The first hint of trouble in paradise came inside the crowded transit lounge of Guayaquil’s Simon Bolivar airport.
Jet-lagged tourists crammed the shabby air-conditioned room with that look of expectation of people about to embark on a trip of a lifetime.
They were waiting for the connecting flight on an old Boeing 727 to the volcanic islands of the Galapagos: the Pacific archipelago straddling the equator 600 miles off the coast of Ecuador.
The tourists chatted excitedly above the din of a television blaring South American pop music.
Below the TV set a large colorful poster portrayed the Galapagos menagerie: iguanas, sharks, blue and red-footed boobies, penguins, giant tortoises and the ghostly palo alto tree.
The sign warned them: “The introduction of plants and animals can ruin the paradise of Galapagos forever.”
The native species of the islands have evolved over 3 million years in isolation and in the absence of competing species and predators.
It was a prelude to an even starker warning: “New diseases such as cholera now exist; stinging insects cause severe reaction; food contaminated by pests is common.”
The Spaniards first called the islands Las Encantadas–the bewitched or enchanted islands.
Washed by the cold Humboldt current flowing from the Antarctic, these tips of giant volcanoes rising deep from the ocean bed have always had their own strange climate and even stranger animals. The climate is temperate except for a few months when the Humboldt current changes its course.
No two islands are the same; each has its extraordinary scenery and its own assembly of bizarre animals.
Many are unafraid of man. Sea lions play with you in the cool waters while penguins and turtles whizz past. Weird marine iguanas sunbathe by your feet next to colorful Sally Lightfoot crabs on the black rocks.
Hammerhead sharks are omnipresent. Well fed by the bountiful ocean, locals say they never attack humans.
For the islands, humans are the biggest threat. For developing countries, tourism can become an economic bonanza creating jobs and a significant source of hard currency.
But it can also provoke deep social tensions between governments, conservation groups, tourist organizations and local inhabitants.
The Galapagos have enjoyed such a boom. In the last 25 years, the number of visitors has risen from 10,000 a year to 54,000 last year, and the Galapagos tourist industry earns Ecuador more than $50 million a year. The islands have also attracted an increasing number of mainland Ecuadorians anxious to cash in on the tourist trade.
There were barely 1,350 residents on the islands in 1950. Now there are more than 12,000. And the population is growing at an annual rate of 8 percent, the highest in South America.
Julian Fitter, chairman of the recently established Galapagos Conservation Trust, explained: “Until 10 years ago, regulations on tourism in the Galapagos National Park worked well. But it has begun to crumble as tourism grew and people started to realize there was money to be made out there. It is not tourism itself, but the impact of all the support industries and immigration that is the problem.”
Tensions are increasing. Older residents are seeking greater autonomy from the mainland and special legislation to stop the flow of immigrants.
Fishermen have threatened to disrupt the tourist industry and conservation programs if they continue to be blamed for the decline of marine life and are prevented from fishing certain lucrative species.
“I have a family and three children to feed,” said Alberto Granja, the head of one local fishermen’s cooperative.
“It is easy for people loaded with money in comfortable air-conditioned offices in Quito to tell us don’t fish this or don’t fish that. We say if you don’t want us to fish give us at least some other alternative.”
Another fisherman said a giant tortoise with an injured leg was flown to Florida for an artificial limb implant.
“Do you think I would have been flown there if I had broken my leg?”
The first impression of the Galapagos is not of Eden. The cluster of islands, their volcanic tops covered in mist, appear barren and menacing.
Herman Melville doubted whether “any spot on earth can, in desolateness, furnish a parallel.”
Even Charles Darwin, who based his theory of the evolution of the species on the Galapagos, first discovered “a broken field of black basaltic lava, thrown into the most rugged waves and crossed by great fissures . . . everywhere covered by stunted, sunburnt brushwood, which shows little sign of life.”
Now, waiting cruise directors wave placards in the small military airfield on Baltra island as the mass of tourists weaves through the last formalities. Eighty or so boats tour the islands.
In the main center of population of Puerto Ayora on Santa Cruz island, the smartly cobbled main street is lined with bars, restaurants, a discotheque, scores of tourist shops selling T-shirts and the most modern branch of the Banco del Pacifico in Ecuador.
At the headquarters of the Galapagos National Park and the Charles Darwin Foundation, nestled in a compound of brush and mangrove, rare giant tortoises are bred in protective custody from the dangers of more recently introduced species including the most dangerous of all–man.
Eliecer Cruz, the deputy director of the park, is a native of the islands. His father emigrated to the Galapagos from the Ecuadorian mainland in 1935, an early pioneer with a romantic notion of starting a new life in the archipelago.
“In those days there was nothing here. Life was tough. They built their own houses, grew fruit and vegetables and fished to survive. A ship would come from the mainland every five months or so,” he said.
But already in those days, pressure was growing to create a wildlife sanctuary in the archipelago.
Tourism was not a problem. First came the pirates and buccaneers seeking refuge during the late 17th and 18th Centuries. Later in the 18th Century and well into the 19th came British and American whaling captains.
