The Rise and Fall of the Panama Canal

Code Switch

NPR

Society & Culture

4.6 • 14.5K Ratings

🗓️ 17 April 2024

⏱️ 36 minutes

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Summary

The Panama Canal has been dubbed the greatest engineering feat in human history. It's also (perhaps less favorably) been called the greatest liberty mankind has ever taken with Mother Nature. But due to climate change, the Canal is drying up and fewer than half of the ships that used to pass through are now able to do so. So how did we get here? Today on the show, we're talking to Cristina Henriquez, the author of a new novel that explores the making of the Canal. It took 50,000 people from 90 different countries to carve the land in two — and the consequences of that extraordinary, nature-defying act are still echoing through our present.

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0:12.8	How, how did we get here?
0:14.8	The Embedded Podcast is NPR's Home for Original Documentary Series.
0:19.2	Listen wherever you get your podcasts.
0:21.6	What's good, y'all? You're listening to Code Switch, the show about race and identity from
0:26.7	MPR, I'm Jean Denby. And I'm B.A. Parker, there's a lot of reasons why
0:30.9	the cost of things in our homes might be getting a little more expensive right now like there's inflation
0:35.1	A lot of which is just corporate greed right very true
0:39.0	Rent keeps getting more more expensive so people are like more squeezed for everything you know what I mean?
0:43.6	I mean I live in New York so you don't got to tell me. Yeah listen, whoa solidarity.
0:48.9	But okay a little south of us in the US there's something else that's happening that might be affecting how much we pay for things
0:54.5	and that we're not maybe paying as much attention to as we should. The Panama Canal might be dying?
1:02.1	Wait, what? Like I... might be dying. dying?
1:03.0	Wait, what?
1:04.0	Like I didn't know that.
1:07.0	Let me guess.
1:08.0	Okay, it's climate change, isn't it?
1:10.0	Yep, it's climate change.
1:12.0	The Panama Canal Authority has been forced to cut daily ship numbers.
	...

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