Galapagos: tourist paradise, scientific laboratory, bureaucratic prison, or lifeworld?

Abstract (English)

The Galapagos Islands are renowned for their unique biodiversity and their association to Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. While the notion of Darwin's 'eureka moment' in Galapagos has been critiqued as ahistorical (Hennessy 2017), the archipelago continues to attract growing numbers of tourists every year. For conservationists, the islands are viewed as a 'laboratory' of evolution (Barrow 2009)—a place to be conserved and studied. For tourists, they are a picturesque backdrop for selfies in front of giant tortoises and blue-footed boobies. However, for the majority of the 30,000 people who inhabit the archipelago, the islands are often experienced as a site of restrictions, inequality, bureaucracy, precarity, and fortress conservation (Brockington 2002). Many residents described the islands as a 'prison' or 'hell' for those who live there. Drawing on a year of ethnographic fieldwork, conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic, this paper explores the competing imaginaries of Galapagos: a tourist paradise, a scientific laboratory, and a bureaucratic prison. Using Ingold's concept of 'lifeworld', this paper acknowledges that humans and non-humans inhabit a 'dwelt-in world' (1993). Furthermore, I argue that the overarching conservationist paradigm and prison analogy illustrate how marginalized people feel, especially from the perspective of farmers who feel like they have been abandoned by other economic sectors in the archipelago. Finally, I introduce the concept of the 'coexistential rift' (Büscher & Fletcher 2019), whereby farmers are thrust into greater livelihood insecurity, alienation, anxiety, and market dependence, due to the compounding risks that they face everyday, including agricultural pests, climate change, conservationist exclusion, and bureaucratic restrictions (Stimson 2023a, Stimson 2023b). Highlighting farmers' nostalgic views of the past and utopian visions of the future, I argue that the islands could adopt a model of 'convivial conservation', but only when space is reimagined as a truly intertwined socio-ecological system, rather than an exclusionary model with finance and privileges directed towards a small elite of tourism providers and conservationists. This paper contributes to debates in political ecology, showing that often contradictory ways of visualizing space should be the first step in providing a future where we can all coexist in more ethical and equitable ways and one where people can foster a deep sense of belonging to the islands (Grenier 2007 [2000]). Such an emphasis on coexistence and caring is not only important from the perspective of social inclusion and environmental justice, but they could also enhance the food security of the archipelago (Burke 2021).