Beyond the Big Ditch ─ Politics, Ecology, and Infrastructure at the Panama Canal

In this innovative book, Ashley Carse traces the water that flows into and out fromthe Panama Canal to explain how global shipping is entangled with Panama's cultural and physicallandscapes. By following container ships as they travel downstream along maritime routes and tracingrivers upstream across the populated watershed that feeds the canal, he explores the politics ofenvironmental management around a waterway that links faraway ports and markets to nearby farms,forests, cities, and rural communities.

Carse draws on a wide range ofethnographic and archival material to show the social and ecological implications of transportationacross Panama. The Canal moves ships over an aquatic staircase of locks that demand an enormousamount of fresh water from the surrounding region. Each passing ship drains 52 million gallons outto sea -- a volume comparable to the daily water use of half a million Panamanians.

Infrastructures like the Panama Canal, Carse argues, do not simply conquernature; they rework ecologies in ways that serve specific political and economic priorities.Interweaving histories that range from the depopulation of the U.S. Canal Zone a century ago to roadconstruction conflicts and water hyacinth invasions in canal waters, the book illuminates the humanand nonhuman actors that have come together at the margins of the famous trade route. 2014 marks the100th anniversary of the Panama Canal. Beyond the Big Ditch calls us to considerhow infrastructures are materially embedded in place, producing environments with winners andlosers.

Ashley Carse, an anthropologist, is currently a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Science, Technology, and Society at the University of Virginia.