Marine iguanas are unique to the Galapagos Photo: STUART CONWAY By Sir David Attenborough
Sir David Attenborough explains why tourists are a "necessary evil" on the remote islands.
I first visited the Galapagos Islands in1978, filming Life on Earth, and in fact last returned on my 80th birthday. I think what knocks everyone for six when they first arrive and step off the boat is the realisation that there are albatross and pelicans just… sitting there.
It is perfectly clear to them that they own the place and that you ought to step past them, not they get out of your way. They have this extraordinary indifference to human beings and leave you with this notion that you are visiting an area the animals clearly still consider to be theirs.
I really understood what Darwin must have seen in 1835. There are giant tortoises in different parts of the world, but what are visibly and obviously unique in the Galapagos are the marine iguanas. There's nothing remotely like them elsewhere. When you first see them they are dramatic to a degree; there are these huge herds of them sitting on the black rocks. It's easy to see why Darwin called them 'the imps of darkness'. It is most fascinating to see the marine iguanas swimming. If you're a swimmer, you come round on the coast having been watching trigger fish, sea lions and so on and there at the bottom is this lizard – a lizard! – 20 feet down, holding on to the rocks with especially long claws, grazing green seaweed. Extraordinary.
The Galapagos Islands lie on one of those great lines of weakness below the oceans of the world, the edges of tectonic plates where molten rocks from deep in the crust come to the surface and form volcanoes. You get volcanoes of different ages there, just as in Hawaii, and many of them remain active. On one of those islands Darwin could see this great expanse of black lava, this most extraordinary place.
He wrote in his journals: 'It reminds me very much of Wolverhampton.' He really did. Remember, his visit was at the time of the Industrial Revolution.
The variation in the islands lay behind Darwin's discovery that different circumstances produce different animals and different adaptations. So the marine iguanas don't occur everywhere – they have only colonised certain areas of the Galapagos. They had to feed on something and so on those islands that were new in geological terms and had very little vegetation on them – that were just bleak fields of black lava – the only vegetation they could find was seaweed.
The Galapagos are the classic example of the spark that lit the fuse, the one that natural selection. The evidence that is so transparently and dramatically and obviously clear in the Galapagos, you can also see in the Seychelles, you can see in Hawaii; you can see it wherever there is a group of small islands. Nonetheless, the Galapagos planted the seed that flowered, and so we revere them.
Partly because the Galapagos Islands are so remote, human beings didn't get there until the 16th century. Hawaii is just as varied if not more varied biologically, both botanically and zoologically, because it's bigger. However, the Polynesians have been there for many centuries so have wiped out an awful lot of stuff, as indeed they have in New Zealand.
The point about the Galapagos is that no-one had been to them previously and western European seafarers didn't know about them until late in their existence because they are stuck away in the middle of nowhere. Therefore they maintained their ecological isolation until a comparatively recent period.
The arrival of goats, which were deliberately put on the islands in order to provide meat for the seafarers, and the inadvertent arrival of rats, have both had a radical effect on the environment, on seabirds and upon the ecosystem. Recently the authorities on the Galapagos have taken steps to eradicate the goats from some of the islands, which is controversial; not for people interested in the biological world but, if you're a settler on certain islands, you'd think, 'Hell's teeth, I could sail across to another island, knock off a few goats and I'd have enough meat to last me and my family.' So it's not a popular move with some of the settlers but it's a brave thing to have been done and the authorities on the Galapagos deserve every support that we can give them.
The Galapagos consist of a dozen big islands and many smaller ones and so when tourists arrive, their groups can be divided up into manageable packets, sometimes of 150, sometimes of half a dozen. They tend to sleep on boats, so the groups' locations can be tracked and their schedules worked out to keep them separated. This is to the advantage of the tourists, in that when they go out in the morning they have the impression that they are the only ones there. It's very cleverly done. There are people working to do this, but others who are saying, 'Why don't you have twice as many tourists and that way we could get more money?' That will always seem to be the temptation, to push so far that you destroy the golden goose that lays the eggs. Tourism is a mixed blessing for the Galapagos but the fact is, if there was not tourism to the islands and the local people did not get any income from it, there would be nothing left there now. It would all be gone. It is the lesson of conservation around the world that unless the people who live in such places, whose land they feel belongs to them, are on the side of conservation, you're doomed. So tourism, if it's evil, is a necessary evil and one that in this instance can be controlled.
Of course, journalists and scientists have long pored over every conceivable aspect of the Galapagos. The interesting thing is that what is going on there relates to man's exploitation of the world and what we are proposing to do about it. We can screw up the Galapagos in the way that we can very easily screw up the whole planet. These islands are an example, a parable, for how we treat the natural world.
This article first appeared in Lonely Planet Magazine
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