Paul S. Sutter

Nature's agents or agents of empire? Entomological workers and environmental change during the construction of the Panama Canal.

This essay examines the role that entomological workers played in U.S. public health efforts during the construction of the Panama Canal (1904–1914). Entomological workers were critical to mosquito control efforts aimed at the reduction of tropical fevers such as malaria. But in the process of studying vector mosquitoes, they discovered that many of the conditions that produced mosquitoes were not intrinsic to tropical nature per se but resulted from the human‐caused environmental disturbances that accompanied canal building. This realization did not mesh well with an American ideology of tropical triumphalism premised on the notion that the Americans had conquered unalloyed tropical nature in Panama. The result, however, was not a coherent counternarrative but a set of intra‐administrative tensions over what controlling nature meant in Panama. Ultimately, entomological workers were loyal not just to the U.S. imperial mission in Panama but also to a modernist culture of science and to the workings of mosquito ecology as they understood them.

New Deal Conservation: A View from the Wilderness

In late 1934 and early 1935, just as many of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s (FDR) conservation initiatives were taking shape, several of the era’s most distinguished environmental activists—including Aldo Leopold, Bob Marshall, Benton MacKaye, and Robert Sterling Yard—came together to form the Wilderness Society, the first national organization dedicated to the creation and protection of a system of wilderness areas on America’s public lands. Over the previous decade and a half, the founders of the Wilderness Society had cobbled together what we know today as the modern wilderness idea, one that found a statutory home in the Wilderness Act of 1964, but the New Deal context was crucial to the coalescence of modern wilderness advocacy. The single most important facet of the Wilderness Society’s early advocacy was the group’s united opposition to the threats that roads and automobiles posed to the nation’s remaining wildlands. These pioneer wilderness advocates were “driven wild,” pushed into a new brand of preservationist advocacy by a growing love affair between Americans, their automobiles, and wild nature.1 Such threats to wilderness were pronounced throughout the interwar era, but they climaxed during the early New Deal as the federal government deployed an army of unemployed workers on the public lands, many of them charged with building roads, trails, and other modern improvements designed to open the public domain to motorized outdoor recreation.