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Emergent Ecologies
By Eben Kirksey Duke University Press
Copyright © 2015 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7480-0
CHAPTER 1
PARALLAX
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Barro Colorado Island is an "open-air biological laboratory" in the Panama Canal. It is run by the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, and its activities are outwardly united by a single goal: "to increase understanding of the past, present, and future of tropical biodiversity and its relevance to human welfare." At this facility, long-term projects have been established around specific research questions and focal organisms: the dispersal of seeds by mammals, the population dynamics of canopy trees, the pollination ecology of euglossine bees, symbiosis and parasitism in fig trees, and the neuroethology of bats. Many biologists on Barro Colorado Island are knowledgeable about the historical forces that have shaped their island laboratory. Egbert Leigh's influential textbook, Tropical Forest Ecology: A View from Barro Colorado Island, clearly states, "Barro Colorado's biota is in no sense 'pristine.'" Despite this historical consciousness, I found depictions of reified Nature in the Smithsonian's archives that only gave room for some forms of culture.
Rewinding past more than one hundred years of history, to early U.S. military adventures in Central America, and then fast-forwarding back again, produces a parallax effect — a mode of three-dimensional depth perception that emerges when nearby objects move against a distant backdrop. Early visitors who toured the Panama Canal experienced "stereoscopic visions," in the words of Ellen Strain, where tourism doubled as a mode of time travel. Learning to view the landscape through hand-operated stereoscopes, containing a pair of photographs that used the parallax effect to produce three-dimensional illusions, visitors came to view Panama "as the ideal tourist object with its natural wonders — tropical fruits, luxuriant vegetation, the Rio Grande River, fresh water springs, and scenic bays — and its combination of an intriguing past, an exotic present, and a bustling future which lies ahead." Contemporary scientific objects — like euglossine bees, symbionts, and parasites — gain depth when viewed against the backdrop of these earlier objects of wonder and when situated within the political and economic forces that shaped the ecology of Central America. President Teddy Roosevelt helped create the nation of Panama in 1903, supporting separatist insurgents and initiating a naval blockade against Colombia. On the heels of this military action, the United States took over the construction of the Panama Canal — a spectacular marvel of engineering that facilitated the flow of global commerce, fortified an emergent empire, and created a "living laboratory."
Barro Colorado Island was gradually created by the rising waters of the Chagres River after U.S. engineers installed a dam in 1914 during the construction of the Panama Canal. Widespread cutting and clearing of the forest from the nineteenth century, from the French attempt to build a canal, left a lasting impact on the northeastern half of the island. After Barro Colorado Island was declared a reserve in 1923, an ecosystem emerged that served U.S. strategic interests and the desires of biological scientists. Seven Panamanian farmers who remained on the island were eventually forced to leave. "Remnants of the plantings of bananas, oranges, limes, guava, etc., are still encountered in the bush," according to a 1924 clipping in the Smithsonian archives, "although all cultivation by natives is now a thing of the past." "The island is set aside solely for the purposes of scientific study," according to another early archival document, "and hence no hunting permits, or tree-cutting permits will be issued for this natural preserve except for scientific purposes."
Administrators were preoccupied by Panamanian incursions onto this nature reserve even though activities by the U.S. government were arguably much more ecologically destructive. The Smithsonian archives are relatively silent on the impacts of the Panama Canal on local flora and fauna, as some twenty-two square miles of rain forest and farmlands were expropriated by the United States and drowned under floodwaters. Hunters with historical ties to the lands of the Canal Zone became "poachers" who were routinely fined, detained, and sometimes assailed with gunfire. While researchers from the United States were given permits to capture, kill, and collect animals and plants on Barro Colorado Island, other uses of forest resources by Panamanians were strictly prohibited. "Whatever destruction takes place is that which is ordered by Nature and which is the law of the wild," according to a 1931 article by James Zetek, the first director of Barro Colorado Island. "Plants grow, reach maturity and die. They have their enemies. So also animals grow and die, must fight for their existence. They also have natural foes. But Man is out of this picture. When he comes to the island he is a peaceful intruder. He comes to study, not to destroy."
