The politics of a natural laboratory: Claiming territory and governing life in the Galápagos Islands

Abstract

The Galápagos Islands are often called a natural laboratory of evolution. This metaphor provides a powerful way of understanding space that, through scientific research, conservation and tourism, has shaped the archipelago over the past century. Combining environmental histories of field science with political ecologies of conservation biopower, this article foregrounds the territorial production of the archipelago as a living laboratory. In the mid-twentieth century, foreign naturalists used the metaphor to make land claims as they campaigned to create the Galápagos National Park and Charles Darwin Research Station. Unlike earlier ‘parks for science’, these institutions were not established under colonial rule, but through postwar institutions of transnational environmental governance that nonetheless continued colonial approaches to nature protection. In the following decades, the metaphor became a rationale for territorial management through biopolitical strategies designed to ensure isolation by controlling human access and introduced species. This article’s approach extends the scope of what is at stake in histories of field science: not only the production of knowledge and authority of knowledge claims, but also the foundation of global environmental governance and authority over life and death in particular places. Yet while the natural laboratory was a powerful geographical imagination, analysis shows that it was also an unsustainable goal.

Keywords

biopolitics conservation field Galápagos natural laboratory political ecology territory

In 1933, California ornithologist Harry S. Swarth submitted a proposal to the Ecuadorian government calling for the protection of the Galápagos Islands, which he argued were ‘one of the most amazing natural laboratories of evolutionary processes on earth’ (Barrow, 2009: 176). At the time, these equatorial islands 600 miles off the Pacific coast of South America were home to a few hundred colonists from continental Ecuador, Western Europe, and North America. This colonization, in Swarth’s opinion, jeopardized the archipelago’s native flora and fauna and should be stopped. He thought the islands should ‘be made a wildlife sanctuary and outdoor biological laboratory in honor of Charles Darwin’ (The New York Times, 1933: 15). In this way, the archipelago’s nature would be preserved and modern biologists could continue to work in this place Darwin (1845) once wrote was ‘a little world within itself’ (p. 377).

Today, Swarth’s vision for the Galápagos seems self-evident. The assertion he made – that the islands are a natural laboratory – is now commonly repeated, most often in nature documentaries and travel writing. Since 1959, 97 percent of the archipelago has been protected as a national park managed under the guidance of a research station that bears Darwin’s name. The Galápagos was among the first set of UNESCO World Heritage Sites named in 1978 and is considered to be one of the ‘best-preserved’ island archipelagos in the world, retaining 95 percent of its ‘original’ biodiversity (Charles Darwin Foundation (CDF) and World Wildlife Fund (WWF), 2002: 1). But this outcome was not at all clear in 1933.

This article traces the political history of the Galápagos as a natural laboratory, arguing that the metaphor was not merely a description of the value of a scientific field site, but a powerful way of understanding space that has profoundly shaped the archipelago over the past century. Scientific descriptions like Swarth’s propose that the islands are a place where scientists can watch ‘nature’s experiments’ unfold and witness the diversification of species as they adapt to different island landscapes (Kohler, 2002a: 214). ‘Darwin’s finches’ are the textbook example, but many sets of Galápagos species display similar patterns of allopatric and sympatric speciation, including snails, giant tortoises, and Scalesia trees.¹

Rather than detail the history of scientific research on such ‘experiments’ in the Galápagos, I analyze the natural laboratory as what geographers term a ‘geographical imagination’, or a way of thinking about the value of particular places and people’s relationships to them that have profound effects in shaping the world (Gregory, 1994). I combine histories of field science with environmental histories and political ecologies of conservation to foreground the territorial production of the Galápagos as a natural laboratory. The article first examines the claims to land that biologists made as they campaigned to create a national park and research station. It then turns to how the metaphor shaped practices of conservationist management aimed to protect the nature scientists sought to study – bounding the lab, managing human access to nature, and controlling introduced species. This approach demonstrates that the natural laboratory metaphor was not an objective representation of island nature, but a particular way of producing space with consequences far beyond the scope of any particular research project.

For Swarth and other biologists, the natural laboratory metaphor was as much an argument about where nature should be studied as about where it should be saved. In the 1920s and 1930s, field biologists increasingly sought to study wildlife in its natural habitat, rather than bringing specimens back to natural history museums or metropolitan laboratories. But at a time of mounting concern about extinction (Barrow, 2009), conservationist intervention was necessary to ensure the continued existence of scientifically valuable nature. Calling the Galápagos a natural laboratory was an argument for ‘preservation for science’ (Rumore, 2012). It justified the creation of both a scientific research station and national park where prized evolutionary experiments would remain safe from human despoliation (see Alagona, 2012; De Bont, 2017; Kupper, 2014, 2016).

Analysis of these campaigns sheds light on the changing political infrastructure of global field science in the mid-twentieth century and thus extends attention to how scientists have gained access to the field, a central theme of literature on the history of field science (Kuklick and Kohler, 1996). In addition to understanding how scientists’ access is shaped by social networks (Kohler, 2002a; Lachenal, 2016; Vetter, 2017), transportation infrastructure – particularly the extension of railroads across the US West (Kohler, 2002a; Vetter, 2012, 2017) – and local negotiations over access to land (Rumore, 2012; Vetter, 2008), recent work has stressed the broader power dynamics of colonial and neocolonial governance structures through which scientists gained the ability to protect nature and do research across national borders in the early twentieth century (Barrow, 2009; De Bont, 2017; Raby, 2017). Unlike two prominent examples in the literature, the Albert (now Virunga) National Park in the Congo and Barro Colorado Island in the Panama Canal Zone, the Galápagos was not under formal colonial control when the park and research station were established in 1959. The Galápagos case post-dates the creation of those ‘laboratories’, but the later timeline nonetheless provides an important case for understanding how postwar environmental institutions, namely the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN), constituted a new nongovernmental structure for field science and conservation that has since fundamentally shaped the practice of natural science in much of the world, particularly the global South (Adams, 2004; Fairhead and Leach, 2003; Goldman, 2005, 2007). Many national parks in Latin America were formed in response primarily to national concerns (Wakild, 2018), but Ecuador’s first national park, much like its archipelagic location, was an outlier, part of the initial wave of a neocolonial conservation land grab orchestrated through international nongovernmental organizations. The enclosure of 1,949 protected areas in Latin America and the Caribbean – more than 24 percent of total land area, or over 485 million hectares – has not been an entirely home-grown enterprise (United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), 2016).

