Introduction
Early on a May morning in 2010, the Galápagos National Park Service’s flagship work vessel, the Sierra Negra, neared the shore of Pinta Island in the northern reaches of the
archipelago after a long, choppy night at sea. This was an historic voyage, for on board were thirty-nine giant tortoises that would be the first to set their feet on the island in nearly four decades, since the island’s last native tortoise was brought to live in captivity at the GNP headquarters in 1972. Linda Cayot of the Galápagos Conservancy—one of more than fifty scientists, conservations, Park guards and members of the news media who accompanied the tortoises—celebrated the landing in a blog post: “There are now thirty-nine tortoises roaming the slopes of Pinta!! I can’t stop smiling and want to shout it to the world.”84 Reintroducing the tortoises to Pinta—or “re-tortoising” as it has become known in the Galápagos—was a pivotal moment in the island’s history and in the lives of the released tortoises, many of whom had been born in captivity. The Pinta project was both a continuation of the GNP’s tortoise breeding and rewilding work and a departure from business as usual. Because these tortoises were not originally from Pinta sending them to live there contradicted the long-held goal of Galápagos conservation: preserving the evolutionary purity of island nature.
The key tenet of evolutionary understandings of the Galápagos—what makes the
archipelago useful for studying evolutionary processes—is that native species evolved separately
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on different islands (and volcanoes) through processes of adaptive radiation. Based on the assumption that each island (or volcano) was home to a distinct population of tortoises, the animals have been managed separately by population since conservation efforts started. In captivity, breeding populations and their offspring are housed separately by population before being repatriated to their home islands. The Pinta project was an outlier to this adherence to the evolutionary purity of species lineages because the reintroduced tortoises were not native to the island. Despite concerted effort among conservationists, the last Pinta tortoise, Lonesome George, never reproduced in captivity. (He died in June 2012.) In the intervening years, Lonesome George became an icon of Galápagos conservation, famous around the world because—as his biographer explained—he was a testament to histories of man’s destruction of the natural world (Nicholls 2006). What to do with his native island has long been a matter of debate among Galápagos conservationists. How could they restore the ecosystem if the keystone herbivore that evolved there could not reproduce his lineage? Following years of debate, the thirty-nine tortoises reintroduced to Pinta were a temporary compromise solution.
This chapter situates the story of Pinta and Lonesome George in decades of tortoise conservation work aimed at “conserving evolution.” This vision for nature protection grew from bioactivists’ framings of the islands as a “natural laboratory of evolution” in the early twentieth century (see previous chapter). They established a vision for conservation that combined the islands’ Darwinian history with notions of the pristine that have long informed Western nature preservation. This chapter details how this vision has been put into practice through four key areas of work: population surveys, introduced species control, captive breeding, and re-wilding. I adapt Foucault’s biopolitics analytic to attend to the government of nonhuman populations of endangered species, exploring how evolutionary understandings of nature have underwritten
tortoise management. In doing so, I analyze the human and nonhuman classifications and subjectivities that arise through this work. Examining the labor that goes into nature protection shows that “conserving evolution” is not a matter of letting nature take its course, but involves active management. The chapter shows that conserving evolution is matter of multi-species relations that entangle human and nonhuman agencies in diverse and contradictory ways. Recreating the pristine in this “natural laboratory” involves attempts to untangle some of these relations by forging new enfoldings of nature and culture. Biopower is a productive power through which populations of endangered species are discursively and materially created and populations of unwanted species eliminated. It is a powerful way in which humans engage the nonhuman world. Conservation biopower is productive of both nonhuman and human
subjectivities, which I explore through interviews with park guards involved in species surveys and eradication campaigns. Finally, by analyzing the Pinta case as that which complicates biopolitical strategies of conserving evolution, the chapter also explores the limitations of goals to remake nature in the Galápagos. The Pinta case demonstrates the tenacity of the human will to design nature, but also the limitations of attempts to remake evolution.
Conserving a Natural Laboratory
Western nature protection has long revolved around the ideology of protecting “pristine” nature both spatially and temporally separate from human influences (Nash 2001, Cronon 1996, Worster 1994). The remote Galápagos Islands, which had no indigenous human population, are no exception. Indeed, the Galápagos are perhaps the paradigm case of what Steve Hinchliffe sees as a popular “myth of independent nature” that underwrites much of contemporary Western environmentalism. This rendering, in which a pure natural realm is distinct from, and often
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threatened by, “society,” relies on the spatial imaginary of “an island of natural facts untouched by people” (2007, p. 33). The ideology of the pristine in nature protection was often fueled by landscape aesthetics and American transcendentalism (Neumann 1998, Cronon 1996)—John Muir’s worship of the Yosemite Valley is the paradigm case. If for Muir the wild Nature of Yosemite offered a direct window to a universal God (Tsing 2003), the wilderness of Galápagos could be said to offer a direct glimpse on a secular, scientific origin story. Scientific framings of the archipelago as a natural laboratory suggest that the islands are sites of pure Darwinian nature that unveil the key to understanding life. The laboratory rhetoric also implies that the islands are sites of controllable isolation (Kohler 2002), suggesting a special mission for Galápagos
conservation: not only protecting pristine nature, but also preserving the evolutionary processes that produced the laboratory over the past 3-5 million years.
