Galapagos is a Garden
Human activities and booming tourism industries are altering the stability of ecosystems in the Galapagos Islands. Managing the impacts of these changes depends primarily on how scientists and decision-makers conceptualize human relationships with the env
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Our Hands (and Minds) Shape Evolution’s Eden The famed Galapagos Islands, the first UNESCO Natural World Heritage Site, are undergoing a profound change in both ecological and socio-economic aspects (Watkins & Cruz, 2007). Since their discovery in 1535, the reason why humans have valued these islands has changed through time. The islands changed from a place for ships to rest and re-stock on food with tortoise meat, to a source of valued materials for trade such as tincture from lichen and fertilizer from guano, to a place where undesirable humans were cast away from the rest of society (Basset, 2009; Donoso, 2012; González, Montes, Rodríguez, & Tapia, 2008). In the 1800s, agriculture was already one of the main economic engines in Galapagos, and a necessity for the survival of human settlements (Chiriboga & Maignan, 2006a). However, the visits of naturalists like Charles Darwin and writers like William Beebe redirected people’s attention to the archipelago’s unique flora and fauna (Grenier, 2007; Quiroga, 2017). Galapagos’ biota was special not only for its uniqueness, but because it thrived in isolation, and its evolutionary processes were readily visible in this natural laboratory. The establishment of the Galapagos National Park (GNP) in 1959 and its recognition as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1979 solidified tourism and conservation research as the central pillars for the values and economic development of the region (Romanova, Yakushenkov, & Lebedeva, 2013). Meanwhile, local populations were seen as a negative force that needed to be curbed if the natural wonders that made these islands famous were to survive (Groot de, 1983; Quiroga, 2013). Today, conservation is a crucial component of the discourse that perF. Laso (*) Department of Geography, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 S. J. Walsh et al. (eds.), Land Cover and Land Use Change on Islands, Social and Ecological Interactions in the Galapagos Islands, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43973-6_6
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suades more than 250,000 visitors annually from around the world to spend thousands of dollars to experience the (so-called) pristine ecosystems (BenitezCapistros, Hugé, Dahdouh-Guebas, & Koedam, 2016; Hennessy & Mccleary, 2011; Quiroga, 2009). However, the extensive and long-standing human presence, as well as the uncontrolled development of tourism infrastructure, is making pristine ecosystems an increasingly rare and often artificial experience (Epler, 2007; Epler Wood, Milstein, & Ahamed-Broadhurst, 2019; Watson, Trueman, Tufet, Henderson, & Atkinson, 2009). In fact, many conservationists consider densely inhabited islands like Santa Cruz and San Cristobal to have already been lost (Reck, 2017). Sixty years after the foundation of the GNP, the discourse that values the absence of local populations (but encourages the presence of tourists) to conserve pristine ecosystems has become dominant as both local populations and annual visitors have soa
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