By emphasizing this scientific territorial claim, I draw histories of field science more deeply into conversation with political ecologies and environmental histories of conservation. I frame the natural laboratory as a ‘conservation territory’ – Zimmerer’s (2006) term for ‘designated spaces of nature protection and resource management’ (p. 8). Drawing on this literature’s emphasis on the politics of enclosure of protected areas (Jacoby, 2014 [2001]; Neumann, 2004), I show how the natural laboratory is a particular ‘way of seeing, understanding, and producing nature (environment) and culture (society) and … a way of attempting to manage and control the relationship between the two’ (West et al., 2006: 251). Historians of field science have emphasized that the creation of natural laboratories involved regulating differential access to nature (De Bont, 2017; Raby, 2017).The political ecology literature pushes analysis of social access to research sites to attend to concomitant material productions of nature (Smith, 2008).

Attention to conservationist productions of nature extends analyses of the construction of field sites. Historians of science have shown that field science can take place just about anywhere – be it city park, productive landscape, protected area, Western ranch, polar ice cap, or tropical island (Alagona, 2012; Gieryn, 2006; Heggie, 2016; Lachmund, 2003; Raby, 2017; Rumore, 2012; Vetter, 2012). This work stresses the unique material characteristics that make particular places valuable for research, while also asserting that field sites are not encountered whole, but are always in the process of being constructed, their boundaries continually redefined and remade through the practices of scientific research (Driver, 2000). Field sites are shaped by the ways scientists envision, and inhabit, space (Geissler and Kelly, 2016; Greenhough, 2006; Lachenal, 2016). So, too, are they shaped by the dynamism of nature and social histories of place (Lachmund, 2003; Raby, 2015). Islands-as-laboratories are not fixed, closed spaces already formed but are ‘constantly being re-negotiated by their human and nonhuman inhabitants’ (Greenhough, 2006: 225). Field sites are constructed through the imbrication of social practices and material processes that change over time.

To analyze how the geographical imagination of a natural laboratory has produced space in the Galápagos, I turn to a subfield of political ecology on conservation biopolitics (Biermann and Anderson, 2017; Biermann and Mansfield, 2014; Buller, 2008; Hennessy, 2013; Lorimer, 2015; Lorimer and Driessen, 2013). This scholarship is based on Foucault’s analysis of how scientific understandings of biology emerging in the nineteenth century informed new strategies of biopower, or power over life. Political ecologists have translated Foucault’s concern with the security of human populations to the realm of wildlife management, examining the logics through which nonhuman life is ranked, valued, and sorted (Biermann and Anderson, 2017). For Foucault (2003), biopolitics was one form of power to ‘make live and let die’, an art of government that turned on the ability to secure populations with particular attributes (p. 241, quoted in Biermann and Mansfield, 2014: 1). This work examines the calculative practices of biodiversity conservation, a more-than-human biopolitics that, in Lorimer’s (2015: 12) words, ‘involves the systematic, but never totalizing, application of scientific knowledge, technology, and administration’ to classify, protect, and ‘make live’ endangered species (Biermann and Anderson, 2017; Hennessy, 2013).

This work provides a framework for understanding how evolutionary understandings of the Galápagos as a natural laboratory became a guiding logic for conservationist government of life in the archipelago. Beginning in the 1960s, conservation policies aimed to create an idealized natural laboratory where nature was pristine and secure boundaries separated the natural world from human contamination. Attention to material production of the landscape through, and in preparation for, scientific study extends the emphasis in the history of field science literature on the epistemological practices scientists use to produce knowledge in and of the field – what Kohler (2002b) calls ‘practices of place’ (p. 192). I argue that conservationist land management practices that aimed to purify and protect native nature – in the form of territorial boundary work and control of human populations and introduced species – are also crucial practices of place that set the conditions of possibility for scientific knowledge production in the Galápagos. In this ‘living lab’, only nonhuman species that had evolved in place in evolutionarily deep time were meant to thrive – but controlling the dynamism of life in this way has proved much more difficult than the rhetoric of mid-century scientists implied.

Such territorial productions of the natural laboratory were premised on a modernist vision of isolated, controllable island space and an ontological commitment to Nature. Historians of science have argued that natural laboratories confound such binary logics – that they are at once ‘controlled and wild, artificial and natural, purified and contaminated, abstract and practical and [places of both] experience and experiment’ (Geissler and Kelly, 2017: 798, citing Heggie, 2014).² But here I argue that the metaphor is unsustainable as a model for conservation not because of inherent contradictions, but because of the tensions that have arisen through attempts to make the archipelago conform to mid-century visions of isolated nature.

The power of metaphor

Owing to the remoteness of the archipelago, the number of ancestors is of course very limited. Hence a simplification in the fauna which makes the laws of evolution much easier to distinguish than in the rest of the world, where the complexity of natural phenomena and the multiplicity of ancestors complicate inextricably the tracing of relationships. The Galapagos Islands thus stand out as Nature’s experimental station. (Dorst, 1961: 30)

In the 1930s, naturalists and diplomats secured two decrees that ensured, on paper, the protection of the Galápagos. But conservation decrees were barely implemented until the Charles Darwin Research Station (CDRS) and Galápagos National Park (GNP) were founded in 1959. Conservation campaigns that led to the creation of these institutions often reiterated the geographical imagination of the Galápagos as a natural laboratory. Writing for the UNESCO Courier, French ornithologist Jean Dorst (1961), then a sousdirector at the Paris natural history museum, described the islands as a ‘living laboratory of evolution’ and ‘Nature’s experimental station’ (p. 30). The metaphors were descriptions of the scientific value of the islands. They were equally arguments for conservation.

