From the naturalist's point of view, "there's an insoluble conflict between the Panama Canal Authority's demand for sustainability and the unsustainability of Panamanian social relations." Such was the warning that the Panama Audubon Society heard from Guillermo Castro at its October 10 regular meeting. Castro, a graduate of the National Autonomous University of Mexico and the University of Havana who works as an administrator at the City of Knowledge and teaches at the University of Panama and USMA, summed up the nation's options: "We develop the country, or we underdevelop the canal."

The audience, composed of Audubon Society regulars plus a few people from the Panama Canal Authority, did not see a blueprint for changes that need to happen, nor did they get Castro's opinion about whether the canal ought to be expanded. They did get an overview of the problems that need to be solved and the questions that need to be asked.

The traditional Panama Canal Watershed, which includes the Chagres River, Gatun Lake, Madden Lake and their tributaries, plus the Rio Grande and Miraflores Lake and their tributaries, encompasses 5,527 square kilometers. The Western Watershed, which was established in a lame duck legislative session in August of 1999, contemplates the damming of the Indio, Caño Sucio and Cocle del Norte rivers, whose combined watersheds encompass another 2,131 square kilometers. The canal watershed is home to less than seven percent of Panama's population, but nearly 75 percent of all Panamanians depend on its resources, most often for the water they drink or the canal economy upon whch their jobs directly or indirectly depend.

"We're talking about a human creation" Castro said of the existing canal watershed, that rarest of river systems that drains into two oceans. "It's not permanent --- it takes constant attention to maintain it."

The proposal to create a second lake to provide water for the canal has sparked bitter controversy, with most of the residents who stand to be displaced objecting and finding allies in the Caritas Catholic social ministry, the environmentalist movement and leftist groups. The Panama Canal Authority has mobilized a minority of Western Watershed residents, part of the Catholic heirarchy and some environmentalists to its side. In any case, the most basic studies, such as the measurement of how much rain falls on the Western Watershed, have yet to be completed. Though critics fear sudden and uninformed moves for the benefit of narrow special interests, any definitive decision to proceed with the project, let alone a construction start, is years away.

Linked, but not inextricably so, to the decision about expanding the watershed to the west is the question of building a third, larger set of locks, one that can accomodate ships that are too big to transit the Panama Canal in its present configuration. A third set of locks would clearly require additional water resources, whether from the Western Watershed or by building another dam up the Chagres River from Madden Lake. Even without the third locks, however, there are some who advocate the contemplated new lake to the west on the grounds that the extra water is needed to run the canal during El Niño drought years and to supply the demands of urban areas.

According to Castro, in the decade of the 90s the canal used 94 percent of the water that was taken from the canal watershed, while the IDAAN public water and sewer utility used six percent. Broken down further, the Panama Canal used 60 percent of the water to run the locks and 34 percent to generate electricity.

Managing competing and sometimes mutually exclusive demands for uses of the watershed's land and water resources is one of the key tasks facing the nation, Castro noted. Will the water be used for the canal or for the cities? Will the land be forest, cow pasture or urban sprawl? What kinds of roads will be developed, and what will those choices imply? And thus the case was made for policies and plans.

It's not a simple matter, Castro argued. Sure, on the grounds of maintaining biodiversity and preventing erosion that fills the canal with silt, it's easy to say that the policy should be to discourage cattle ranching in the watershed. "On paper it looks good, but in reality you're dealing with people."

Then there is the matter of conflicting political jurisdictions. In the 1940s this didn't matter very much, because the central part of the existing watershed was managed by the authorities in the former Canal Zone and the periphery was so sparsely populated that land use issues there meant little to the watershed's overall health. But then the Trans-Isthmian Highway, originally built as a wartime military road, opened up for civilian use and in the 50s people flocked to it, chopping down the jungle for homes, farms, cow pastures and commercial developments. The wildlife was hunted and deprived of its habitat, and the streams filled with sewage and trash. More and more people moved in, as Panama shifted from a mostly rural to a mostly urban society. Along with the people came local political subdivisions and national government agencies that often had conflicting aims. Though legislation passed in 1997 gave the Panama Canal Authority the last legal word on decisions that affect the watershed, that hasn't entirely ended the rivalries among public entities. The fragmented political structure, Castro asserted, "conspires against all integral management goals."

The professor waxed philosophical, citing the old notion that when a problem has been solved, that only raises new and more complex problems. He detailed how the watershed was mentioned as an issue in the Panama Canal Treaties, but that for nearly 20 years the Panamanian government paid scant attention to it. Without taking sides, he hailed the dispute over the damming of the Western Watershed as a move toward democratization, one that has taken watershed management out of the exlusive domain of experts and into Panama's political dialogue, and that has brought isolated communities into an unprecedented relationship with the rest of the nation. Noting that canal officials now come to the University of Panama to discuss and debate policies when they never did so before, Castro expressed his hope that the unfolding watershed management process will "stimulate a new environmental culture."

Though he said that the people who negotiated Panamanian sovereignty over the canal could not have known the extent of it, assumption of that responsibility implies vast social changes for this country. Whether the banks of the canal are stolen by rich people with the right political ties, turned into subsistence farms and shantytowns for the poor or managed in a more judicious way, Panamanian society and its governance will be transformed by the result. "There are no solutions to the watershed's problems just within the watershed," Castro argued. "The watershed's problems are the country's."

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