Beyond the Big Ditch: Politics, Ecology, and Infrastructure at the Panama Canal by Ashley Carse (review)

Correction:
The title of the book being reviewed has been corrected. The word "Economy" in the title was replaced by "Ecology".

Ashley Carse’s book is another welcome addition to a growing literature on infrastructure. The kinds of infrastructure studied vary widely, from infotech to flood control, as do the analytic approaches adopted. Carse frames his study in terms of the politics of environmental management. As seems to be the fashion in cultural anthropology these days, he opens his book through the voices of others. We learn from a Panama Canal tour guide announcer about the canal infrastructure as hardware and engineering achievement. That particular day happened to be Earth Day, and in this context the announcer represented the canal as a “sprawling, living organism.” The water for the storage reservoirs is secured by the surrounding rain forest and the announcer explains that “it’s basic and simple: no rain forest, no canal” (p. 2). This opening sets the stage for the analysis of the political ecology of the canal.

The main arguments are laid out clearly and are well-supported by the evidence marshaled. The author begins with what he describes as two core paradoxes: the canal needs forests and it needs to be protected from the machetes of the local population. In this context he sets out four arguments about politics, ecology, and infrastructure. First, infrastructure is not simply an artifact or system, but an ongoing process of relationship building. Second, infrastructures like the Panama Canal are global. They channel flows of people, goods, etc., across the globe. But this is a process that is never complete in that various human and non-human elements are dis/connected, integrated, bypassed, etc., in varying ways over time. Third, infrastructures produce environments and vice versa, and this gives rise to political ecologies where not everyone is a winner. And fourth, environmental conflicts result as infrastructures rework landscapes in ways that serve different purposes and people.

The author seeks to shed “new light” on old questions by viewing the canal as an “organism clothed in treaties, legislation, and institutions” (p. 7). The term “clothed” does not, however, capture what is demonstrated here: that the canal is assembled from all manner of human and nonhuman elements. The infrastructure is not so much wrapped in social clothing as fabricated from heterogeneous elements. Carse says as much at another point in the book, but could have linked the discussion more directly with actor-network theory (ANT), with which the approach resonates. With respect to the “environment,” the author argues that it has always been part of the management of the infrastructure, though by other names. He implies and even seems to acknowledge that there was no such thing as “environmental management” before the 1960s; speaking about the “environment” before the mid-twentieth century is anachronistic. The term would have had no meaning for the actors during the construction of the canal, and thus its use requires explicit analytic justification. Showing how the “environmental movement” emerged and constructed “the environment” as an object of science and governance, and thereby shifted the management of the canal (assemblage) in specific ways, would have shed more new light on it. In fairness, this is my own historiographical bias. Nonetheless, the author does shed new light on how infrastructure and “nature” are entangled and thus bring different ways of knowing into tension.

Carse also attempts to shift how we think about politics by drawing on a growing body of work that conceptualizes “the state” as a material entity constructed through engineering works and policies of various kinds. This is a welcome contribution that adds another demonstrable case to the argument. There is a tension in the analysis, however, since the author often refers to the state as an actor in its own right rather than a discursive, organizational, and material effect of actions (human and non-human) over long periods of time.

Finally...