Islands have played a central role in the construction of Western environmental knowledge for centuries, since early imperial naturalists began to recognize the devastating effects of colonization on their environments (Grove, 1994). Often cast as remote, isolated, and thus controllable, islands have become laboratories for a vast array of scientific work – from Darwin and Wallace’s theories of evolution, to island biogeography and systems ecology (MacArthur and Wilson, 1967), nuclear testing (DeLoughrey, 2012), and more recently genetic science and science studies (Greenhough, 2006). For mid-twentieth century biologists, the Galápagos were a particular kind of natural laboratory. While they wanted to build a research station, they primarily saw the archipelago as the lab (see Cittadino, 1990). Unlike other island laboratories, such as Barro Colorado, which naturalists valued for its species richness (Raby, 2017: 102–104), it was the archipelagic geography and biogeographical austerity of the Galápagos that made patterns of evolution relatively easy to trace. The proximity of the archipelago’s thirteen large islands clustered together yet remote from the continent provided ideal conditions for tracing the differences among similar species across different islands, and thus patterns of radiation. This was the context that made the Galápagos a site of ‘nature’s experiments’.³

In the Courier article, Dorst discussed three reasons why ‘the Galapagos Islands are no less than a natural laboratory in which evolution has been made manifest’. His language framed the islands as an isolated (Baldacchino, 2007), anachronistic space (McClintock, 1995). They were ‘a refuge for animals of an archaic type and for a biological complex which has disappeared everywhere else in the world’ (Dorst, 1961: 30). Going to the islands was, he argued, like going back to the ‘secondary period, the age of the reptile’, because mammals had largely never reached them (p. 30). The islands’ remoteness also led to high levels of species endemism because ‘evolutionary differentiation occurred isolated from the currents of evolution taking place on the continents’ (p. 30). Finally, as quoted above, isolation also meant few ancestral species and thus easier tracing of lineage relationships.

Natural laboratories were of particular interest to field evolutionists who, as De Bont (2015) writes, paraphrasing one naturalist’s argument, ‘should not limit themselves to reconstructing evolutionary trees on the basis of sliced-and-stained organisms, but … should also study the actual adaptation of animals to their environment. Had this after all not been Darwin’s first interest?’ (p. 131). What Darwin, and Wallace too, made apparent was that remote islands like the Galápagos are useful places to determine the role of isolation in species diversification. Biologists arguing for Galápagos preservation saw the islands as a Darwinian ‘truth-spot’ (Gieryn, 2006) – a unique landscape where the particularities of natural life made ‘laws’ of evolution visible.

When he was in the Galápagos in 1835, Darwin had not yet realized the importance of island-by-island variation and thus failed to label his bird specimens by island of origin, so he did not have the data from the Galápagos to use the islands as evidence of evolution (Sulloway, 1984). However, mid-century promoters repeatedly stressed the archipelago’s Darwinian history – even asserting that it was where he had discovered evolution. The ‘Darwin-Galápagos legend’ (Sulloway, 1984: 30) of discovery emerged in the mid-twentieth century through conservation campaigns and celebrations of the centenary of the Origin (Hennessy, 2017). Promoters used allusions to Darwin to frame the archipelago as the ideal site for a vast array of potential future field studies of evolution. Julian Huxley (1966), a key figure in 1930s and 1950s campaigns, argued that the Galápagos should be ‘a living memorial of Darwin – not only a museum of evolution in action, but an important laboratory for the furtherance of … a truly Darwinian biology’ (p. 9).

Scientists’ ability to continue the research Darwin had begun depended on protecting the islands. Dorst followed his Courier description with a note of alarm about the ‘situation of [the] flora and fauna’ which was ‘so precarious that this unique biological complex is threatened with extinction’ (1961, p. 31). Tropes of isolation, a-temporality, and fragility belied a long social history, including centuries of visits by buccaneers, whalers, and naturalists as well as colonization since the 1830s. But they underscored the urgency of action. As scientific understanding of extinction spread in the late nineteenth century, naturalists increasingly reported the scarcity of giant tortoises and other prized fauna because of overhunting by colonists and natural history collectors alike (Barrow, 2009). After a trip to the archipelago in 1891, US-based paleontologist Georg Baur (1891) exclaimed the need for work on the nature of speciation in the Galápagos:

Such work ought to be done before it is too late. I repeat, before it is too late! Or it may happen that the natural history of the Galapagos will be lost as it has unfortunately been lost in so many islands…lost forever, irreparably! (p. 318)

Yet what Baur advocated in the 1890s – and what followed at the turn of the twentieth century – were more collection expeditions to gather Galápagos specimens for museums before they disappeared. It was not until the 1930s that naturalists advocated in situ conservation of the Galápagos.

The natural laboratory metaphor was an argument about where nature should be saved. Movements promoting ‘preservation for science’ (Rumore, 2012) were common in the first decades of the twentieth century, although few national parks were ever expressly established as field laboratories for scientific research. For promoter Carl Schröter, who led the Swiss National Park’s scientific commission, parks were a means for making ecology a ‘‘genuine’ field science’; he predicted that they would become akin to herbaria and botanical gardens (quoted in Kupper, 2016: 127, also Kupper, 2014). Schröter’s vision was never fully realized, but his arguments helped shaped transnational and colonial conservation efforts. In the Belgian Congo, the rhetoric of a ‘world laboratory’ facilitated European management by linking assertions of the universality of scientific knowledge and political internationalism (De Bont, 2017: 412). Decades later, during the period of decolonization, the ‘world laboratory’ metaphor held together internationalist political campaigns that extended colonialist environmentalism. In the Galápagos in the 1950s, emerging transnational institutions of environmental governance would bring this environmentalist empire to a nation long since emerged from formal colonial control.

Transnational networks of environmentalist empire

In the early twentieth century, US biologists rushed to establish research stations across the tropical Americas in a ‘scramble for the Caribbean’ (Raby, 2017: 41). Although this Pacific archipelago was further afield, it was not outside the reach of neocolonial tropical biology. To establish Caribbean stations, ‘U.S. biologists became embedded in the networks of empire’ in the form of private agricultural companies (in the case of Soledad, Cuba) and US control of the Canal Zone (in the case of Barro Colorado Island) in Panama (Raby, 2017: 216, also McCook, 2002). But to protect the Galápagos – which were under neither formal colonial nor capitalist control – field naturalists campaigned through networks of transnational governance. During the Progressive era naturalists became increasingly convinced that national approaches alone could not ensure the fate of endangered species, many of which were migratory, or otherwise not confined to national political boundaries (Barrow, 2009; Dorsey, 1998). International networks became so instrumental in the creation of nature reserves in the twentieth century that several historians have argued that national parks should more accurately be called ‘transnational parks’ (Gissibl et al., 2012: 2). This movement was an extension of the colonial civilizing mission that ‘assured the ongoing political influence of the former imperial powers in the decolonizing world’ (Gissibl et al., 2012: 10; also Ross, 2017). Below I show how scientific access to the field in the mid-twentieth century was facilitated through an emerging institutional structure of transnational environmental governance that replicated the tenets of colonial era conservation (Ross, 2017).