The idea of “conserving evolution” is not an official written policy in the Galápagos, but is the guiding principle on which nature protection work has been organized. Although the focus on maintaining evolutionary processes resonates with Muir’s focus on preserving pristine
wilderness, I move away from the terms that structured early twentieth century American debate between preservation and conservation (Nash 2001). I use the term conservation here rather than preservation for two reasons: first, because it is commonly used in the Galápagos; and second, because it speaks to a recognition of the human agency involved in landscape management. Although Galápagos tortoises are not managed as a resource for human consumption as they were once used—they are protected in the strict sense, unlike fisheries resources—they are managed. “Restoring the tortoise dynasty” (Merlen 1999), as this chapter shows, depends on an alignment of human and nonhuman labor through captive care and breeding as well as invasive species control to prepare island landscapes for the return of their native denizens.
The idea that Galápagos conservation is a matter of “conserving evolution” was first mentioned to me during an interview with Howard Snell, a University of New Mexico biologist who worked with Galápagos tortoises and land iguanas for more than 20 years and was Director of Science at the Charles Darwin Research Station in the early 2000s. As he explained, the Galápagos were an ideal model for conservation:
Galápagos had all these things going for it: 95 percent of the biodiversity that was there was still extant. There were some local extirpations, but almost no species expirations whatsoever. And 97 percent was a national park. Small resident population. Not an economic mover and shaker in the country of Ecuador. Six hundred miles off the coast, so theoretically, you could have managed that as a very natural ecosystem, which at one time were the original park goals, which were not only to preserve the biological diversity, but also maintain ecological and evolutionary processes. Which is a very…what always attracted me to Galápagos and made me admire the national park was that at that time they actually explicitly—I don't know if anyone understood what they were saying, or if they understood what they were saying—but…because evolution was such a major thing in Galápagos history, they wanted to maintain evolutionary processes in an unaltered state. That sort of relates to your tortoise taxonomy question…as far as the national park was concerned in its early days, it didn't matter whether a separate island population was a species or a subspecies or not even
taxonomically recognized, it was envisioned as first as sacrosanct because it was different or potentially different… I thought that was this wonderful model. In fact when I used to teach conservation modeling—I still teach conservation modeling—but I used to use Galápagos as the ideal model because you had the opportunity to save the islands' natural state and you could do it relatively easily because the numbers of individuals involved that had contrary interests were small. (Interview 1/29/12)
His quote draws together the islands’ Darwinian history with understandings of the Galápagos as relatively pristine, isolated islands because of their small human population and few species extirpations. In addition to this unique opportunity to protect islands as a “very natural ecosystem,” conservationists were also motivated by desire to preserve the islands’ evolutionary history in an “unaltered state.”85 Snell’s quote also reveals the politics inherent in
85 The Galápagos afforded a unique opportunity opposed to Hawai’i, which was often raised in interviews as an
example archipelago where conservationists were “too late” to protect the islands’ original nature because of widespread species extirpations and a large human population.
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conserving evolution as he positioned conservationists as working against those with “contrary interests.”
When I subsequently asked other scientists and conservationists about “conserving evolution,” they agreed it was an important focus in the archipelago. Linda Cayot, who directed CDRS’s Herpetology program during the 1990s and now consults with the Galápagos
Conservancy, explained that the focus of Galápagos conservation has always been about “conserving evolution, pristine nature, and species.” She explained the link between a natural laboratory and the pristine:
LC: If you get back to using Galápagos as a natural laboratory of evolution, the more you can return to a pre-human condition, the better that laboratory
is…Basically what we do in conservation is to save biodiversity, save regions of the world...part of what makes Galápagos maybe also unique is that we are also saving the evolution. Everywhere in the world does that to a certain extent, and it's possible to do it more because it's islands, and each island is unique.
EH: So is that because there are clear different pieces of evolutionary history to save, or because it's easier to manage isolated islands?
LC: I think it's a combination. Geographic isolation of islands is what makes evolution so interesting on the islands. You could get the same kind of geographic isolation on mountain tops—they are island
EH: —ecosystems—
LC: —yeah. It's just Galápagos, because of the distribution of the islands, the distribution of the species, you already have a laboratory. Because of that same distribution, it makes conservation and management unique by island. (Interview 7/17/13)
As Cayot explains, Galápagos conservation is aimed not only at saving biodiversity, but also at saving evolutionary history. As both she and Snell mention, this is a matter of protecting a particular geography—the archipelago is comprised of individual islands with distinct
measures of species or genetic biodiversity, Galápagos conservation also strives to save the environmental conditions that produced that biodiversity through processes of adaptive radiation among different islands. What they are alluding to are theories of island biogeography,
formalized in the 1960s but dating to Darwin, that demonstrate why archipelagos are excellent places to study evolutionary processes. Because of the geographic isolation of islands,
archipelagos provide ideal examples of allopatric speciation—the evolutionary process of the diversification of species due to spatial isolation (Quammen 1996, MacArthur 1967). The Galápagos giant tortoises are an excellent example. As shown in Figure 1, biologists have long thought that each major island in the Galápagos archipelago, and each of the five volcanoes on the largest island, Isabela, was home to a distinct population of tortoises (Van Denburgh 1914).86 As Cayot and Snell both mentioned, this evolutionary theory of species diversification between islands was the rationale for always doing conservation island by island—this island-scale management of native species constitutes the basis of “conserving evolution.”
