THE Galápagos Islands are wrapped in the cotton wool of conservation. Few places are protected by as many environmental restrictions as the archipelago where Charles Darwin first conceived the idea of evolution through natural selection. These “enchanted isles” are biologically unique. Eleven of the original 14 or 15 subspecies of giant tortoises remain. Here too are the world’s only sea lizard (the marine iguana), the flightless cormorant, a nocturnal gull and 13 native finches.
But people live here too, and they are fighting the conservationists every inch of the way. The Galápagos are home to 14 000 islanders who, together with thousands of migrants from mainland Ecuador, want to exploit the islands’ natural resources. Early this month – for the third time in two years – armed protesters besieged scientists at the islands’ research station, demanding that they be allowed to fish the coastal waters and build hotels. On 16 September, the two-week-long siege was lifted after government officials made some concessions to islanders, including an agreement that all new tour guides will be island residents. But conservationists were not consulted and the issue is far from resolved.
Can people and wildlife find a way to live together on the Galápagos? Conservationists from outside view the crisis with foreboding. They believe the impasse underlines growing evidence of the failure of traditional conservation policies, based on fencing off the most biologically interesting parts of the planet.
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The Galápagos comprise 12 large volcanic islands and dozens of smaller ones set in the Pacific Ocean 800 kilometres west of Ecuador. They emerged from the ocean some 3 million years ago. Since then they have gradually accumulated a remarkable collection of flora and fauna. In 1961, a century after Darwin’s visit, scientists persuaded the government of Ecuador to designate most of the islands as a national park. The Charles Darwin Research Station was established in 1964 to study the islands’ many unique species and breed some threatened ones in captivity. And in 1986, 70 000 square kilometres of ocean around the Galápagos became the second largest marine reserve in the world.
When the conservationists first moved in, the islands had a total population less than that of an average British village. But now every flight from mainland Ecuador brings more immigrants. “A population of 4000 in 1980 has soared to 14 000 today, doubling every seven years,” says Clive Wicks from the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF). “Galápagos’s major problem today is an invasion of people.” They come because the mainland is poor, while the natural resources of the Galápagos make them potentially rich. These natural wonders attract some 50 000 tourists each year. Most arrive on cruise ships, but increasing numbers are staying in island hotels. “The tourists are becoming a menace,” says Wicks, not because of the damage they do personally, but because their money is such a powerful magnet.
But the trigger for the latest unrest lies not on the islands, but in the seas around them. With stocks off mainland Ecuador declining through overfishing, the sea around the Galápagos is the country’s last great fishery. Or it would be if most of it were not protected as part of the Galápagos marine reserve.
Since the early 1990s, fishermen have been flocking to the Galápagos with their families to dive for the sea cucumber, a tasty echinoderm that lives in huge numbers on the seabed (“The grub and the Galápagos”, żěè¶ĚĘÓƵ, 11 December 1993). Fishing has been most intense in the remote Bolivar Channel between Isabela Island and the uninhabited and largely pristine Fernandina.
But in 1992 the government moved to ban sea cucumber fishing because it breached the rules of the marine reserve. The result was open warfare between conservationists and fishermen. The following year, angry fishermen, deprived of their livelihood, barricaded the research station in Puerto Ayora, the largest town in the Galápagos. Last year, with international film crews on the islands to record major brush fires, islanders hacked 86 giant tortoises to death on Isabela Island.
Under pressure, Ecuadorian President Sixto Durán Ballén acceded to the fishermen’s demands and granted a three-month long “experimental fishery” with a maximum harvest of 550 000 sea cucumbers, beginning in October 1994. The aim was to devise a “sustainable” fishery that would provide an income for the fishermen while protecting the species. The result was pandemonium.
Within weeks, some 800 fishermen, many of them without permits, had plundered an estimated 7 million sea cucumbers from the waters of the Galápagos. Many landed illegally on islands such as Fernandina, taking ashore goats and chickens, and cutting mangrove swamps for firewood to boil their catch before selling it to Japanese and Korean ships waiting offshore.
Sea cucumbers were not the only targets. According to Macarena Green, an Ecuadorian biologist who works on the islands, the divers also collected sea horses, snails, sea urchins and black coral. They sent a consignment of sea lion penises to Japan, where they were to be tried out as a new aphrodisiac. “The Japanese buyer paid $50 for each penis,” says Green.
Faced with an international outcry from conservationists, the President called off the experimental fishery a month early and announced that new scientific studies would have to be carried out before any resumption was permitted. The fishermen reacted by once again taking over the offices of the national park and research station, holding staff hostage and sinking the station’s boat. “They threatened to kill all the tortoises in captivity at the station, and to start fires on little islands,” says Green.
In an effort to defuse the crisis, the President asked his civil servants to draft a new conservation law for the Galápagos. But he was upstaged last month by the representative for the Galápagos, Eduardo Veliz, who abruptly introduced his own “conservation bill” for the islands to Ecuador’s National Congress. It outraged conservationists. According to Julian Fitter, chairman of the British-based Galápagos Conservation Trust, “it would have ruined the islands for both tourism and science”. If passed, the bill would have opened up the islands, including their fisheries, to commercial exploitation, and would have required all tourists to spend at least one night on the islands, threatening a massive growth in hotel construction.
The bill shrewdly appealed to islanders by offering to double the pay of many public officials and servants, and it was swiftly passed by the National Congress before being vetoed by the President early this month. The result was predictable: riots and the threat of a wider insurrection headed by Veliz (This Week, 16 September).
This cycle of conflict, with each side in turn winning the President’s ear, shows no sign of ending. With the next sea cucumber hunting season due to start in a few days, conservationists are in no mood to moderate their protection laws. Craig MacFarland, president of the Charles Darwin Foundation, which runs the research station, said this year that “reopening the fishery will overturn the management plan for the reserve”. The plan allows some traditional fishing, but most of the sea cucumbers are in parts designated for total protection.
Alien activity
“Our people do not have the education to understand that if they fish all sizes and ages of certain species, eventually they won’t have any,” says Green. “They don’t understand what it means to use a resource intelligently.” Staff at the research station have spent 30 years attempting to improve the environmental education of islanders. Clearly they have failed. In fact, they may even have reinforced the view among islanders that conservation is an alien activity.
The stance taken by conservationists during the present crisis only serves to strengthen that view. Their language is confrontational – islanders are “insurrectionists” and “extremists” who have been “incited” by their democratic representatives. To cap it all, some conservationists are even calling for a halt to immigration from mainland Ecuador.
This tone is in marked contrast with thinking among a new generation of conservationists who believe that wildlife protection can only work with the consent of local people. The WWF, for example, now sanctions timber felling and even the hunting of endangered species such as manatee by villagers in its ecological reserves in the Amazon. In southern Africa many conservationists believe the Kruger National Park, until 1926 the homeland of the Mhinga people, should be handed back.
Galápagos conservationists would not consider such extreme measures. But to protect a unique ecosystem they have no choice but to make peace with the islanders, and that will mean compromise. “You can’t take just a biological view,” says Wicks from the WWF “You have to understand the social problems.”
