In the third installment of <i>This Is Planet Earth,</i> <b>Mitchell Stephens</b> rides a container ship through the Panama Canal and finds out how this ninety year-old artificial passageway still shapes the world order.
I boarded the Sea Jaguar, a huge container ship, near Colón, Panama -- right at the Atlantic end of the Panama Canal. The ship itself proved to be a pretty impressive example of globalization: It was built in Korea in 1997. Its owners are German, but it has been leased to an American company, Crowley American Transport. The Sea Jaguar, with German officers and a Filipino crew, spends much of its time plying the waters of Latin America, moving truck backs filled with electronics, chemicals, ice cream (kept in refrigerated containers), aluminum foil, keyboards, cosmetics, bananas, and just about anything else that will fit into one of these rectangular metal boxes.
Seven skinny decks have been squeezed between the rows and stacks of those containers to accommodate the crew of nineteen and, on this voyage, one passenger. I’ve been given a living room, bedroom, shower, and three solid, Filipino-cooked, German-style meals a day. In between meals, I’ll type on my laptop, circumnavigate the main deck, visit the bridge, and, with some frequency, nap. I highly recommend life as the only passenger on a freighter to those interested in pondering the effects of technology on globalization, musing on the sea’s vastness and talking to themselves.
We leave the dock, where giant cranes have been adding and subtracting from our store of containers, and begin to move. Not far. The Sea Jaguar drops anchor just outside the mouth of the canal. I count about two-dozen ships, similarly tethered, nearby. Up on the bridge, various other impatient captains can be heard on the radio, in English with various other accents, asking when their turn to "transit" might come. After twelve hours, a pilot finally arrives on a small boat. Ladder lowered, he climbs on board. It’s our turn.
The Panama Canal was finished just when an earlier era of globalization ended -- in August 1914. They had a pretty good little age of innovation going back then: the telegraph, cables under the oceans, steamships, railroads, the telephone, radio, the first automobiles, the first airplanes -- distance-eating innovations, innovations in many ways more world-changing than those of our own era. And this was a time when you could travel around most of the world without a passport or visa. Global trade was booming before the First World War.
And the little slit they made in the Americas, this passage into an ocean Europeans didn't even know existed four hundred years earlier, should have been one of the most productive of those innovations. Except that era ended. Europeans set about murdering each other in trenches. A depression came, then an even more brutal war. Curtains were hung; containment practiced. There were more and more places you couldn't travel, even with a passport. Our current age of globalization in some sense dates only from 1989.
And guess what is now a big part of it? How do you think -- how did I think -- all those Japanese cars find their way to Long Island? How can they drink Evian in San Francisco? How do Nikes make it to the malls of New Jersey from those cheap factories in Thailand? They ain't moving this stuff over fiber-optic cables or the Internet! It’s all those ships waiting their turn to be lifted, at tens of thousands of dollars a transit, over the Americas.
The containers the Sea Jaguar is weighted down with are another example of a technological advance we don’t talk about much that has profound implications for world trade. It is a lot easier to move a container from ship to shore to truck to train than it is to move a pile of bananas or even a bunch of boxes filled with cosmetics. A lot more bananas and cosmetics are now, consequently, moving.
Those containers are also an example of a technological advance that has led to worldwide standardization: Every truck, every railroad car, every ship that wants to get in on this global lugging game has to be prepared to handle a box of one of two precise sizes -- full (40' x 8' x 8' 6") or, less commonly, half. No choice. No alternative. (For its voyage, the Toyota I drove to Panama from New Jersey was "stuffed" into a half.) And those two sizes were chosen to fit American roads, as individuals who hail from lands with narrower roads have, with some resentment, reminded me.
The Sea Jaguar moves into the first set of locks just as the sun is setting. And I admit to some excitement, riding a ship through the Panama Canal (even if your aunt and uncle did take a cruise ship here once). I’m up on the bridge, on top of the ship’s narrow stack of decks, looking around and down. There seems, though the pilot does not appear concerned, little more than a meter between the fat Sea Jaguar and the concrete walls of the lock. I guess we’ll squeeze through, but clearly the world’s ships aren’t going to be getting any wider.