As Cayot and Snell mentioned, the idea of conserving evolution is historically driven. By using evolutionary theory as a guide for nature protection, Galápagos conservation turns on a scientific rationale as well as cultural appreciation of wilderness to justify a “return” to pristine ecosystems. In the Galápagos, as elsewhere, restoration biology has become a major focus of conservation work (Fraser 2009). As Cayot explained, the goal of Galápagos restoration is to
86 This belief goes back to Darwin—although he did not label the specimens he collected geographically, John
Gould (who did the taxonomy of Darwin’s Galápagos birds) and Thomas Bell (who worked on the few tortoises Darwin brought back) both pointed to the probability of diversification among island populations (Sulloway 2009). As Darwin later wrote in his published Beagle journal “I have not as yet noticed by far the most remarkable feature in the natural history of this archipelago; it is, that the different islands to a considerable extent are inhabited by a different set of beings. My attention was first called to this fact by the Vice-Governor, Mr. Lawson, declaring that the tortoises differed from the different islands, and that he could with certainly tell from which island any one was brought. I did not for some time pay sufficient attention to this statement, and I had already partially mingled together the collections from two of the islands. I never dreamed that islands, about 50 or 60 miles apart, and most of them in sight of each other, formed of precisely the same rocks, placed under a quite similar climate, rising to nearly equal height, would have been differently tenanted; but we shall soon see that this is the case.” ([nd, 1845, p. 373-374).
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return the islands to their “pre-human condition” as much as possible. Although there are a variety of interpretations, technologies, and methods for doing restoration work, this broad goal has surfaced in official policy documents with a specific target date. In 2002, scientists and conservationists working with the CDF published a Biodiversity Vision for Galápagos that outlined the goal of going “Back to Eden”:
[The] ultimate goal is the restoration of the populations and distributions of all extant native biodiversity and of natural ecological/evolutionary processes to the conditions prior to human settlement. If this extremely ambitious goal were one day to be achieved, it would represent the pinnacle of accomplishment in conservation biology—the restoration of the biological nature of the Galápagos Islands almost to the conditions of 1534” (CDF and WWF 2002, p. 48).
Through this vision, the goal of conserving the “natural” evolutionary history of the islands is tied to the islands’ prehistoric past. The year 1534 serves as a baseline for this vision because it was the following year that the islands were officially discovered by Fray Tomas de Berlanga, Spanish Bishop to Panama, who was becalmed in the archipelago while trying to sail to what is now Peru. This vision situates human influences in the archipelago as unnatural intrusions—no indigenous population evolved in the islands, so their natural history is not a peopled history. As the quote above explains, the complete restoration of the Galápagos to their natural, prehuman ecological and evolutionary conditions is “extremely ambitious,” but
nonetheless the motivation behind island conservation work.87 When I asked Cayot how much it was possible to go back to a previous state, she said:
I would say we go backwards...as much as we can...Those of us who work in conservation, our goals are to minimize the impact of humans on natural ecosystems where humans—in Galápagos it's easy, you can say pre-human
87 This vision has been much criticized in the Galápagos because it failed to address any social issues in the islands
(Hennessy and McCleary 2011); indeed, the accomplishment of this vision would in principle mean removing all human populations from the islands. This is something that has actually been suggested, but which many conservationists now distance themselves from. Subsequent visioning documents released by the Galápagos National Park Service and local government and NGOs all explicitly address social issues and call for management paradigms that stress sustainable socio-ecological futures.
because humans only got there in the last few hundred years. In other places, it gets more complicated because you have to look at indigenous human
populations, and they are part of the system. But in Galápagos it's crystal clear because humans weren't even there.
The idea of “conserving evolution” in the Galápagos combines both a pristine past and a scientific theory. Because science is understood as a direct representation of nature, the natural laboratory discourse justifies conservation as a return to the “natural truth” of the islands. The laboratory discourse further supports restoration efforts that aim to remove unnatural human influences that interfere natural processes of evolution, distorting the results of nature’s
experiments. To do this, however, requires the paradoxical situation in which human intervention is necessary to return to a prehistoric past. This requires a particular understanding of evolution and an exceptional view of conservationist agency as uniquely aligning with “natural” agency to mitigate the degradation caused by other human agency. The notion that evolutionary time could be refolded such as to return to a past state also reflects a particular interpretation of evolution— one that was frozen five hundred years ago and becomes less “natural” as humans are involved. This scientific framing is a cultural, moral, and political endeavor. This chapter examines how this scientific interpretation is applied to manage the islands, attempting to return them to their prehistoric state. I argue that through management efforts such as breeding tortoises and