Opening what looks like the drawer of an office filing cabinet, Gustavo Jimenez, a scientist at the Charles Darwin Foundation on the Galapagos, reaches inside, rummages around for a bit, and then pulls out not a report or a file, but a massive stuffed albatross. It’s about the size of a toddler, just one of hundreds of stuffed birds and animals in the foundation’s vertebrate collection.
We have already seen a stuffed Baltra Island iguana, a 1.2m-long, scaly, dragon-like creature that was successfully brought back from near-extinction in the 1930s, but has the misfortune to live on one of the two islands that have an airport. About once a month, Jimenez receives a body that has been flattened by a bus or landed on by an aircraft.
Then there are the finches, the songbirds that inspired Charles Darwin to formulate the theory of evolution. It was the differing length of their beaks that helped lead him to the notion that they had evolved differently according to their environment. Now they are roadkill. “There are now so many people living in the highlands,” says Jimenez. “So many cars. It’s impossible to estimate how many are run over a year, but at least 10,000.” To put this in context, there are only just over 100 left of the most endangered type, the mangrove finch.
Photo: EPA
In the filing cabinets of life on these islands, the waved albatross — the only albatross to live in the tropics — is just another Galapagan hard-luck story: regularly caught up in fishing nets, it’s on the critically endangered species list with a “high risk of extinction in the wild.”
The collection is supposed to be a catalog of life, but increasingly it looks more like one of death. Of species threatened. Disappearing. Missing. Of an entire ecosystem under threat. Because there is nowhere quite like the Galapagos. In every sense. For its profound isolation in the Pacific Ocean, its unique biodiversity — home to hundreds of endemic species — and for its pristine, untouched environment.
Except, as even a glance around the harbor of Puerto Ayora, the main town on the island of Santa Cruz, will show you, it’s no longer pristine. A filmy slick of oil shines on the surface of the water where hundreds of boats wait to receive the next intake of tourists. And beyond is a large town, a mess of shanty suburbs and half-finished hotels. The ground water is contaminated and there’s no proper sewerage. Dozens and dozens of Toyota pickups wait to ferry the tourists around.
Photo: EPA
What many people don’t realize is that the Galapagos, as well as being one of the most fragile environments on Earth, is also is one of the fastest-growing economies in South America. Per capita income is higher here than anywhere else in Ecuador. Nearly 40,000 people have made their home here, drawn by tourism, and with them have come hundreds of introduced species, invasive plants and an infrastructure that simply can’t cope.
For anyone who grew up watching David Attenborough and giant tortoises on Life on Earth, it’s a shock. This isn’t what Darwin’s earthly paradise is meant to look like, although Noemi D’Ozouville, an earth scientist who lives in Puerto Ayora and studies freshwater dynamics, sighs when I say this. “That’s the thing with the stories about the Galapagos: it’s either paradise or paradise in crisis.”
The problem with this is that it is in crisis. In the bowels of the Charles Darwin Foundation, Henri Herrera, an entomologist, pulls out drawers of preserved ants. They’re his specialist field — he points out that Darwin studied them too — but new types of ants keep arriving all the time. In aircraft, on boats, in the bags of tourists, in cargo shipments. “I sampled two boats and found 600 different species of insects in my traps. If you look at graphs of tourism and invasive species, they go absolutely together.”
It’s not difficult to understand the threat. He pulls out a drawer of native endemic ants and then a recent introduction, a bigheaded ant. It’s not just its head that is bigger. “The thing is that invertebrates are crucial to the ecosystem. If you destroy them, you destroy the ecosystem; it’s at the base of it all.”
It’s this conflict between man and nature that’s at the heart of a new exhibition on the Galapagos at the Bluecoat arts center in Liverpool, northwest England. It’s the result of an initiative by the Gulbenkian Foundation and the Galapagos Conservation Trust. Over a period of four years, they have sent 11 artists to the islands and the exhibition, featuring works as diverse as photographs of cockfighting by Jeremy Deller, the sound of sharks underwater by Kaffe Matthews and, most arrestingly of all, footage of Marcus Coates dressed up as a bird, in a cardboard box, with a cardboard beak and cardboard wings, wandering the streets of Puerto Ayora.
Four years on, he’s still vividly remembered. Enrique Ramos, owner and editor of the Galapagos newspaper El Colono, said it had been a startling moment. Coates had dressed up as a booby — the blue-footed bird that inhabits the islands — and received an amazed reaction from residents. “It was a kind of communication that was totally new for us. To dress up like this. As a way of expressing feelings. People hadn’t seen that before.”
But the shock worked both ways. “I had no idea that anyone even lived on the Galapagos,” says Coates. “There’s this huge conflict between people and animals and this bizarre situation where people are almost second-class citizens compared to the wildlife.” The impact on his art has been profound, he says; it’s made him entirely rethink what it is to be human.
Coates’ work explored the interaction of animals and people, but what’s abundantly clear if you spend any time at all on the Galapagos is that the needs of human habitation and the needs of preserving a pristine environment intact are incompatible.
“It’s unsustainable,” says Felipe Cruz, the director of technical assistance at the Charles Darwin Foundation. “There’s constantly more, more, more. More flights, more hotels, more cars. It’s uncontrolled. We talk about ecotourism but in reality it’s already showing signs of being mass tourism. People aren’t even coming for the wildlife any more. They just come for a vacation.”