In the Galápagos, 1930s conservation campaigns for a Darwin Memorial Zoological Laboratory and wildlife refuge had been led by scientists working through the American Committee for International Wildlife Protection and a committee of the British Association for the Advancement of Science led by evolutionist Julian Huxley (Barrow, 2009). US and British scientists worked with Ecuadorian counterparts and diplomats on these efforts, but the network lacked the resources and authority to implement conservation plans. During World War II, US biologists tried, but failed, to attach a scientific station to a US Air Force base erected in the Galápagos after the bombing of Pearl Harbor (Barrow, 2009: 183; Larson, 2001). It was not until the 1950s that Galápagos conservation efforts were again taken up in earnest when two young biologists wrote to the IUCN. Following separate research trips to the islands, Austrian ethnologist Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt and Canadian-American ornithologist Robert Bowman each shared their alarm about increasing colonization and the destruction left behind by the military base.

Their concerns reached a sympathetic audience. The IUCN (originally the International Union for the Protection of Nature) was founded in 1948 as a clearinghouse for global nature protection efforts (IUCN, 2017). Its roots reached to the ‘world nature protection’ movement of the early twentieth century that argued for the protection of natural treasures as global commons, not beholden to rule of any single power (Ross, 2015). The IUCN was a spin-off of UNESCO, which had been founded in 1945. As UNESCO’s first director (1947–1949), Julian Huxley laid out a philosophy for the institution based on a ‘world scientific humanism’ grounded in an ostensibly politically neutral evolutionary understanding of life (Huxley, 1947). Yet as Sluga (2010) argues, Huxley’s vision was shaped by not only ‘an Enlightenment-coddled trust in the universal power of knowledge and education, but also late nineteenth-century conceptions of evolution and empire’ (pp. 396–397).⁴ Plans for a new global empire based on rational scientific management were shot through with a paternalistic racial and cultural elitism (Anker, 2001).

UNESCO and the IUCN provided a structure for international, scientifically based environmental management to replace the previous efforts of colonial powers. Yet their power structure and appeals to the universal value of nature and science were firmly embedded in histories of colonialism (De Bont, 2017; Ross, 2017). Although the IUCN was formed in an era of decolonization, many of the same authorities who had worked for European colonial governments led new post-colonial initiatives. Victor Van Straelen, who had been central to the creation of the Albert National Park, moved from managing Belgian conservation in the Congo to become IUCN vice president – and later president of the NGO that would administer Galápagos conservation. (A tourist interpretation center in the archipelago is named for him.) In the early years of decolonization, foreign environmentalist presence actually increased across Africa, where the IUCN was involved in the creation of a spate of parks (De Bont, 2017: 411; Neumann, 2002; Ross, 2015: 395).

Galápagos conservation was also a major initiative for the IUCN. Officials responded to Eibl-Eibesfeldt’s and Bowman’s concerns about Ecuadorian plans for tourism and economic development in the archipelago by passing a resolution in 1956 that aimed to protect the Galápagos by setting aside several islands as ‘permanent reserves’ where flora and fauna could remain ‘undisturbed … so as to provide for long term research’ (quoted in Bowman, 1960: 7). The following year, UNESCO secured support from the Ecuadorian government to send a ‘biological reconnaissance’ mission to scout a site for a research station and survey the status of wildlife. Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Bowman, and a photographer and illustrator for Life magazine soon left for four months ‘On the Trail of Darwin’ in the archipelago, as one writer put it, where the Ecuadorian navy and island settlers acted as their guides (Behrman, 1957). The Life articles that followed positioned Eibl-Eibesfeldt and Bowman as young Darwins themselves, exploring the archipelago’s volcanoes and studying their unusual species. But they followed in his wake in another sense as well: as agents of neo-imperial scientific reconnaissance.

A hundred and twenty years before, Darwin’s voyage on the Beagle (1831–1836) had been shaped by a newly postcolonial context in South America. As Kuklick and Kohler (1996) argue, the ‘global infrastructure of imperial commerce and control’ was a crucial political and institutional configuration that allowed field naturalists to travel and conduct research in ‘unfamiliar areas far from home’ (p. 7). When Darwin sailed, Spanish and Portuguese colonial control in South America had fallen to independence movements, opening ports and new governments to trade with other powers. The British admiralty sent the Beagle to survey the coast of South America and make detailed charts for British merchant ships. Much as Eibl-Eibesfeldt and Bowman traveled under the auspices of institutions established during a wave of twentieth-century decolonization, Darwin’s visit to the Galápagos had been made possible by the fall of Spanish colonialism and the ascendance of British imperialism.

The 1957 reconnaissance mission was complemented by conservation diplomats in Paris, Brussels, and Quito. Their efforts led to a 1959 decree calling for the establishment of the GNP and CDRS. For Ecuador, recognition by UNESCO and the IUCN helped to secure sovereignty in the archipelago and raised the country’s international stature. The project also promised economic development either through tourism, which foreign scientists promoted, or through research to develop fisheries, which appealed to the few national scientists then involved (see Hennessy, 2017). It would be nine years before the state sent the first wardens to run the national park, but foreign scientists went to work building the station immediately.

In an unusual legal structure that remains in place today, the Darwin Station would be run by a private NGO, the Charles Darwin Foundation (CDF), spun off from the IUCN and UNESCO and formally registered under Belgian law.⁵ Its board included a who’s who of mid-century conservation, with Huxley serving as honorary chair and Van Straelen as founding president.⁶ The 1959 decree granted these foreign scientists the authority to determine which parts of the islands should be included in the nature reserve (discussed below). Their legal authority to manage the archipelago, in conjunction with the Ecuadorian Navy, was further secured in 1964 following a formal dedication ceremony for the new station. The military junta then ruling Ecuador signed a convention with CDF that established it as official scientific advisor to the state for the Galápagos for the next 25 years. The convention marked a new era of governing the islands, yet promises of tourism development would come into tension with plans to manage the archipelago as a place where nature was to be preserved in accordance with its evolutionary history.

Governing life in a natural laboratory

Construction of the new Charles Darwin Research Station on Santa Cruz Island began in 1960, under the direction of a series of young biologists UNESCO sent to the islands for two-to-three year stints to serve as resident director. These men worked with island residents and laborers from continental Ecuador to build a laboratory and office space, house and dorms that would serve as the base for visiting scientists in the archipelago. On a remote island, where government supply boats visited once a month at best, this was not a simple feat. But building infrastructure was far from all that scientists had to do to make the Galápagos a natural laboratory.

