Deep Cut: Science, Power, and the Unbuilt Interoceanic Canal

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has generously provided a grant to make this book available in digital formats, allowing for a broader audience to access its content.
The Atlantic-Pacific Central American sea-level canal, often considered a failure, is examined in Deep Cut by historian Christine Keiner. The book explores the canal's historical context, its advocates, and its political and scientific purposes. It challenges the notion of the canal as a failed scheme and highlights its significance in diplomatic, scientific, and ecological contexts. The grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has made the book accessible in digital formats, expanding its reach.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 240 pages
Publication date: 30 December 2020
Publisher: University of Georgia Press

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has generously provided a grant to make this book available in digital formats. The Atlantic-Pacific Central American sea-level canal is often considered a spectacular failure, but Deep Cut takes a different approach, examining the canal as an anticipated infrastructure project that captured attention from the nineteenth through the late twentieth centuries. Its advocates included naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, physicist Edward Teller, and U.S. presidents John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Jimmy Carter. The waterway did not come to fruition, but as a proposal, it served important political and scientific purposes during different eras, especially the years spanning the Cold War and the "environmental decade" of the 1970s. Historian Christine Keiner shows how the evolving plans for the sea-level ship canal performed distinct kinds of work for diverse historical actors in light of shifting scientific, environmental, and diplomatic values. Dismissing it as a failed scheme prevents us from considering the political, cultural, and epistemological processes that went into constructing the seaway as an innovative diplomatic solution to rising U.S.-Panama tensions, an exciting research opportunity for evolutionary biologists, a superior hydrocarbon highway for the oil industry, or a serious ecological threat to marine biodiversity. Invoking past dreams and nightmares of peaceful nuclear explosives, invasive sea snakes, and the 1970s energy crisis, Deep Cut uses the Central American seaway proposal to examine the changing roles of environmental diplomacy and state-sponsored environmental impact assessment. More broadly, Keiner amplifies an emerging conversation around the environmental, scientific, and political histories and legacies of the canal.

Weight: 440g
Dimension: 152 x 228 x 21 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780820338958