James Zetek's own research on Barro Colorado Island was focused on the destruction of certain kinds of life. Financial backing from the American Wood Preserver's Association, the Grasselli Chemical Company, and the Southern Pine Association, among other sources, enabled him to test the efficacy of a variety of poisons on termites. Alongside research initiatives that directly aided U.S. commerce, a multitude of other projects emerged within the architecture of empire. Despite being dramatically shaped by industry and agriculture, this man-made island quickly became the premiere site in the Americas for studying tropical ecology. The island was viewed by early researchers as an exotic field site for adventures in the present, which contained the mysterious secrets of nature's past, where new discoveries might unlock future possibilities. It became a site of pilgrimage for aspiring scientists. Visiting became "a rite of passage," in the words of Pamela Henson, a historian at the Smithsonian Institution Archives. "A field trip to the tropics [was] a route to fame for young North American naturalists."
The historical archives of the Smithsonian are full of accounts by young men whose lives and careers were transformed by encounters with other forms of life in the Panama Canal Zone. Surprising behaviors by monkeys and ants, as well as uncanny features of plants and fungi, captured the imagination of visiting researchers and prompted new studies of ecological interdependency. As Barro Colorado Island became a key institution supporting the fledgling discipline of ecology, certain categories of people were excluded from the social world of this new science. Social separation was naturalized among humans even as ecological entanglements were discovered. An architecture of apartheid initially separated men from women and whites from "coloreds" at this Smithsonian research station. "The first women to conduct field work in the tropics encountered many of the well-known barriers to professional women," writes Pamela Henson, "as well as the challenges of dealing with unfamiliar environments and cultures." Disputes about whether or not groundskeepers of "white descent" should have the privilege of using the white toilet, the same toilet used by researchers, were among the contentious subjects animating the correspondence among founders of the biological station.
Barro Colorado Island, with its sharply divided social worlds, was a microcosm of the Canal Zone — a place of U.S. military operations that was off-limits to Panamanian citizens who did not carry a special pass. Gamboa, the nearest town, was designed by the U.S. government "to reflect and facilitate a system of industrial relations based on a rigid class and racial hierarchy ... with a sharply segregated workforce divided by a dual wage system into 'gold' (white/U.S.) and 'silver' (non-white/non-U.S.)." The Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute began administering Barro Colorado Island in 1946. Even after the dual wage system was abolished in 1948, segregation continued to be "a powerful institutional and cultural force" in the Canal Zone. The architecture of many buildings, such as the clinic, contained separate entrances, waiting rooms, examination rooms, physicians' offices, and overnight quarters for "silver" and "gold" social categories.
Those who were privileged enough to belong to the gold social category participated in a government-sponsored utopia. The gold workers enjoyed a stable and comfortable lifestyle in the policed atmosphere of the Canal Zone — with sports facilities, movie theaters, and churches all built in a series of planned towns. Social harmony and stability, very much in line with Sir Thomas More's original novel Utopia (1516), prevailed there in contrast to the chaotic state of affairs in Panama and Central America more broadly. Like other utopian projects, there was what Foucault regards as "a panopticon effect" in these planned towns, with spatial systems of surveillance built into the landscape. In Gamboa, workers' houses were carefully arranged, with the lowest-paid living close to the canal in a low valley, and the higher-paid supervisors living on a ridge overlooking the scene. Imagination and authoritarianism came to life there, as part of the broader midcentury new urban movement described by David Harvey in Spaces of Hope.
Expatriate U.S. citizens who took up long-term residence within this Canal Zone utopia began calling themselves "Zonians." A third-generation Zonian, who masquerades online under the anonymous username of killbyte, has posted photographs on Flickr and snippets of text that offer candid views of a social world united by doing fun things together amid a military occupation: "I am indeed part of a small, privileged group that belong to a dwindling, elite club that will never exist again. Yes, perhaps it was an experiment in US colonialism — they made sure we retained our US heritage by importing everything cultural that made us feel like US citizens, but we were distinct enough in the sense that we could go into the rain forest & use it as our own private playground. The jungle swimming holes were amazing!"
Forested ecosystems on the banks of the Panama Canal, and the surrounding watershed, became linked to the life of global commerce in the 1970s. Ashley Carse, a cultural anthropologist, suggests that nature became part of the U.S. government "infrastructure" in Panama for storing water and regulating its flows. Agricultural methods of Panamanian farmers, which involved periodically clearing the forest in swidden systems, came to be seen as "the specter of commercial death" for the canal. The forest for these campesinos was not a fixed object, a green space on the map, but a dynamic system, an emergent ecology, tied to their own economic livelihoods. A 1978 essay by Frank Wadsworth, "Deforestation: Death to the Panama Canal," mentions a number of factors contributing to water scarcity in the canal system — drought, ship traffic, and municipal water use. But, ultimately, only Panamanian agricultural practices were targeted by policy makers. Parklands and nature monuments were created as farmerswere pushed from their lands with a combination of financial incentives and military operations. Policing operations in the forest where expatriate Smithsonian scientists worked also intensified. "Poachers still roamed the more distant portions of Barro Colorado almost at will in the early 1970s," writes Egbert Leigh in Tropical Forest Ecology, "but poaching on the island was almost entirely suppressed by 1985."
