Non-Essential: Galapagos III

The Galapagos Islands remind you that you’re a member of a nonessential species on the planet. But they also bring home the fact that the planet and its ecosystems are essential to you. We tend to stride over the earth as if we really do “have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth….” (Genesis: 1:26) And we do, in fact, have the power and the means to dominate much of the natural world, to extinguish other species, to make the earth uninhabitable for humankind.

The Galapagos have been conveying the true relationship of nature to humans and vice versa since they were discovered in 1535. Bishop Berlanga reported their inhospitable characteristics so far as human beings were concerned. In the 16th C., what made land desirable were first mineral riches—gold, silver, copper—followed by indigenous populations to provide labor to exploit the riches or to work agricultural land, in the case that mineral riches weren’t available. (And of course, to bring into the Christian fold as part of the ongoing crusade to prepare for the second coming…but I digress.)

When humans stopped by—as did the occasional merchant ship, pirate and later, whaler—they did so to take on water and provision with such meat as could be hunted or carried. Fur seals and sperm whales were the attraction to being in the vicinity. No one worried much about conserving stocks for the needs of the next ship, much less future generations. Case in point: the whaling ship Essex, of Herman Melville fame, put into Floreana in 1820 to pick up some tortoises to augment its food supply. Whether as amusement or to facilitate the hunt, the crew set the island on fire. In doing so, they managed to almost entirely eradicate the tortoises on the island.

Whalers and fur sealers ransacked the archipelago. According to the Galapagos Conservancy, “Sperm whale, fur seal, and giant tortoise populations declined precipitously during the 19th century. By 1890, the Galapagos Fur Seal was considered commercially extinct.… Between 1784 and 1860, whalers took more than 100,000 tortoises from the islands…. The California Academy of Science 1905-06 expedition found that tortoises were very scarce on Española and Fernandina; by 1974, Pinta was added to the list of islands where tortoises could not be found. ”

Fish market, Pto. Ayora, Santa Cruz

By the time of the California Academy studies, settlement of the islands was making headway.  Added to the environmental pressure caused by species depletion through hunting came habitat destruction due to human activities.

Floreana was settled first, in the 1830s.  Domestic livestock was brought in to support the colony and highland forests were cut for pasture and cropland. When the colony ultimately failed, it left behind a devastated landscape no longer fit to sustain Floreana’s native wildlife.

But the scientific interest in the archipelago aroused by Charles Darwin’s visit in 1835 continued to seep out into the world, even as small groups of people emigrated from the mainland to find a life harvesting tortoise oil, or salt, or fish. In 1959, Ecuador created a national park to protect the archipelago, expanded by a marine reserve added in 1998. The protected area was further extended with a marine sanctuary decreed in 2016. Conservation and protection were enhanced by designation of the archipelago as a World Heritage Site in 1979; the archipelago and its immense marine reserve are considered  a unique “living museum and showcase of evolution” by UNESCO.

The Ecuadoran National Park Service has worked with the Charles Darwin Foundation (CDF) since the beginning in 1959, thanks to an agreement with the Ecuador’s Government. The CDF’S Darwin Research Center has a mandate to pursue and maintain collaborations with government agencies by providing scientific knowledge and technical assistance to promote and secure conservation of Galapagos.

UNESCO raised a warning flag in 2007, when tourism development and immigration pressures were threatening the islands, by including the archipelago on its list of World Heritage in Danger. It was a warning that Ecuador heeded, to the extent that in 2010, the Galapagos were removed from the endangered list. Strict rules govern tourist visits to the islands; fishing is stringently regulated; and research efforts have incorporated sustainability of human activity into investigations—in other words, research into how humankind might live in balance with the natural world.

All of which is to say that the Galapagos experience offers a model of how our species might redefine its approach to, and place in, the world on which we live. It’s actually an old model, since most indigenous peoples have used it for eons. It recognizes that in order for us to survive, we have to contribute to and protect the survival of the rest of the natural world.

We humans are arguably ecologically unnecessary. Think about that for a moment. So far as ecosystems go, we seem to have a place only as a top predator, which is one of the least important positions on the web of life. If we all disappeared tomorrow, the worst that could happen to the rest of creation would be that our leftover garbage would get in its way for a time… Certainly the Galapagos Islands got along without us quite nicely until 1535; currents and winds brought life to the islands against incredible odds, and it thrived and reformed and worked out a unique ecosystem. We are privileged today to walk through it, to catch a glimpse of what an existence devoid of humankind might look like… to recognize, in all humility, our proper place in the scheme of things.

[For anyone interested in the work of the Charles Darwin Research Center and Foundation, check out https://www.darwinfoundation.org/en/; this is the English language link.]