This blog republishes the ‘Snapshot’ article by Henry Jacobs that first appeared in Environment and History 29.2 (May 2023) addressing the history of the Panama Canal Zone Summit Gardens in the context of concerns about extractivism and exploitation, depletion and species extinction.
James Edgar ( J.E.) Higgins ‘devoted his entire life to tropical agriculture’ and in service of American power abroad.[1]After receiving degrees from Acadia and Cornell University in 1895 and 1898, he launched a career in the burgeoning US empire’s outlying possessions. Higgins earned postings at Agricultural Experiment Stations in Hawaii, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. These experiences instilled his passion to circumvent the depletion of US resources through developing the country’s offshore territories. Higgins pursued this mission upon relocating to Panama in 1927; there, he assumed the directorship of the Panama Canal Zone Summit Gardens (Summit), a site the US founded in 1923 to obtain horticultural specimens. Tracing Higgins’s career at Summit, which lasted until his death in 1938, elucidates the contours of notions about scarcity at the gardens. Paradoxically, prospects of diminishing resources, rather than prompting action towards conservation, impelled Higgins to exploit the landscape with greater vigour.
The roots of Higgins’s extractivist ambitions lay in his anxieties about shortages. In his own words, Panama would be ‘scientifically managed’ to yield ‘inexhaustible’ supplies to the US and allay such fears.[2] Resorting to hyperbole, hehoped that Summit would transform into a premier repository of reserves. If ‘nature’s storehouses’ become empty, Summit might reinvigorate from its ‘soil… the world’s commerce and industry’.[3] To prepare for such conditions, Higgins acquired and tested thousands of plants for their use to the government and businesses.
This concise survey reviews three of the numerous trials Higgins championed, aiming to reveal their breadth. Analysing Summit’s efforts to cultivate teak, pineapple and rubber indicates the potency and precariousness of scarcity as an idea. As Higgins vaunted, this ‘vision… extended far beyond the confines of this narrow strip of country’.[4] Summit specialists viewed Panama as a laboratory where they could experiment, produce and export resources without limit. Convinced that expertise alone would realise Panama’s agricultural potential, they introduced seeds and ideas to meet pressing needs in America.
This study propounds that these undertakings engendered further capitalist consumption and entrenched colonial hierarchies. The final section chronicles how Summit refashioned itself into a place of recreation after Higgins’s tenure and then reflects on its direction after Panama gained control of it; I conclude by ruminating on how Panama’s management of Summit today suggests the value of shifting wildlife preservation responsibilities from the Global North to South.
Between Anxiety and Abundance: Teak, Pineapple and Rubber at Summit
Higgins’s apprehensions about dwindling American environmental assets and his trust in Panamanian land coalesced into an almost-utopian scheme to turn Summit into an environmental wellspring for America. Upon assuming office, Higgins articulated his philosophy in dramatic terms: without agriculture, life ‘is an uninviting waste in which no man would care to live’.[5] But the horticulturalist did not regard Panama just as a way for America to sustain itself; instead, he considered it a means to prosperity. With the minds and ‘the hand of man’, the director aspired to ‘transform the jungle into gardens, orchards, and plantations’, diverting profits and goods back home.[6] His teak, pineapple and rubber projects were distinct but all exhibit Higgins’s optimism about taking advantage of ‘dormant, vast undeveloped agricultural resources, capable of producing… a score of other tropical products’.[7] He expected that Summit would become a ‘garden spot at the crossroads of the world’, one ships would not just pass through, but stop to visit.[8] Yet this conviction also betrayed Higgins’s condescending outlook. He judged that ‘whatever develops tropical agricultural production’ in Latin America ‘tends ultimately to benefit the United States’.[9] Fundamentally, he deemed only white ‘hand[s] of man’ worthy of handling the jungle.[10]
