Free About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory by Barry Lopez Page B

volcanic soils, the undependable climate, or the vicissitudes of a trade-based economy.
    Along with the farmers came resident fishermen, who fared somewhat better. Utopian daydreamers, adventurers, and eccentrics followed, many of them poorly informed about the islands’ climate, the extent of arable land, even their sovereign status. This pattern, in fact, carried far into the twentieth century.
    The first scientific collectors in the islands, an expedition under the French, arrived in 1790. The next, under Captain Robert FitzRoy in HMS
Beagle
in 1835, fixed the archipelago indelibly in the minds of all who read the subsequent reports of the ship’s naturalist, Charles Darwin. In 1905–1906 the California Academy of Sciences conducted the last major effort to collect in the islands, with an apparent excess of zeal—its leader killed the only tortoise ever recorded on Isla Fernandina.
    The days when scientists trapped for zoos and collected indiscriminately are gone; settlers, however, still turn domestic animals loose to prey upon, and compete with, native animals, and residents still shoot Galápagos hawks as predators and occasionally poach tortoise meat. Colonists have also introduced nearly 250 exotic plants to the islands, some of which, in combination with the grazing of feral horses, goats, cattle, and donkeys, threaten several endemic plants with extinction. Scientists, too, sometimes contribute to alterations in the islands’ plantcommunities by bringing ashore food and equipment that harbor seeds or insects from the mainland, or from one of the other islands.
    Anxiety about the islands’ natural communities stems from scientific knowledge that each island’s flora and fauna are unique. Remarkably, this remains essentially true today, despite plant introductions, damage by feral animals, and the loss of some native plant and animal populations. Researchers, in other words, can still find in Galápagos an evolutionary puzzle with relatively few pieces missing.
    A DESIRE TO PRESERVE a virtually undisturbed environment in the islands seems obsessive and unrealistic to some local villagers and farmers. Their pressing concerns are for food, a stable source of fresh water, and such things as raw building materials and supplementary income. (One encounters this basic difference in point of view, of course, with growing frequency in many countries—around the game parks of East Africa, for example, or in the rain forests of Guatemala.) In Galápagos, as elsewhere, things of the mind, including intellectual ramifications from evolutionary theory, and things of the spirit, like the feeling one gets from a Queen Anne’s lace of stars in the moonless Galapagean sky, struggle toward accommodation with an elementary desire for material comfort. In Galápagos, however, the measure of accommodation is slightly different. Things of the mind and spirit exert more influence here because so many regard this archipelago as preeminently a terrain of the mind and spirit, a locus of biological thought and psychological rejuvenation. It represents the legacy of Charles Darwin, and the heritage of devotion to his thought.
    The sheer strength alone of Darwin’s insight into the development of biological life gently urges a visitor to be more than usually observant here—to notice, say, that while the thirteen Galapagean finches are all roughly the same hue, it is possible to separate them according to marked differences in the shapes oftheir bills and feeding habits. The eye catches similar nuances elsewhere—minor differences also separate eleven species of tortoise and fourteen species of scalesia tree. This close variety is tantalizing. Invariably, one begins to wonder why these related species look so much alike—and an encounter with adaptive radiation, with what Darwin called “descent with modification,” becomes inevitable.
    A vague intellectual current meanders continually through Galápagos, an ever present musing one