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- 5 – Here, then, are the paradoxes at the core of this book: (1) the Panama Canal needs forests and (2) the canal had to be saved from machetes. Beginning with an examination of the conditions of possi bility for those two statements, the book examines both technical and governmental efforts to establish landscapes conducive to transportation, foregrounding the lived consequences of those efforts at their rural margins. In so doing, I develop four broader arguments about politics, ecology, and infrastructure.
- 2
- First, infrastructure is not a specific class of artifact or system, but an ongoing process of relationship building. Seen in this way, engineered canals and highways are surprisingly social and ecological. As temporary lines across active environments that erode, rust, and fracture them, infrastructures advance and retreat in relation to the capital and labor channeled into their construction and maintenance.
- 2 – co-control
- Second, infrastructures have grown long enough to encircle — if not encompass — the planet. These global infrastructures channel flows of people, goods, and wealth through certain areas (like the Chagres River basin) with feverish intensity, placing great demands on neighboring populations and environments. However, people and places are not “ globalized ”in any final way. Over time, they can be connected and disconnected, integrated and bypassed.
- 6 – Third, infrastructures produce environments, and vice versa. On the one hand, reservoirs, wetlands, reefs, forests, and other “ natural ”landscapes may be organized in ways that reflect the design, management, and politics of technical systems. On the other hand, the ecologies that accrete around infrastructures are irreducible to environmental effects or services. As landscape, infrastructures give rise to political ecologies with winners and losers.
- 2 – co-control
- Fourth, environmental conflicts may emerge at the intersection of competing global infrastructures that organize landscapes to “ serve ”different purposes, economies, or communities. Around the Chagres River, for example, transportation and rural development infrastructures have come into tension with one another, reconfiguring expectations, responsibilities, and social practices.
- 2 – co-control
- 10 – If we begin with these assumptions, then we are likely to ask questions that reproduce their logics, like: How do global forces affect a local community? Or, the same question reversed: How do people resist or refashion global forces? Yet both questions situate agency at “ larger ”or “ higher ” scales while treating “ smaller ”or “ lower ” — the local, everyday — as either passive or reactive.
- 13 – As such, infrastructure projects are fertile ground for what anthropologist Anna Tsing calls global conjuring. For her, globalism — a commitment to and public evocation of the global scale — strengthens other scale-making projects. . . . In this way, appeals to the global are used to build and remake localities. From this perspective, the globe begins to look like a multitude of scale-making projects reaching outward to attach themselves to different infrastructures, rather than a solid sphere. This was certainly the case in twentieth-century Panama.
- Co-control of global and local — or any two scales
- 31 – Because monte becomes organic fertilizer, roza agriculture as historically practiced in Panama cannot exist without it, just as mechanized farming depends on chemical fertilizers. 3 As a cyclical form of land management, roza agriculture is at odds with protecting stands of forests for transportation because it is organized around transforming forest into farm, which — ideally — will later become forest again.
- 3
- 35 – Roza agriculture is, despite critics ’assertions, neither a backward nor random system. It is, as anthropologist Stephen Gudeman observes, a sophisticated “ technology ”that integrates material implements like the machete, the labor of the agricultural cycle, and environmental knowledge. 7 And that technology produces a landscape. At the same time, monte’ s significance exceeds the crude economic utility of grass, bushes, and trees, because it is also a potent cultural shorthand for the sedimentation of work, place, and history as landscape.
- 1, 2, 3
- 55 – For these agriculturalists, the longer a rastrojo grows before it is cleared, the more nutrients available for the next crop on that land. Consequently, farmers weigh the maturity of a rastrojo against pressures and incentives to put land back into production as they make clearing and planting decisions. Or, to put it another way, land use is shaped both by the farmer ’ s relationship with the land and the location of that relationship within a broader political ecology that constrains and shapes choices.
- 2
- 58 – As the example of rastrojo illustrates, these landscapes do not have value in an absolute sense. Rather, they have a variety of potential capabilities that emerge in relation to particular uses. When a landscape is assigned value in relation to one infrastructure or cultural system of production (transportation) rather than another (agriculture), different services become relevant (water provision rather than nutrient delivery), and the landscape is reorganized to prioritize the delivery of those services and support that system.
- 2
- 67 – Watershed history might be defined along two axes. 15 The first axis is a chronological series of years in which the events of 1952 happened before the drought, water shortage, and signing of the Panama Canal treaties in 1977. But, as the watershed map illustrates, much of the environmental significance of 1952 was defined retroactively in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s due to the establishment of the watershed as a new political and administrative unit. The second axis, then, can be understood as the sedimentation of past years with new meanings and relevance. Or, to paraphrase Bruno Latour, the watershed of 1952 as it is known today does not have the same components, textures and associations as the Chagres River basin of 1952. 16 The forests mapped by Robinson alone, then Robinson and Alvarado, became the concern of a growing network.
- 3
- 97 – Most historians of the construction effort have focused on the Culebra Cut because of the drama inherent in a monumental struggle involving throngs of laborers (up to six thousand working at one time), hulking machinery and complex technical networks, and earth that seemed to actively resist the opening of the waterway by sliding into the cut as it was excavated.
- 2 – co-control
- 5 – Here, then, are the paradoxes at the core of this book: (1) the Panama Canal needs forests and (2) the canal had to be saved from machetes. Beginning with an examination of the conditions of possi bility for those two statements, the book examines both technical and governmental efforts to establish landscapes conducive to transportation, foregrounding the lived consequences of those efforts at their rural margins. In so doing, I develop four broader arguments about politics, ecology, and infrastructure.
- Historical narrative interspersed with ethnographic asides detailing the lives of smallholder farmers, inhabitants of the relocated versions of the “lost villages”, road trip across the transistmica
- 133-34 – Modern bananas might be described as an infrastructural species. . . . because they largely depend on human labor for propagation and transportation infrastructure for dispersal. As a result, they thrive along edge environments where transportation networks and lowland tropical ecology meet. Thus, the nature-culture borderlands of the Canal Zone — with its waterways, alluvial soils, train line, heavy rainfall, and nearby ports — provided ideal habitat for bananas.
- 2 – eco-freakology
- 193 – Movement between the highway and the community depended on the transportistas with access to motor boats and four-wheel drive trucks. 12 These men — rarely women — knew every pothole in the road and in the river intimately. Their knowl edge and labor linked the community to formal transportation networks . . ..
- 1
- 217 – Seeing an iconic canal through a weed illustrates how profoundly our infrastructures are entangled with our political ecologies. It reminds us that engineering marvels have not freed humans from the limitations of the environment, as we once hoped, but bound us more tightly and contentiously to landscapes and waterscapes of our own making. What emerged around the Panama Canal was neither a replica of engineers ’blueprints, nor an elevated version of the former riparian world along the lower Chagres River, but something new.
- 2 – co-control; freakology
- 220 – It used to be thought that, although environment might shape human life at primitive levels, where men were, it was said, more dependent on nature, culture-evolutionary advance, especially technical advances, consisted of a progressive freeing of man from such conditioning. But the ecological crisis has divested us all of that illusion; indeed, it may be that advanced technology ties us in even more closely with the habitat we both make and inhabit, that having more impact upon it we in turn cause it to have more impact upon us.
- 2 – co-control – Clifford Geertz