Higgins’s attempt to mitigate deforestation in the US by mass-producing teak in Panama demonstrates how he sought to battle deficits through further exploitation. In 1928, he first expressed uneasiness about dwindling timber supplies. While brooding on the repercussions of logging in the US, he warned that ‘the necessity of protecting these forests may, at any time, become pressing’.[11] Adopting a sombre register, he acknowledged that ‘trees are not immune to destruction as the people of the United States are learning’.[12] He appreciated the gravity of this situation and the necessity of action, even going so far as to ponder preservation. However, Higgins banished these reservations when he coauthored a 1936 report,‘Possibilities of Teak Production’. Higgins and his colleague T.W. Braddy stated that teak suited the gardens ‘because of its limited production and consistently high price’.[13] Since teak was rare, they predicted that it would not face competition over costs. Employing a utilitarian logic, the scientists sought to convert the tree’s ‘economic importance’ into a realised ‘promise of usefulness’.[14] Despite the fact that it would take decades for saplings to become viable lumber, the pair waxed about the ‘possibility of production’, an undefined yet glowing future.[15] If all progressed smoothly, loggers in denuded American landscapes could feel sanguine about stocks of teak in Panama. Higgins’s abandonment of his earlier thoughts on protecting trees exemplifies how scarcity, with its attendant economic ramifications, pushed him to pursue growth as an end in itself.
A similar impulse framed Higgins’s intent to introduce Hawaiian and Puerto Rican pineapples to Panama, deepening the imbrication of colonialism and science at Summit. Even before Higgins took hold of the gardens, his colleagues complained that Panama cultivated too few fruits. In their eyes, ‘The Canal Zone should be essentially a fruit-growing region’.[16] Given his background, Higgins felt he was the ideal person to bring this vision to fruition. He solidified Summit’s ties with his three former employers in Hawaii, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. By exchanging seeds within this network, Summit indirectly strengthened the links among America’s far-flung territories. Eager to introduce pineapple types from US overseas holdings, scientists expressed excitement about two varieties; after all, the Cayenneserved as ‘the basis of the Hawaiian pineapple industry’ and the Spanish was responsible for ‘the prosperous pineapple industry of Porto Rico’.[17] In turn, the report hoped that Summit could be ‘a base for expansion’ akin to Hawaii and Puerto Rico.[18] Higgins also sought to emulate European empires’ hothouses in Asia and the Caribbean. Citing the British, Dutch and French, he maintained that ‘Government-supported botanic gardens’ invigorated the ‘great colonial agricultural industries’.[19] Panamanian pineapples, he reasoned, would be perfect for Americans, ‘the greatest consumer of all tropical products’.[20] With this circular movement of cash and fruits, ‘every dollar would ultimately return to the Treasury increased many fold’.[21] Thus, his target to make a ‘profitable investment for surplus capital’ by ‘supplying tropical raw materials’ advanced the Zone as a colonial hub, placing Summit’s scientific endeavours under the aegis of America’s expansionist mission.[22]
Moving from colonial to corporate power, the trajectory of rubber at Summit shows how economic distress prompted the garden’s alliance with industrial conglomerates. Even in its early days, Summit addressed ‘the important question of raising a high grade of commercial rubber’.[23] In fact, two D.C. committees travelled across South America, collecting 600 trees worth of rubber seeds for the Zone. After an auspicious decade of maturation, Higgins opined Panama could become a prominent actor ‘in the world rubber situation’ and revive American commerce.[24] For this reason, ‘one of the largest rubber-producing and manufacturing interests in the United States arrived on the Isthmus to investigate the adaptability of this country for Hevea rubber production’.[25] After this visit, the unnamed corporation created a few-thousand-acre plantation and entered an agreement to receive rubber from Summit’s nursery. Through this partnership, Summit eased the corporation’s reliance on its Asian estates. The following year, botanists celebrated their expanding rubber market, handing over 50,000 trees to the company. But Higgins, who died in 1938, would not witness Summit rubber’s apex during WWII. Given the Axis threat, businesses needed more rubber from Panama than before. In 1942 alone, 250,600 of Summit’s seeds went across the hemisphere ‘in the interest of further developing the rubber industry’.[26] However, this demand waned as the Cold War détente settled in, reducing the significance of Zonian rubber.