After a couple of sets of locks raise us about eighty-five feet, the canal spreads out into a long lake, which was made by damming the Chargres River. (In fact, the Panama Canal runs mostly north-south, and its Atlantic end is actually slightly to the west of its Pacific end.) I tire of watching the captain pace and of listening to the pilot say things like, "starboard twenty," and go out to a dark deck to sit, observe, and, with the help of lithium ion, type. The Sea Jaguar, I note, is following a path of blinking red and green lights through this lazy lake -- passing little dot islands. I’m hearing faint tweety and chirpy bird or animal sounds, as well as the putter and metallic vibrations of the big ship itself -- an awfully impressive piece of machinery in its own right.
Technology is, of course, the great wildcard in the globalization debate.
People have moved from one country to another before -- my grandparents, for example, quite possibly yours. People have imposed cultures on others before -- gently or, more commonly, brutally. In Panama, to take one of a thousand possible examples, the language most people speak is hardly indigenous; the religion most of them practice is hardly indigenous. (And aren’t those two particular foreign impositions just a little more significant than the soda these people may now be drinking or the sneakers they may now be wearing?) People have also borrowed ideas from other cultures before -- inevitably, incessantly, to the point where, once you start investigating the history of music, art, food, or soap operas, it is almost impossible to determine where one culture begins and another ends.
If the world can be seen as a giant paint can full of cultures, that paint can has certainly been stirred before. Cultures have mixed, blended into each other, sometimes disappeared before. But neither Spain, when it was colonizing Panama, nor my grandparents had access to the amazing machines for moving entertainments, information, people, and things that we have developed. The question is whether our spiffy new technologies are stirring -- or can be expected to stir -- that paint can with unprecedented vigor. Will the multicolored patterns we are now seeing -- a swirl of exotic restaurants, world musics, and peripatetic peoples -- eventually blend into a dull brown? A new academic book out in France -- where this possibility is much fretted over nowadays -- bears the grim title: La Planete Uniforme.
Canal construction is hardly cutting-edge technology. While the digging of this particular ditch required innovations in lock design, in mountain leveling, and in disease fighting, rearranging rivers is a pretty old trick for human beings. You can stumble across old canals (their mule paths reduced to jogging trails), or streets named after now extinct canals, all over the eastern United States, Europe, and Asia.
Nevertheless, as we’re lowered by a final set of locks and released into the Pacific, I am struck by how much our current age of globalization owes to this one venerable ship elevator. It owes a lot, too, to the internal-combustion engine, a more than hundred-year-old technology, and to airplanes, which have been around for almost a hundred years. Our current age of globalization is also deeply and increasingly in debt, of course, to television, a technology now about seventy-five years old. And our goods are being lugged through the canal on what are essentially updated, steel-clad steamships, like the one I’m floating on -- amalgams of various, mostly nineteenth-century technologies.
It takes a while before such technologies really come into their own. This, not anything Wilbur and Orville saw, is really the age of the airplane. Television, now that we’re beginning to get a decent selection of channels, seems to be just starting to mature. And the Panama Canal? They have a sign next to one of the locks saying, in Spanish and English, "A Canal for a New Millennium." It’s hard not to conclude, based on what I've seen today and tonight, that its time is right now.
Which brings us to the question of what more recent technologies are likely to contribute to globalization -- to, in other words, the Internet question.
What right have we to conclude that whatever happens to be going on with the Web today or in the next fiscal quarter indicates the power of this new technology? (Got that Nasdaq?) It may be a long while before we see the more profound contributions this worldwide information and entertainment pump is going to make to stirring up human cultures. If the eighty-six-year-old Panama Canal is a driving force in globalization today, the Internet may become the driving force in some future, even more powerful age of globalization.
Mitchell Stephens is a Professor of Journalism and Mass Communication at New York University and the author, most recently, of
the rise of the image the fall of the word (Oxford). You can read more about his travels at roadthinker.com.
Other articles by Mitchell Stephens
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