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 environment. The impacts and responsibilities of the solutions pursued by decision-makers most acutely affect human populations who inhabit the frontiers between human-dominated and natural areas. The most common narrative about the Galapagos refers to the archipelago as a natural laboratory. In the latter half of the twentieth century, this imaginary not only justified the establishment of the Galapagos National Park and scientific institutions like the Charles Darwin Research Station, but also fueled a burgeoning tourism industry. However, a new narrative started to emerge under the influence of fields such as systems science and political ecology: the discourse of Galapagos as a coupled human-natural system. I performed a literature review to trace these two narratives in scientific publications. Using a semiotic device (Greimas, Structural semantics: An attempt at a method. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983) that highlights how the relationships among elements in a system produce their meanings, I mapped out the discursive boundaries between humans and pristine ecosystems for the first narrative, and between agriculture and conservation for the second narrative, as well as the oppositional relationships that define each of the respective concepts. The natural laboratory narrative is heavily based on dualisms between human and nature, as well as on idealized notions of pristine landscapes devoid of human influence. Breaking down the natural laboratory narrative evidences how important the myth of the pristine has been in erasing human history from the imaginary of the Galapagos and in privileging both the conservation and tourism sectors over other economic activities. Meanwhile, the coupled human-natural system narrative acknowledges the influence that humans have had on landscapes throughout human history and recognizes the role that they can have in their conservation. These narratives and the differences between them come into play when authorities discuss development models for the region and potential solutions for the problems that Galapagos faces. While the first narrative has usually proposed solutions based on excluding people from protected areas and regulating land uses that do not fit their vision, the second narrative focuses on the function that people can serve and seeks to involve people outside of protected areas into conservation work and to include different land uses as potential allies for conservation. The first narrative is compatible with the way ecotourism was conceived, as an activity that would promote economic growth while having a limited impact on the environment. The second narrative is consistent with the concept of novel ecosystems because it is a functional perspective that focuses on promoting and maintaining positive relationships between humans and their environment. I argue that including the agricultural sector into the vision for conservation of the Galapagos can have tangible benefits for the control of invasive plants, for the protection of charismatic megafauna, for the region’s food security, and the population’s socioeconomic stability. Much like a gardener who must judge what seeds to sow and must work to keep what they believe belongs on their land and what does not, it is human agency (or lack thereof) that determines what will flourish on humanity’s Galapagos Garden.