The Question of Diversity

Tracing the fieldwork and ideas of Robert H. MacArthur, Howard T. Odum, and Theodosius Dobzhansky, chapter 4 examines the post­World War II rise of efforts to capture the complexity of tropical nature using a simplified quantitative measure: species diversity. The new approaches were abstract but were shaped by U.S. biologists’ experiences in an increasingly wide array of sites within and beyond the circum­Caribbean—facilitated by the U.S. government’s interest in tropical warfare, demand for tropical products, and the growth in air travel. The rise of mathematical and systems approaches in ecology, along with the population perspective of the modern evolutionary synthesis, recast the old question of the biological difference of the tropics. The need for tropical data to solve biology’s core theoretical problems was now unquestionable.

Jungle Island

Tropical stations drew hundreds of U.S. biologists, few of whom would have attempted a rigorous tropical expedition on their own. In the 1920s through 1940s, Barro Colorado Island (BCI) in particular became a model tropical forest. Chapter 3 demonstrates how the station’s location on an island nature reserve within the Panama Canal Zone enabled unprecedented control over space and scientific labor. BCI was transformed into a scientific site by the removal of Panamanian settlers and through descriptions of the site as undisturbed and representative of tropical nature. It was maintained for science by the labor of Panamanian workers and through the development of a host of new techniques and technologies for the prolonged observation of tropical life. There, biologists were able to develop practices to monitor and census living tropical organisms as part of a complex, dynamic ecological community. BCI became increasingly accessible and observable—but only in certain ways and only to certain classes of people.

An American Tropical Laboratory

During the lead-up to the Spanish-American War, U.S. botanists looked with envy at the progress of European scientists, who had access to tropical colonies. They pushed for the creation of their own “American tropical laboratory.” Chapter 1 traces the origins of the U.S. tropical laboratory movement; the resulting rental of the station at Cinchona, Jamaica; and the first decade of research there by members of the founding generation of U.S. ecologists. This history reveals their range of motivations for engaging in tropical research, from the 1890s through the outbreak of World War I and the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914. The study of tropical organisms—with their diversity of forms and adaptations so foreign to those familiar with temperate flora and fauna—seemed to offer a path to a truly general understanding of living things. At the same time, U.S. botanists saw tropical research as the key to a place on the international scientific stage. U.S. botanists did not wait for state­sponsored colonial science. Driven by a distinct set of intellectual, cultural, and professional concerns, they were ready to filibuster for science to acquire an outpost for research in the Caribbean.

A Global Resource

The 1960s and 1970s saw a wave of highly influential publications on problems of the distribution and ecological controls on species diversity, which drew heavily on data from key tropical field sites. Yet, at this same moment U.S. scientists’ future in the tropics was thrown into question. Revolution swept Cuba and protests erupted in Panama against the U.S. occupation of the Canal Zone. U.S. tropical biologists confronted the loss of access to their most important tropical stations. They responded by realigning themselves, creating professional organizations, and taking new steps toward international collaboration. As chapter 5 explains, they also recast their justifications for the support of basic research. Tropical research was not merely in the U.S. national interest, they began to argue; understanding the biological diversity of the tropics was essential for sustainable global development.

Making Biology Tropical

Early efforts to create institutions for ecological research in the tropics were far more difficult to sustain financially than stations with agricultural goals. In the 1910s and 1920s, rival zoologists Thomas Barbour and William Beebe each drew on their wealth, corporate and political connections, and larger­than­life personalities to transform the landscape of basic tropical research. While differing in their spatial practices and relative emphases on taxonomy or ecology, both men argued that the study of life in the tropics was fundamental to a broad understanding of biology. Barbour argued that “tropical biology” was essential to solving the United States’ growing practical problems in tropical agriculture and medicine. Chapter 2 examines the stations they developed—Beebe in British Guiana, Barbour at Soledad, Cuba, and Barro Colorado Island (BCI) in the Panama Canal Zone—and how they leveraged U.S. economic interests in the tropics to further basic science.

From Tropicality to Biodiversity

Consciousness of tropical biodiversity exploded onto the scene in the 1980s following the 1986 National Forum on BioDiversity. Biodiversity was not a new concept to biologists, however. U.S. scientists’ engagement with life in the tropics already stretched back a century. During this time, scientists had struggled with questions of the biological differences of the tropics—especially its richness in species—and at the same time entangled themselves in U.S. corporate and government efforts to exploit tropical resources. American Tropics argues that both the key scientific concepts and the values embedded in the modern biodiversity discourse had significant precedents in biologists’ involvement in U.S. encounters with the tropical world over the course of the twentieth century, centered on the circum­Caribbean region. This book argues that the ideas, attitudes, and institutions forged at field sites in the colonies and neocolonies of the circum­Caribbean are crucial for understanding the emergence of this new paradigm in biology and conservation at the end of the century. Long before the BioDiversity Forum extended such ideas to the globe, U.S. biologists had begun both to articulate fundamental biological questions raised by the diversity of tropical life and to argue for its potential as a natural resource.

Postcolonial Ecology

American Tropics closes with an examination of the postcolonial situation of tropical research in the circum­Caribbean. Today, the institutions that are the most important and heavily used by U.S. biologists for tropical research and teaching are located in independent republics: the Organization for Tropical Studies (OTS) in Costa Rica and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI)—since the 1979 dissolution of the Canal Zone—in Panama. Key players in the move to bring “biodiversity” to the public stage in the 1980s were tropical biologists who had deep connections to OTS and STRI during the previous two decades of transition. The emergence of the modern biodiversity discourse, this book argues, is a direct product of the intellectual and political ferment of tropical biology during that revolutionary period. The significance of that moment, in turn, can be understood only in the context of the full twentieth century and its mixed legacies for tropical biology—the development of place­based research practices and a long­standing dependence on institutions supported by U.S. corporations and government agencies.