Even after the Article XII fiasco, and after Congress rejected the bills proposed by Senator Gravel and Representative Murphy to conduct a new set of feasibil-ity studies, President Carter remained intrigued by the promise of a seaway for conveying Alaskan oil to the energy- starved East Coast. As the hearings to enact enabling legislation for the Panama Canal Treaties heated up after the 1978 mid-term elections, environmental groups renewed their efforts to convince Carter to change course. President David Brower of Friends of the Earth, along with the
directors of ten other influential NGOs, sent the president a letter on January 30, 1979, asking him to follow through on the State Department’s intentions for the joint environmental oversight commission of the existing canal and to oppose any further congressional efforts to authorize a new study: “We see no need for haste and recommend that a decision concerning a Sea- level Canal study not be made part of the current implementing legislation.”2
Most members of Congress appeared to be on their side; when the House Committee on Merchant Marine and Fisheries asked the congressional Office of Technology Assessment to analyze the Panama Canal Treaty EIS, the parties agreed in the summer of 1978 not to address the sea- level canal. The Office of Technology Assessment staff did, however, consult with four of the biologists who had contributed to the 1960s debate (Rubinoff, Jones, Robins, and Sanders) and noted their concerns about the EIS’s lack of attention to the consequences of pumping seawater into the existing canal during droughts.3
The Panama Canal Act of 1979 did not authorize funds for new seaway feasibility studies, but it did echo the language of Article XII committing the two nations to study the issue. Otherwise, the congressional debates over im-plementing the treaties focused on military and economic issues. The enabling laws took effect just three days before the treaties entered into force on October 1, 1979, the first day the Panamanian flag flew alone over the former lands of the Canal Zone.
The possibility of cutting a new canal west of the Zone revived yet again in the new decade. Although the 1970 report of the Anderson Commission had generated revilement in the United States, the Japanese read it eagerly.4 By 1980, Japan’s postwar economic transformation was nearly complete, and it had em-barked on a series of overseas development projects to secure strategic resources and its status as a global economic behemoth. The country’s thriving economy would benefit enormously from a second Central American waterway, as the president of the Japan Chamber of Commerce and Industry and former head of Nippon Steel, Shigeo Nagano, explained: “We can bring through the canal at far cheaper cost grains from the United States Midwest, coal from West Virginia, oil from Venezuela, iron ore from Brazil.”5
The estimated costs of building a sea- level waterway along the Route 10 site west of the Canal Zone had ballooned to $20 billion (including $8.3 billion for construction alone). But having a channel measuring 650 to 1,300 feet wide and 110 feet deep appeared worth it to the Japanese, whose ships accounted for over one- third of the Panama Canal’s traffic. The lock canal could not accommodate vessels larger than 40,000 tons, and thus a seaway large enough for 300,000- ton
tankers—designed to carry raw materials going to the island nation and automo-biles and consumer electronic goods leaving it—would represent the pinnacle of Japanese technological mastery.
Japan’s shipbuilding industry had exploited the 1967–75 closure of the Suez Canal by developing very large and ultra- large crude carriers and, later, special-ized dredging technology for widening the Suez.6 During the 1970s, the Panama Canal had gone from being able to accept 90 percent of the world’s ships to less than 40 percent, and the number of vessels passing through had declined from 15,500 in 1970 to 13,200 in 1976 to 12,000 in 1978. Panama likewise had a great interest in not allowing the canal to become obsolete once it acquired full control in 2000.7
As the Panama Canal’s wealthy, second- largest user, Japan commanded the attention of the U.S. and Panamanian governments. In January 1980, several Japanese bankers and businessmen visited Panamanian president Aristides Royo to discuss a $30 million feasibility study.8 Five months later, in a Washington meeting with Prime Minister Masayoshi Ohira, Carter joked about the United States providing the engineering and equipment and Japan providing the money for a new sea- level waterway. He concluded that while it did present some envi-ronmental problems, they did not seem insurmountable.9
As in 1977, Senator Mike Gravel served as “the main catalyst behind this effort,” as an administration official informed the president’s assistant for na-tional security affairs, Zbigniew Brzezinski, in March 1980. Anticipating that once again Gravel “might do an end- run to the President on this issue,” Carter’s lieutenants sought to manage the situation by “giving him a little bit more in-formation” about the plan to inform the Panamanians and Japanese of the pres-ident’s interest in a tripartite feasibility study.10 The Alaskan senator had trav-eled around the world seeking financing opportunities for his passion project, even visiting Japan with Panamanian diplomat Eduardo Morgan, who declared,
“If the feasibility study is positive, then the sea- level canal project cannot be stopped.” Gravel shared his thoughts in a 1979 interview with William Jorden, who as ambassador to Panama had played a major role in brokering the canal treaties and who was writing a book on the subject. “Had there been strong sup-port either from the Panamanians agitating or the White House, I would have got legislation last year [1978] that would have brought about the study,” insisted Gravel. It was still not too late: “I feel that if we made a ‘go’ decision in ’81, that it could be completed by ’87.”11
