finding new opportunities in the transportation of passengers along the lake shores. Carse uses the Pueblos Perdidos to reinforce another of his key arguments – that infrastructures connect networks, while disconnecting others. They ‘rework landscapes in a manner that facilitates new connections and opportunities, but, also creates barriers and forecloses alternative possibilities’ (p. 130).
Carse draws upon a well-informed collection of resources to craft this history of the Panama Canal watershed. These include ecological surveys, government documents, life history interviews and the expansive field of infrastructure studies among others. There is a respectable dose of professional input from quintessential Panamanian researchers – such as Stanley Heckadon Moreno, Francisco Herrera and Alfredo Castillero Calvo – who are at the forefront of ecological, campesino, and infrastructure work within the country. Their contributions resonate through the book, but are most present in the discussion titled ‘Making the Panama Canal Watershed’ (Ch. 3). In this chapter, Carse calls upon existing research to resolve questions about the history of the term Cuenca (watershed) and watershed management programs that reoriented rural settlement patterns along the shifting fringes of the Canal territory.
It is Carse’s collection of life histories, however, that add crucial voices to the project and capture a third valuable theme of the book – rural people make sense of their relationships with transit infrastructure through landscape change (p. 8). Carse captures the stories of Boquerón residents who recall how local road projects reoriented their connection to the land. Much like his outlook on infrastructure in general, the histories that he presents situate the road as remaining always unfinished. The ongoing construction projects waxed and waned as political interests in the region shifted from logging, to agricultural production, to manganese extraction. A most recent shift toward canal watershed management, Carse explains, required the canal administration and regional communities to ‘establish new relationships and disconnect existing networks built to reorganize landscapes for different purposes’ (p. 203).
This work is a useful extension of the current dialogue within transit infrastructure and mobilities studies. The author hits on many of the key themes within this field: infrastructural relationships are ongoing and multi-scalar, infrastructures influence behaviour, but do not determine it, and researchers should see and embrace the complexity of infrastructural worlds. Not only does he effectively distil the events of a massive global infrastructure project into a manageable, tightly focused watershed history but he also successfully demonstrates the usefulness and applicability of an ecological approach to problematize the complex relationships that emerge around transit infrastructures. His ecological perspective attunes readers to mundane components of infrastructural worlds and their deeply rooted influences on everyday mobility. He demonstrates this point in a chapter dedicated to weed maintenance on the edges of Gatun Lake and its feeder rivers (Ch. 12). Carse reminds readers that infrastructures are embedded in the landscape. Without maintenance, they will eventually be retaken by the active environments that they seek to cross.