By 1997, when I made my own initial pilgrimage to Barro Colorado Island as an undergraduate research assistant, armed forest rangers (guardabosques) were still a visible presence at Smithsonian facilities. The entitlements of white Zonians were rapidly dwindling, even though some measures of distinction and segregation were in place. My U.S. passport continued to grant me privileges — like entry to the old Officer's Club on Clayton Army Base. My citizenship also facilitated my initial access to Smithsonian facilities. A forty-minute boat ride separated the Smithsonian's living laboratory from Gamboa, and it remained inaccessible to ordinary Panamanians who could not afford to pay for a day-long guided nature tour. In the 1990s, local historical memories were haunted by the 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama that killed some three thousand civilians and deposed President Manuel Noriega (who had formerly been regarded as a CIA "asset"). Future uncertainties also loomed large on the horizon. The United States was slated, in accordance with international treaties, to give the Canal Zone to the nation of Panama on December 31, 1999. But messages from powerful political factions in Washington signaled that the planned transfer of sovereignty might not take place.
The project that initially brought me to Panama as an undergraduate assistant was indirectly in the service of U.S. geostrategic interests — it was research that would potentially benefit the citrus industry. The electric ant (Wasmannia auropunctata), an insect native to Panama, had become a common agricultural pest in the southern United States. Fruit pickers were demanding premium wages to work in infested orange groves in Florida, because the ants can deliver a painful sting, like an electric shock. They were notorious for swarming inside the workers' clothes. The electric ant had become a cosmopolitan insect, ranging over many different countries, free from national limitations or attachments. Spreading in areas disturbed by humans, it had invaded ecosystems emerging around human agricultural schemes. Hitching a ride in shipments of produce, nesting in rolled leaves or dead sticks or almost anywhere, this nomadic species had taken up residence in West Africa, Melanesia, Polynesia, and islands throughout the tropical Americas.
Electric ants in Panama live within a diverse community of other ants in leaf litter on the forest floor. The project that brought me to Barro Colorado Island in 1997 sought to understand if competition with these other species helped regulate electric ant populations. During the fieldwork stage of the project, my role involved placing tuna fish baits at marked spots on the ground, collecting ants at the baits, and identifying them under the microscope back in the lab. While gathering data in tangles of underbrush, dripping with sweat from the sweltering heat, I became familiar with the habits of Ectatomma ruidum — one of the largest ants at the baits, which frequently wrestled large chunks of tuna fish away from smaller competitors. I came to easily recognize Ectatomma with my naked eye and began to follow these charismatic insects away from the tuna baits, on alternate lines of flight.
Most ant species vigorously defend the boundaries of their colony — killing intruders from different colonies of the same species on contact. For most ant species, the stranger is the enemy "with whom there is the real possibility of a violent struggle to the death." Casual observations of Ectatomma ruidum suggested that this species is different from most ants — in a certain sense it is exceptional, in fact. While studying "competition" among leaf litter ants, I found surprising forms of collaboration among Ectatomma ants. Spending hours casually watching different colonies, I watched ants carry food, larvae, other workers, and even winged queens between distinct nests. Making my own informal experiment, I put up a barrier around one focal Ectatomma colony and let the ants continuously collect tuna fish bait for an hour. After removing the barrier, and the bait, I watched as tuna fish was redistributed. Ants exited the focal colony and carried it into the nests of neighbors. Minutes after watching tuna entering one neighboring nest, I watched as it was carried out again to an even more distant nest. As I spent more time watching Ectatomma, I found that guards will sometimes stand in the nest entrance and occasionally bite or drag away Ectatomma ants from other colonies that are trying to get inside. But often the nest entrances stand empty. Ants actively guarding the nest entrance also sometimes stand aside, letting members of neighboring nests pass unmolested. Once inside, these ants have access to caches of food.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Emergent Ecologies by Eben Kirksey. Copyright © 2015 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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