Yet no one else in Congress shared his enthusiasm, leading Gravel to a sad prediction: “And so it will just languish around until about 1990. Everybody will
wake up and recognize it is highly obsolete and say, well, hell, we ought to do something, and we will have missed 15, 20 years.”12 Jorden later interviewed Dep-uty Secretary of State Warren Christopher about whether he foresaw a sea- level canal being built in the next twenty years. Christopher replied that it depended on how much Japan would want to contribute and pointed out that Gravel’s defeat in the 1980 Alaska primary had removed from Congress the one member most committed to the issue.13
Following the May 1980 Carter- Ohira meeting, Japan, Panama, and the United States agreed to begin discussions on how to implement the tripartite study. The deliberations did not begin, however, until the administration of Ronald Reagan, who defeated Carter in the November 1980 election. By the time representatives of the three nations met in 1982, another major change had occurred: the Panamanian government had contracted with a U.S. company to build a pipeline near the Costa Rica border to transport North Slope crude oil eastward. Completed in 1981 with private financing, the eighty- one- mile- long Trans- Panama Pipeline proceeded without any state- mandated environmental review.14 (By contrast, after five years of regulatory delays and environmental-ist lawsuits, the U.S.- based Sohio oil company canceled its proposed $1 billion California- to- Texas pipeline and port in 1979.)15
The Trans- Panama Pipeline dimmed but did not kill the sea- level canal; fol-lowing six meetings, the three nations established the Commission for the Study of Alternatives to the Panama Canal in 1985. Like the Anderson Commission of 1965, it had an ambitious five- year agenda to analyze the impacts of a sea- level canal, modifications to the present one, and overland options such as pipelines or container- rail transit. Unlike the previous group, however, the new commission was explicitly tasked with determining the environmental and social, as well as the economic and political, impacts of such alternatives.16
Yet the questions raised in the 1960s about nonnative marine species ex-change remained inchoate, underfunded, and unfamiliar, even to its Japanese boosters.17 When the U.S. ambassador to Japan, Mike Mansfield, asked Shigeo Nagano about the sea- level canal’s environmental problems, Nagano replied:
“We have no intention of using nuclear explosions in the construction.” Mans-field, a former Democratic senator from Montana (who had retired just before the canal ratification votes), explained, “I’m asking about what will happen when the waters of the Pacific and the Atlantic oceans flow together and the marine organisms which have been separated for hundreds of millions of years mix to-gether.” Nagano was dumbfounded, a sign that the scientific and environmental-ist communities still had much work to do in Japan—and elsewhere.18
Ecological sensitivity was also in short supply at a 1986 international gath-ering in Anchorage, Alaska, devoted to megaproject planning. Organized by a Swedish think tank, the International Federation of Institutes for Advanced Study, the conference featured presentations on such projects as a moon city, a dam across the Bering Strait, an Alaska- Norway ice highway, a river diversion network from the Pacific Northwest to thirty- three U.S. states and Mexico—
and the Panatomic Canal. Then in his late sixties and working as a private con-sultant, John Sheffey reminded the audience of the benefits of nuclear dynamite, while conceding that a thirteen- megaton charge “would rattle windows 105 miles away.” Regardless, political obstacles now posed “insurmountable problems” to nuclear geoengineering. Likewise, laughed the ice road proponent, the biggest hurdle would be having to file an environmental impact statement.19
After Reagan officials of the Council on Environmental Quality and the En-vironmental Protection Agency declined to help draft the terms of reference for the tripartite seaway study commission, the State Department asked the Smith-sonian Institution to step in. The SmithSmith-sonian representatives remained focused on the need for a biological baseline survey because the isthmian coasts and oceans remained woefully underresearched: “Everything that follows must be founded upon a firm taxonomic and ecological base. Only when this is done, can we properly assess the possible environmental effects on an interoceanic canal or any other alternative.”20
The needed scientific work remained unfinished, however, and by 1990 the prospects for the sea- level canal faded once again.21 The Japanese stock market crash of 1989 led to a “lost decade” of growth and the end of its Lessepsian am-bitions for a second Panama Canal.22 Moreover, the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1989 to remove the dictator Manuel Noriega—whom officials accused of threat-ening the Panama Canal’s neutrality—refocused attention on whether the na-tion could manage the original waterway within a decade, let alone build a new one. After the 1979 transfer of the Zone lands to Panama, many of the embittered Zonians who remained in the country blasted the Panamanian government for not cutting the grass properly, and reminisced about the Zone’s similarity to “a beautifully manicured golf course,” a function of the Panama Canal Company’s well- funded mosquito- control practices and large groundskeeper force.23 More substantively, Panama had to deal with the problem of cleaning up unexploded ordnance left behind by the U.S. military and with implementing new forms of canal watershed management.24