Making the islands a place useful for science required territorial practices to protect – and produce – island nature. On Barro Colorado Island, practices of long-term maintenance (such as a marked trail system), scientific instruments, and social relations transformed the island into a ‘living archive’ of tropical nature (Raby, 2015: 809). Similarly, in the Galápagos in the 1960s and 1970s biologists and conservation workers surveyed and tagged key species, methods that would provide a reference point for long-term studies. Such practices were common in scientific parks (Kupper, 2016: 126), but the Galápagos case draws attention to an additional aspect of the maintenance of such natural laboratories – the practices of conservationist management that were necessary additions to scientific ‘practices of place’ (Kohler, 2002b: 192). To produce the natural laboratory as an ‘unadulterated reality, just now come upon’, conservationists needed to purify island landscapes by ‘segregating out potential contaminants – both natural and human’ (Gieryn, 2006: 6).

The geographical imagination of a natural laboratory became the overarching rationale of conservation policies that sought to protect the archipelago according to Huxley’s vision of a living museum of evolution. As a policy document put it in 2002, the goal was to go ‘back to Eden’ by returning the islands, as much as possible, to their ecological state in 1534, the year before they were discovered by the Spanish (CDF and WWF, 2002: 1). With the notable exception of conservation biologists themselves, human presence in the archipelago was read as unnatural and threatening to native species that had evolved in place over millennia when the archipelago was unpeopled. The natural laboratory rhetoric combined understandings of the islands as scientifically valuable and manipulable with popular conservationist tropes of pristine wilderness, suggesting that the islands were sites of pure nature and controllable isolation. Although laboratory studies have thoroughly challenged the conceit that labs are controlled spaces isolated from social contamination (Knorr Cetina, 1992), these ideals resonated with goals of protecting the Galápagos as a site of nearly pristine evolutionary history.

Over the past 50 years, conservationists have worked to restore the ideal conditions of an isolated natural laboratory by employing territorial practices of place designed to make the archipelago an archive of evolution where native life continued to thrive. These practices included marking territorial boundaries, enforcing anti-poaching laws, hunting to control introduced species, limiting the number of migrants from continental Ecuador and their citizenship rights, and implementing biological quarantine measures to reduce the introduction of nonnative ‘pest’ species – including dogs and cats, rats, mosquitos, and micro-organismic diseases. Below I draw from conservation biopolitics literature to analyze three logics that organized these techniques: territorial security, controlling unwanted nonhuman life, and managing human populations’ access to nature.

First, attention to biopolitical techniques explains how mid-century evolutionary understandings of life (as described by Dorst above) were translated into conservation policies governing island territory. The idea of a natural laboratory of evolution recognizes that evolutionary change happens in particular environments – as Foucault (2007 [1978]) noted, ‘Darwin found that population was the medium between the milieu and the organism’ (p. 78). That is, environmental influences shape evolution by acting on the population rather than individual organisms (also Huxley, 1943). As Darwin and mid-century biologists noted, the geographical isolation of the Galápagos Islands (from each other and the continent) made them an ideal place for tracing allopatric speciation. Securing the native species’ territory was thus the basis of securing the natural laboratory. This territorial aspect of conservation is underdeveloped in the biopolitics literature, but Elden (2007) argues that the methods Foucault used to analyze the production of populations can be applied to the governance of territories. As he explains, ‘the strategies applied to territory in terms of its mapping, ordering, measuring, and demarcation, and the way it is normalised, circulation allowed, and internally regulated [are] … themselves calculative’ (Elden, 2007: 578). The Galápagos is an ideal site for thinking through the relationship between the governance of territories and populations because the two are inextricably linked in both evolutionary theory and the idea of a natural laboratory.

Second, biopolitics provides a way of examining how evolutionary understandings of life have been applied to order and value nonhuman beings such that some species are classified as endangered and in need of saving, or governance to ‘make live’, while others are rendered nonnative, even invasive, and thus should be ‘let’ or even made to die (Biermann and Anderson, 2017; Hennessy, 2013). Galápagos biopolitics are grounded in prehistoric evolutionary history: The species that evolved in place over hundreds of thousands of years are classified as native or endemic and thus belong, while species introduced more recently through human actions – rats and goats, for example – are nonnative and their ability to thrive in the islands is seen as an invasion that threatens the life of native species.

Third, evolutionary logics also extend to conservationist management of human populations – as Biermann and Anderson (2017) write, ‘the precarity of humanity and the planet demands that certain forms of nature or certain milieu be forcefully protected from some humans for all humans’ (p. 7; also Cavanagh, 2014). In the Galápagos, Huxley’s vision of a living museum of Darwinian evolution for an ostensibly global public came into direct conflict with colonists living in the islands. Biopolitical management privileges some groups (scientists, conservationists, and tourists) while others (such as local residents and new migrants) are marginalized, their access to nature restricted (Ospina, 2006). Below I examine how each of these three forms of biopolitics has taken shape, but also highlight the limits of their power.

Territorial security: Bounding the laboratory

In the 1960s, one of the lines of conservation work for UNESCO scientists was demarcating the new conservation territory. They established a reserve around a tortoise nesting zone on Santa Cruz and strategized about just how much of the archipelago they would be able to protect, considering that four of the islands were inhabited by about 2,000 people. Over the next two decades, conservationists delineated a national park that enclosed 97 percent of the archipelago’s landmass (8,000 km²), leaving 3 percent for human habitation and agriculture across four inhabited islands. As shown in the map below, the islands were divided into four zones, from strictest protection to inhabited areas.

Figure 1.

Map of the Galápagos Archipelago from the 1984 Galápagos National Park Plan for Management and Development, showing urban and agricultural use areas shaded.

Such maps, which are updated and republished in each of the GNP’s management plans, are less representations of actual territory than projections of a desired space in which gradations of nature and culture are neatly ordered. Mapping is not an apolitical reflection of the landscape, but an ‘intrinsically political act’ to increase control over spaces with valuable resources (Peluso, 1995). Such territorialization ‘is about excluding or including people within particular geographic boundaries, and about controlling what people do and their access to natural resources within those boundaries’ (Vandergeest and Peluso, 1995: 28). A key part of maintaining scientists’ access to the natural laboratory was defending it from perceived biosecurity threats from human settlements as well as introduced species such as cattle, pigs and dogs.

