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This chapter presents a historical overview of the rise of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century station movement in Europe. It sketches the movement’s major developments and puts these in a wider context. It does so by exploring how turn-of-the-century biological stations related to the other scientific workplaces of the time. The hybrid character of the biological stations is addressed by discussing their relation with university laboratories, public aquariums and natural history museums and by comparing their practices with the excursions of naturalist societies and large-scale state-sponsored surveys. Obviously the ways in which these different influences were integrated highly varied from station to station. The diversity indeed ranges from highly technological and indoor-oriented marine laboratories to poorly equipped wooden cabins in the woods.

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.

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.

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.