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

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.

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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.

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.