In the 1960s, Santa Cruz was home to about 500 people. Colonists included Europeans who had fled the world wars in search of an island adventure, as well as Ecuadorians who claimed frontier land through el alambre y la limpieza (barbed wired and clearing) – some of whom had been resettled by the government in the mid-1950s following a devastating earthquake on the continent. There were no roads, and only simple houses built of local ‘iron wood’, matazarno. People subsisted by fishing, hunting feral goats and cows, and farming in the highlands.

Scientists were concerned about colonists’ impact on the landscape, particularly clearing land to farm, hunting giant tortoises, grazing domesticated animals, and introducing foreign plants and insects that could threaten the health of native species. The first station director, French ornithologist Raymond Lévêque, wrote to Dorst in Paris, suggesting they claim the entire island as a conservation zone, apart from the areas already settled. ‘I’m not exaggerating’, he wrote. ‘This would give us the right, at least theoretically, to surveil the island, permitting us to prevent people from wandering everywhere, destroying as they please.’⁷

The official policy was that settled lands would be excluded from the park and lands not settled would become park. But in practice delineating the park was not so straightforward. The contested politics of creating protected areas is among the central themes of political ecology. To create idealized landscapes of ‘pristine’ nature, conservationists have evicted traditional land managers or limited their access to natural resources, often through violent practices of appropriation (Brosius et al., 2005; Jacoby, 2014 [2001]; Neumann, 1998; Peet and Watts, 1996). Conservation territories are, at base, sites of political contestation – ‘contact zones’ in which governance regimes rework the subjectivities of local residents (Sundberg, 2006; West et al., 2006). In the Galápagos, marking the boundary of the national park on inhabited islands involved more than a decade of negotiation, territorial disputes and legal cases over the resettlement of families who did not want to leave land they had recently claimed. The Darwin Foundation bought out some settlers, but others took their case to Ecuador’s Institute of Agrarian Reform and Colonization, which eventually settled the border in the late 1970s under pressure from UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee (which wanted a clearly delineated park before it inscribed the Galápagos as a Natural Heritage Site). In 2011, I interviewed one of the two original park guards, an Ecuadorian trained at a Food and Agriculture Organization forestry school outside Quito. He had worked on the boundary delineation after he arrived in the islands in 1968. ‘I found a very bad situation’, he said. ‘Most of the people had arms – guns. I was traveling along the boundary line and found these people who had come here looking for land and I had to say, no, that’s not yours, but they had been living here four or five years. … They shot at me a couple times – not directly. But we finished. I invited them to walk the line with me … they would come and we would discuss and we made the line [in a zig-zag pattern].’⁸ The process of delimiting park boundaries secured, at least ideally, the boundary separating the natural laboratory from the influence of people living in the islands – although the border was never as stable as the neat lines on park maps.

Today the border marking the divide between the park and agricultural land is continually managed. It is marked, in various places, with fences, stone walls, stakes, and clearings. Park guards routinely walk the border, taking GPS points to mark boundary posts and clearing away overgrowth with their machetes. Farmers, they say, have been known to move their fences to increase grazing land, so constant vigilance is necessary to assert the park’s authority. But local farmers have told opposed stories – that the park encroaches on their land and limits their access to former grounds for hunting and collecting timber (Valdivia et al., 2014). The border that divides the islands is not only a physical, territorial marker, but a socio-political one that divides actors with different spatial imaginaries of the islands. It is a living entity, continually crossed by plants and animals – both native and introduced – that do not recognize the territorial divide as well as by human actors who negotiate its politics.

Managing nonhuman populations: Controlling invasive species

Producing the natural laboratory also depended on managing populations of introduced species. In the 1960s and 1970s, conservationists surveyed the status of endemic fauna such as the giant tortoises and also routinely estimated the status of threatening introduced species, particularly rats, goats, and feral dogs and cats. Many of these species had been introduced – intentionally and not – by colonists and earlier sailors. The surveys became the basis for biopolitical management of nonhuman nature in the archipelago. In the early 1970s, conservation biologist Craig MacFarland, who would later direct the Darwin Station, spent the better part of a year in remote parts of the archipelago surveying tortoise populations for his dissertation research. He also estimated the size of introduced species populations, finding, for example, that 30,000 to 40,000 goats were living on Pinta, an island about two-thirds the size of Manhattan, and that 4,000 to 8,000 pigs inhabited the much larger Santiago (MacFarland et al., 1974: 122). These animals destroyed tortoise nests and preyed on juveniles. Goat populations boomed with plenty of vegetation and no natural predators – their presence threatened the survival of tortoises because they out-competed these shorter, less mobile animals for vegetation.

Management of introduced species was a second line of biopolitical work. To ‘make live’ prized native species required not only the power of ‘letting die’ introduced species, but a variant of what Foucault (2007 [1978]) saw as the sovereign power to ‘make die/let live’. Evolutionary logics and biosecurity threats rendered such species ‘killable’ (Haraway, 2008: 77–85) – they were what Braverman (2015) terms mere ‘biological life’ opposed to the ‘political life’ of giant tortoises and other iconic endangered species (p. 228, quoted in Biermann and Anderson, 2017: 4). Yet not all early conservationists shared a desire to rid the islands of introduced mammals. In 1960, Ecuadorian naturalist and Ambassador to France Cristóbal Bonifaz, who was central to 1930s decrees and one of the founding board members of the Darwin Foundation, suggested sheep ranching as an economic development project. This prompted Lévêque to decry that he was ‘really not much of a naturalist’ for not realizing ‘that once an animal is introduced somewhere, unpleasant things almost always happen’. At the time, Lévêque thought that eradicating feral mammals already in the archipelago was ‘a practically unattainable hope’, but encouraged settlers’ ability to hunt the dogs, goats, and hogs he saw as ‘pests’ (and which settlers saw mainly as sources of sustenance).⁹

Since then, killing work has become a routine aspect of island conservation in the Galápagos and elsewhere. The Galápagos National Park Service has consistently employed a division of guards tasked with managing these populations. One park guard I knew had spent the better part of eight years during the 1990s hunting pigs on the otherwise uninhabited Santiago Island, part of a team of half a dozen men. Another guard, one of the first, told me he spent most of his time hunting – something he looked back on with a degree of horror, saying he probably could not do it now: ‘We were killing animals all the time. That was our profession. To kill animals.’¹⁰ Scientists, too, hunted introduced species. In the 1990s, biologists visiting the Darwin Station routinely packed hunting rifles in their field gear and, upon return from field trips, filed detailed reports about the introduced animals they had encountered and killed. One scientist’s wife – herself a conservationist and ship captain – told me that hunting introduced species was just as much a part of field work as observing and measuring native species.¹¹

Between the mid-1960s and 1990s, park guards killed tens of thousands of mammals. They managed to eradicate introduced animals from several of the smaller islands, but on larger islands, their hunting could only control populations, not eradicate them. Invasive species control was a never-ending task. Biological life constantly escapes technologies of power: all it would take was a few goats who escaped hunters to unleash a new biological invasion.