Everywhere there are signs of stress. On Isabela Island, Maximilian Martin takes us on a tour of the rubbish dump where feral cats roam and of a defunct sewerage plant. “An international organization spent something like US$750,000 on it, but the local people didn’t know how to use it. So now the waste is just going into the ground untreated. Technically, the problems are solved. The expertise is here. The problem is social.”
Martin works for the World Wildlife Fund conservation group and Isabela now has a successful recycling program. It’s not that efforts aren’t being made to address the problem, just that the scale of it is so enormous. Kilometer upon kilometer of the countryside around Puerto Villamil, Isabela’s main town, has been smothered by an invasive creeper. On Santa Cruz, a type of blackberry, impossible to remove, has overrun the highlands, destroying vast tracts of habitat.
Yet it is still an extraordinary place. Even in Isabela’s port, among the boats and the noise, there are penguins and stingrays and pelicans and when I go for a swim, I end up frolicking with a group of sea lions that behave more like a litter of puppies. At one point, one of them swims away and returns with a stick.
It’s heartbreaking to see what is happening to the islands. Dorothy Cross, an Irish artist who participated in the program, had visited the Galapagos 12 years previously, and was shocked by how much it had changed. “I really felt disquiet. Being there felt like a very difficult predicament. I live in nature and a lot of my work is rooted in nature and in the Galapagos this extraordinariness is being undermined by tourism and money.”
All of the artists returned, says Cross, “a bit disheartened and anxious.” As a tourist, whisked off on a boat, you do not necessarily see the towns and one of the key ideas behind the scheme was to provide people with another view of the islands. Robert Silbermann, the chief executive of the Galapagos Conservation Trust, says that sending the artists to the islands was intended to give people a different angle on the place. “If you look at some of the work, cockfighting and unfinished houses and buildings, these are not the usual images of the Galapagos that you see.
“What’s clear,” he adds, “is that things have to change. Things can’t continue in the way they have been. There is a need to take action now. It can’t wait five years.”
But what action? Art will not save the Galapagos, but maybe it can provide a sense of urgency. It’s not clear what else will. In a long interview, Godfrey Merlen, a British biologist who came to the islands in the early 1970s and never left, tries to remain positive, but admits he struggles. He studies the vermilion flycatcher, a bird that was abundant when he arrived, which is now, on the inhabited islands, vanishing before his eyes.
When Merlen first came, inspired by the environmental message of Rachel Carson’s The Silent Spring, the occasional supply ship was the only way in and the only means of communication was a single radio. The isolation that made the Galapagos unique is no more. In Puerto Ayora, schoolchildren hang out in the port checking their e-mails and South America’s newly rich pop over for a weekend minibreak.
The lives and livelihoods of 40,000 people can’t be ignored, but according to Merlen, the Galapagos are the world’s Petri dish. They have to be saved. “Because if we can’t save Galapagos, then we can’t save anywhere.”
When nature calls, Masana Izawa has followed the same routine for more than 50 years: heading out to the woods in Japan, dropping his pants and doing as bears do. “We survive by eating other living things. But you can give faeces back to nature so that organisms in the soil can decompose them,” the 74-year-old said. “This means you are giving life back. What could be a more sublime act?” “Fundo-shi” (“poop-soil master”) Izawa is something of a celebrity in Japan, publishing books, delivering lectures and appearing in a documentary. People flock to his “Poopland” and centuries-old wooden “Fundo-an” (“poop-soil house”) in
Jan 13 to Jan 19 Yang Jen-huang (楊仁煌) recalls being slapped by his father when he asked about their Sakizaya heritage, telling him to never mention it otherwise they’ll be killed. “Only then did I start learning about the Karewan Incident,” he tells Mayaw Kilang in “The social culture and ethnic identification of the Sakizaya” (撒奇萊雅族的社會文化與民族認定). “Many of our elders are reluctant to call themselves Sakizaya, and are accustomed to living in Amis (Pangcah) society. Therefore, it’s up to the younger generation to push for official recognition, because there’s still a taboo with the older people.” Although the Sakizaya became Taiwan’s 13th
Earlier this month, a Hong Kong ship, Shunxin-39, was identified as the ship that had cut telecom cables on the seabed north of Keelung. The ship, owned out of Hong Kong and variously described as registered in Cameroon (as Shunxin-39) and Tanzania (as Xinshun-39), was originally People’s Republic of China (PRC)-flagged, but changed registries in 2024, according to Maritime Executive magazine. The Financial Times published tracking data for the ship showing it crossing a number of undersea cables off northern Taiwan over the course of several days. The intent was clear. Shunxin-39, which according to the Taiwan Coast Guard was crewed
For anyone on board the train looking out the window, it must have been a strange sight. The same foreigner stood outside waving at them four different times within ten minutes, three times on the left and once on the right, his face getting redder and sweatier each time. At this unique location, it’s actually possible to beat the train up the mountain on foot, though only with extreme effort. For the average hiker, the Dulishan Trail is still a great place to get some exercise and see the train — at least once — as it makes its way
RSS