They stopped in the Galapagos for fresh water and food supplies. Tortoise flesh was prized, because the giant Galapagos tortoises could be kept alive, unfed, for months on a ship.
By 1929, giant tortoises were extinct on the island of Floreana. Since then, a second of the islands’ 13 different species of giant tortoises has disappeared.
And only one tortoise, Lonesome George, remains of the Pinta island species.
In 1959, a century after the publication of Darwin’s “Origin of the Species,” Ecuador declared all the Galapagos a national park except land already colonized by that date.
“Today 97 percent of the archipelago is national park and only 3 percent is open to man,” said Cruz. “And 97 percent of the problems come from this 3 percent.”
The biggest problem today is the illegal fishing of pepino de mar or sea cucumbers.
Swimming off Fernandina, on the far west of the archipelago, one of the world’s last virgin islands, Rodrigo Jacome, a national park guide, picked up a large sea cucumber from the sea bed.
“This is a delicacy in Asia,” he said. “A fisherman can earn $2,000 to $3,000 a month fishing pepinos. It’s a lot of money out here and it is easy money because you can pick them up like pebbles.”
Three years ago, after other areas of the Pacific had been fished out of sea cucumbers, Asians turned their attention to the Galapagos.
Illegal fishing for shark fins and lobster had been going on for years. But the scale and threat from sea cucumber fishing led the government to impose a ban in 1992.
Sea cucumbers act as filters, purifying sea water. Their larva are food for many fish. Their disappearance could create serious problems in the food chain of the islands.
Furthermore, they have to be boiled soon after they have been fished to prevent them disintegrating. Fishermen have set up encampments on some of the most pristine islands, burning mangrove wood to boil the pepinos.
“All this can lead to the introduction of more aggressive organisms on the islands,” said Cruz.
The authorities are seeking to eradicate colonies of feral dogs and cats, goats, wild pigs and donkeys that threaten endemic species.
The Ecuadorian navy is supposed to control these waters. It says it lacks the resources and that fines are too small to deter the fishermen.
“Things are a mess,” said Jacome. “We know there is cucumber fishing but they don’t do anything about it. It’s like drug money. Everybody gets a cut.”
Outside the National Park building at Puerto Villamil, the main fishing center on Isabela, the archipelago’s largest island, there was a reward sign offering about $2,000 for information to help capture those responsible for the massacre of giant tortoises on the island during the last two years.
The Charles Darwin Foundation calculates that 81 tortoises were killed by humans on Isabela last year. No one knows who did it but there are plenty of rumors. Most point to fishermen taking revenge against the fishing ban.
“The irony is that it is the wilder, more beautiful parts of the Galapagos that are threatened,” said Augusto Cruz, the brother of the national park deputy director and owner of a small cruise boat, the Beagle III.
He was fishing off the west coast of Isabela in an enchanted place called Derek Cove. You simply cast a line from the side of the dinghy and a grouper would immediately bite.
“Where there is tourism there is some control. But out here few people come,” said Cruz. But if tourism was not properly controlled and strictly limited it could have the same dire consequences as the illegal fishing.
People like Cruz or his friend Hans Schiess, also born on the islands, say they were instilled with a sense of conservation from birth. They see a real danger from the rapid development of tourism without long-term local interests at heart.
“Mainland companies do not reinvest in the islands. Like the big fishing interests, all the money goes back to the mainland and God knows where else,” said Schiess.
“Without investing in good local education and social facilities the problem will get worse because there will be no alternative for young generations but to continue fishing for pepinos.”
There were more worrying signs at Puerto Villamil. Bulldozers were arriving on a barge to build an airport close to a nesting ground for one of the area’s biggest flamingo colonies.
“We have been losing the war,” says Luis Carrera de la Torre, president of Ecuador’s permanent commission for the Galapagos.
He said the government was working on plans to control immigration to the islands, impose a quarantine on plants and animals, set up more efficient policing with a new radar network and patrol boats for the archipelago and maintain tighter rules on tourism development.
“But we are a poor country and we need international help. We also need foreign governments to clamp down on their nationals financing all the illegal fishing that still goes on in our waters,” he said.
Jorge Barba, the head of Inefan, Ecuador’s overall park services, said the Galapagos were not in peril of being destroyed.
“We do have problems. Most of these originate from human activity starting way back 300 years ago when the English whalers came and introduced all sorts of rats and cockroaches in the islands.”
Darwin found in the Galapagos his model for the evolution of species. One and a half centuries later, these islands provide a test case for what ecologists call sustainable development of poor countries.
To some, the economic potential of the Galapagos offers dreams of a paradise gained. To others, the risk of a paradise lost.
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For further information, contact Galapagos Conservation Trust, P.O. Box 50, Shaftesbury, Dorset SP7 8SB. Direct dial: 011-44-1747-853380 (fax: 011-44-1747-855131). Or contact the U.S. equivalent: Charles Darwin Foundation, 703-538-6833 (fax: 703-538-6835).