In the 2000s, a US$40-million project backed by the Global Environment Facility (GEF), for ‘Control of Introduced Species in the Galápagos’ allowed the park to mount an eradication campaign. The main targets were pigs and goats on Santiago, Pinta, and northern Isabela. Traditional methods of hunting on foot with rifles and knives were replaced with systematic high-tech methods, including tagging ‘Judas’ goats with radio transmitters and hunting with semi-automatic rifles from helicopters, which allowed park guards quick access to difficult terrain. Hunters were successful in eradicating pigs on two islands and goats on three. The largest mammal eradication program in the world, they killed a total of 152,292 goats on Isabela and Santiago Islands. Every kill was geo-located and its cost efficiency calculated: on Isabela, where the majority of goats lived, the cost per kill was $47.91 (Lavoie et al., 2007). The project was biopolitical management on a massive scale, killing for conservation made economically calculable.

The eradication project has since become a model for island conservation around the world, but it was contested at home. Although a few dozen local hunters were employed by the campaign, others complained of being excluded. Several of those who did participate were disturbed by the methods employed, which did not follow the typical ethics and challenge of hunting, and by the carnage left behind (Bocci, 2017). One of the program’s coordinators told me the carcasses were left in place because of the logistical challenge of removing them from remote volcanoes before they rotted in the equatorial sun. In addition to complaints of wasted meat, local residents also decried the money spent on the eradication project and told of helicopter shootings dangerously close to the places they lived and worked. Although the eradication campaign did not take place near populated areas, residents suggested that they too felt like targeted invasive species. This sentiment stemmed not just from their exclusion from the GEF project and its funds, but from a long history of conservationist attempts to control local human populations.

Controlling human populations: Tourism, livelihoods, and resistance

Control of human populations’ differential access to the islands has been a third aspect of governing the Galápagos as a natural laboratory. Unlike other national parks for science where tourism was discouraged, the industry has always been a central strategy of Galápagos conservation. In reports on the 1957 reconnaissance mission, scientists recognized that tourism would be essential for state support of their vision for island management (Bowman, 1960; Eibl-Eibesfeldt, 1959). Local colonization, however, was not encouraged. Far from it – Lévêque and others advocated a total halt on new migrants from continental Ecuador for, as Eibl-Eibesfeldt wrote in 1959, ‘colonization conflicts with nature protection’ (p. 22). It was a common sentiment among Western conservationists at the time, and one that has shaped decades of social life in the islands.

Conservationists were never able to stop Ecuadorian migration to the islands – particularly as the tourism industry grew in the 1980s and 1990s. Since the park was founded, the islands’ human population has grown from 2,000 to 30,000 residents, a trajectory that has sparked conservationist concern about overpopulation. The high growth rate is driven mostly by migration from continental Ecuador, with people moving in search of better employment and quality of life than they find on the continent. Residents are concentrated in four urban areas across the archipelago, but the presence of these towns – while essential for tourism services as well as visiting scientists and conservation workers – disrupts ideals of supposedly pristine nature (Hennessy and McCleary, 2011). The creation of the protected area encouraged some livelihood strategies – work as park wardens, for tourism operators, as guides and in support businesses – while discouraging others, particularly fishing, which did not fit the alliance among science, conservation and tourism (Ospina, 2006).

The alliance between tourism and conservation has been repeatedly challenged by local residents, often fishers, through various acts of protest: from the symbolic killing of research objects like tortoises and sea lions (their bodies left for park guards to find, Cayot and Lewis, 1994; Marquez et al., 2007) to strikes in the mid-1990s and early 2000s. During a particularly contentious debate over the annual fishing calendar in 2000, fishers on Isabela set the park director’s house on fire, then walked down the main road and broke into the park office, where they destroyed computers. In 2004, fishers on Santa Cruz closed access to the Darwin Station by blocking the road that leads from town to the station for several days. These protests aimed to draw attention to the ways that conservation concerns curtailed local livelihoods (Constantino, 2007; Ospina, 2002). For decades, foreign conservationists who ran the Darwin Station operated under an implicit policy of discouraging infrastructure investments so as to forestall migration – since they could not remove settlers from the islands altogether. A retired Darwin Station scientist told me in 2012 that if he had his way, there would not be any people on the islands – but, he said, Ecuador is a democracy, so what could be done?

In my interviews, many conservationists looked back with regret on this history of ignoring local development through lack of support for municipal investment in basic infrastructure, such as water purification, improvements to sewerage and the building of hospitals. Following a broad shift in the conservation world toward sustainable development and participatory management, such concerns are now seen by most working in the islands as integral to the success of conservation (GNP, 2005). In 2008, a team of conservation biologists wrote: ‘There is a clear need in Galápagos to abandon the historical perspective of the separation of humans from nature, which only exacerbates conflicts between conservation and development’ (González et al., 2008: 17).

Intervention from UNESCO in 2007 spurred this new direction when the institution put the Galápagos on its list of World Heritage Sites In Danger. UNESCO identified a long list of reasons for the declaration, including ‘lack of effective governance’; ‘risk from alien invasive species’; rapid, ‘haphazard’, ‘unsustainable’, and ‘inequitable’ growth of the tourism sector’; inability to control illegal immigration; lack of stability and capacity of National Park and Marine Reserve staff; and a poor education system that ‘does not incorporate elements of environmental management and heritage preservation, and natural resource development, further delaying the critical need to develop an insular culture focused on sustainable development’ (UNESCO, 2007: 5–7). In my interviews (conducted with a team of researchers) about the crisis declaration with local conservationists, municipal employees, tourism workers and other residents, an oft-repeated refrain was that the problems of the Galápagos stemmed from the ‘three percent’ of the islands where people live. Although these actors had multiple and conflicting ways of interpreting what was at stake in the declarations, a sense that there existed a human crisis in a place of nature was pervasive (Lu et al., 2013). This way of framing the islands’ problems has remained common sense despite policy-setters’ recognition of the need to include local populations in conservation – something that speaks to the hegemony of visions of the islands as a natural laboratory where the only people who truly belong are scientists and conservationists.

