Beyond the Big Ditch: Politics, Ecology, and Infrastructure at the Panama Canal (Infrastructures) Illustrated Edition

Thanks.

This book offers an in-depth and detailed report on the Panama Canal region’s history, and especially the entanglements between environment and humans, as well as the global and the local. It shows that the Panama Canal is not only important for transit, but it is embedded in social and political issues, hydrology and infrastructure. The chapters are well-balanced between almost personal, ethnographic reports and stories from local people as well as the author’s personal experiences, and historical facts that are told as a compelling story of this complex region.As an overarching argument, the author seeks to show that the Panama Canal’s infrastructure goes beyond what people built. It is interwoven with individual fates, international politics, and environmental issues. The book discusses issues ranging from deforestation and the Panama Canal’s hydrological problems, its unique topographic richness that makes Panama globally important, the era of the banana, the disconnect of Panama’s rural regions from the city and the rest of the world through a deliberate lack of roads and other transitways, ways in which people have and still are struggling against nature (from diseases to weeds) and many more. It offers therefore a many-faceted insight into a region that I was previously not very familiar with. The most compelling aspect of these chapters are the photographs and images, some of which the author himself took, as well as the meetings with local people that the author describes with respectful detail.I enjoyed reading this book, and I would recommend it to anyone who, like me, was previously unfamiliar with the rich history of the region. I believe it to be a good introduction to some of the issues that Panama and especially the Canal Zone were historically plagued with. For a more detailed approach of single aspects, however, other literature should be consulted.Even though I enjoyed the book very much, as I was reading the Kindle version and there were some grammatical misspellings and mistakes in punctuation that sometimes confused me, I am only giving it 4 out of 5 stars. If I had to quote passages, this would be unacceptable.