Conclusion
The downturn of rubber in Summit paralleled the organisation’s decreasing value to the US. After WWII, the gardens became less a centre for experimentation and more a diversion. Although Summit still distributed impressive quantities of plants, it no longer held the purpose that Higgins envisioned: in many ways, the space came to resemble a pleasure garden and zoo.
A 1957 newspaper piece announced this conversion: ‘Summit Garden isn’t Summit Garden anymore. It’s Summit Park now’.[27] The article documents how ‘visitors to Summit can spot a marked change from the Garden of the past’ with revamped paths and caged animals. A picture of two relaxed, well-dressed white women ambling down a lush route encapsulates this switch from Higgins’s credo. The caption ‘visitors feel as if they are in the jungle when they walk down this shady path at Summit Park’ epitomises how the site now endeavoured to recreate the feeling of being in the wild but in a comfortable, safe way.[28] Even further, the essay title ‘Won’t You Walk In The Park?’ invites readers to enjoy the scenery too, an invitation distinct from the one Higgins offered.
Higgins never lived to see, nor did he imagine the possibility of, Panamanians becoming the stewards of Summit. In the wake of the 1977 Carter-Torrijos Treaties, Panama gained ownership of Summit and recalibrated its balance between scarcity and abundance. Since this handover, Summit has evolved into an animal refuge. Ultimately, the staff hopes to protect these species so they can return to their habitats. Thus, viewers can still see representatives of Central American wildlife but on different terms from before. Moreover, educational programmes inculcate in guests an appreciation for Panama’s resources and a desire to conserve them.
Reflecting on Summit’s history is relevant to current concerns on depletion and species extinction. Even if Higgins conceded the consequences of unchecked exploitation at times, he nonetheless advocated for further production and usage of resources in Panama. His annual reports articulated a vernacular of hopeful capitalism, capturing his view of Panama as a place where things could continually be produced and taken. But this view proved dangerous. Treating Summit as a panacea for America’s environmental problems enabled figures like Higgins to avoid appreciating the consequences of this extractive perspective. Indeed, this case points to how social norms about humans’ dominance over nature both contradicted reality and weakened our ties to nature.
That said, Higgins acted not from malice but anxiety; his life and work, then, provide insights into how individual and collective choices and beliefs brought us to the climate predicament of the twenty-first century. His tale offers a warning about overreliance on outside expertise, the power of fear and the possibility of unintended outcomes from well-meaning actions. Indeed, juxtaposing Summit’s past and present ownership underscores the importance of dissecting colonial histories of land management. Summit’s story equally implies the necessity of multilateral cooperation to confront scarcity and conserve our future.
Henry Jacob
Yale University
[1] Canal Zone Experiment Gardens, Annual Report of the Canal Zone Experiment Gardens (Mount Hope, C.Z.: Panama Canal Press, 1939), p. 6.
[2] Gardens, Annual Report (1928), p. 8.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Gardens, Annual Report (1929), p. 8.
[9] Gardens, Annual Report (1928), p. 8.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Ibid., p. 9.
[13] Gardens, Annual Report (1936), p. 44
[14] Ibid.
[15] Ibid., p. 49
[16] Gardens, Annual Report (1925), p. 5.
[17] Gardens, Annual Report (1928), pp. 24-25.
[18] Ibid., p. 28
[19] Gardens, Annual Report (1928), p. 10.
[20] Ibid.
[21] Ibid.
[22] Gardens, Annual Report (1930), p. 8.
[23] Gardens, Annual Report (1924), p. 4.
[24] Gardens, Annual Report (1936), p. 10.
[25] Ibid.
[26] Gardens, Annual Report (1942), p. 83.
[27] Panama Canal Review, ‘Won’t You Walk In The Park?’ 6 Sept. 1957, p. 2.
[28] Ibid.
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