Concerns about crisis in ‘Darwin’s lab’ (Conlin, 2008) were not new. A former director of the Darwin Station said the islands had been in a state of crisis since the early 1980s, when state banks began funding island development. My reviews of the Darwin Station’s publication, Noticias de Galápagos, revealed that concerns about over-development on ‘fragile’ islands, the destruction caused by introduced species, and the growth of tourism have been raised repeatedly since the earliest years of conservation. In 1998, a ‘Special Law’ for the Galápagos – written in consultation with the WWF – attempted to address these issues by promoting sustainable development. But institutional capacity to implement the law was weak and it ultimately exacerbated social inequalities. By granting Galápagos ‘citizenship’ to current residents and those born in the archipelago, the law created an island class structure based on residency status: ‘Galapagueños’ or those with permanent residency had the right to own property, while new migrants were relegated to the precarity of annual work permits (Grenier, 2007). UNESCO’s declaration was a response to tensions between conservation and development in the islands that had been escalating for decades (Constantino, 2007; Grenier, 2007; Hennessy and McCleary, 2011; Ospina, 2002, 2006).

The islands were taken off the ‘In Danger’ list in 2010, largely for political reasons, but the declaration has challenged the ideal of the archipelago as a pristine natural laboratory or museum of evolution. Institutional changes also suggest a different model of governance. Over the past ten years, the Galápagos National Park Service has grown out of the shadow of the Darwin Station to become the larger and more powerful of the twin institutions. As part of this repositioning, in 2010 the park published a new guide calling for ‘science for Galápagos’ rather than ‘science in Galápagos’ – a direct challenge to basic evolutionary research that did not have direct connection to conservation priorities (Tapia et al., 2009). When applying for research permits, visiting scientists must now address how their work aligns with the park’s goals for interdisciplinary and sustainability-focused science. At the same time, the Darwin Station has shrunk considerably in terms of both staff and funding. In 2015, the institution, long criticized locally for being run by white foreigners, appointed its first Ecuadorian director. The posting was a strategic move, as the CDF had to negotiate the renewal of its third 25-year convention with a national government skeptical about the prominence of foreign-based NGOs. The renewal was granted in 2016, but these changes hold the potential to refigure this ‘natural laboratory’ into something else – an experimental space for new forms of biopolitical management with the potential to undo neocolonial structures of conservationist management introduced in the mid-twentieth century.

Conclusion

The tensions associated with the UNESCO crisis declaration amount to the ‘unmaking of the natural laboratory’ ideal, argues Quiroga (2009). They reflect the impossibility of the way this geographical imagination was applied as goal for conserving the islands as a museum of evolution, as if behind a fence or lava-boulder wall evolutionary processes could proceed as they had for millennia, untouched by human actions. This vision fails to recognize that the archipelago had to be produced as a natural laboratory, an endeavor that required conservationist territorial and biopolitical management of nature.

Bounding and patrolling the park, controlling invasive species, and governing citizenship are each examples of biopolitical strategies through which the natural laboratory ideal has been translated into conservationist management. Recognizing these practices as an essential aspect of the production of the natural laboratory extends discussions of access to the field by demonstrating that conservation work is a practice of place necessary to secure the nature twentieth century field scientists sought to study. By examining the evolutionary logics that inform Galápagos conservation I demonstrate how conservation biopower enfolds governance of populations with what Foucault saw as the sovereign powers of territorial control and ‘taking life’ (Elden, 2007: 573). The Galápagos case extends the scope of what is at stake in histories of field science: not only the production and authority of knowledge claims, but also authority over life and death in particular places.

Over the past decade, the Galápagos have been framed as a living laboratory not just of evolution, but also of invasive species eradication, climate change, and sustainable development, among other things. Each of these framings suggests a new, more open-ended geographical imagination about the relationships among natures and cultures in the archipelago. These new laboratory imaginations reflect conservationist acknowledgement, somewhat late to take hold in the Galápagos, that even in a remote archipelago nature cannot be isolated from social life. They also reflect changing scientific priorities and understandings of nature. Instead of restoring an ‘evolutionary Eden’, some Galápagos conservationists have advocated ‘embracing invasives’ – particularly pernicious plants like blackberry whose brambles make them all but impossible to eradicate (Vince, 2011). Such shifts have been controversial in this place where conservation policies have long sought to minimize the presence of anything that did not evolve there. Yet recent phylogenetic analyses of endemic species, such as the giant tortoises, demonstrate that they too have been shaped by human history in the archipelago (see Hennessy, 2015). In response, some biologists I have worked with suggested treating the Galápagos as a laboratory for experiments in evolution in humanized landscapes. While such re-framings of the archipelago-as-laboratory are in line with contemporary theories of ecology, they are in tension with historical conservationist interpretations of the islands as an isolated natural laboratory. These tensions deserve further study, as they have significant implications for new forms of biopolitics and relationships between scientific knowledge, research and conservation.

Yet assertions that the archipelago is any kind of laboratory are a legacy of neocolonial territorial claims – a history that must be interrogated alongside shifts to novel ecosystems and participatory conservation. In the 1960s, Dorst presented the Galápagos as a living archive of evolution largely removed from the march of social time and politics, but this geographical imagination was built on histories of imperial exploration and reflects neocolonial approaches to transnational environmental governance of the postwar period. By pointing out the continued relevance of this history, I am not arguing against the importance of the archipelago’s scientific value, or against the need for conservation. Rather I am arguing that the neocolonial power relations that valued nature in a particular way and positioned foreign scientists as those who knew best how to manage the islands need to be interrogated alongside the evolving understandings of nature and the relationship among science, conservation, and local populations.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I am much obliged to Megan Raby and Jessi Lehman who made helpful comments on this paper and would also like to thank Sergio Sismondo as well as the anonymous reviewers who commented on a previous version. My thanks are also due to Jake Fleming, Rebecca Lave, Matt Turner and Chris Henke as well as other participants on panels at AAG and 4S where I presented the earliest incarnations of this article. I am also indebted to the communities in the Galápagos who allowed me to work with them, particularly the Galápagos National Park Service.

Funding

Research and writing time for this article was funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation (1002623), the Mellon Foundation/Social Science Research Council, the Mellon Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies, and the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Notes

Author biography

Elizabeth Hennessy is Assistant Professor in the Department of History and the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She completed her PhD in Geography at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and has been a fellow of the Social Science Research Council, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society. Her book on the Galápagos will be published by Yale University Press in 2019.

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