Governments and international organizations stepped in, and in 1959, both the Galápagos National Park (GNP) and the Charles Darwin Foundation were established, tasked with working in concert to preserve and improve the archipelago’s ecology. Near the end of that decade, scientists sponsored by UNESCO and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature found the impact of the local population to be unsustainable, notably because of the flora and fauna that residents introduced. People had lived on the islands since the early 19th century, growing crops and fishing still, by the 1950s, the population was less than 2,000. Until about 90 years ago, the ecological health of the Galápagos wasn’t a major concern of either the Ecuadorian government or international conservation organizations. And if the islands become so damaged that the myth of the prehistoric can no longer be sustained, the tourism that supports the local economy and funds many conservation efforts may dry up, leading to further ecological decay. Even as those campaigns draw visitors to the Galápagos with the pretense of an untouched world, those visitors significantly contribute to the degradation of the archipelago’s delicate ecological integrity.
Tourism campaigns that tout the archipelago as untouched belie-and contribute to-the existential threat facing it. Such a view is more marketing than truth. My own visit on the MS Santa Cruz II was paid for by the cruise company Hurtigruten, which invites customers to “journey in Darwin’s footsteps.” (I reviewed the trip for The Globe and Mail.)
As the 2006 BBC production Galápagos put it, the islands are “a mysterious prehistoric world, a landscape that profoundly influences life … plumbed directly into the heart of the Earth.” Today, the Charles Darwin Foundation invites donors to join the Pristine Galapagos Society, while tourism companies lure customers with promises of arriving as Darwin did, to a place pure and innocent, unperturbed by humanity. There was something atavistic, almost Cretaceous about it all: the scrubby landscape and enervating climate the hordes of sluglike black iguanas on the sea rocks the albatrosses and frigate birds that, seen against the light, could be taken for pterodactyls.įor centuries, pirates, whalers, and explorers-and now scientists and conservationists- have presented the Galápagos as fixed in time, a kind of Pompeii for naturalists. This spring, I was standing on the forward bow of the MS Santa Cruz II, bird-watching with a group of tourists under the cliffs of the Galápagos’s largest island, when one member of our company lowered his binoculars.
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