Searching for the blue-footed booby: Should I stay or should I go?
Are critter “bucket lists” saving or killing the animals we want to protect?
For over a decade, I saved money and frequent flyer miles so I could travel to the Galapagos Islands.
I wanted to check the blue-footed booby, the marine iguana, the waved albatross and, most of all, the giant tortoise off my “must-see” list. I yearned to follow the footsteps of one of my intellectual heroes, Charles Darwin, in search of the evolution-proving finches on each of the islands.
But stuff happened.
I fell in love, decided to get married in one of my ancestral homelands (6,000 miles in the opposite direction from the Galapagos), and used my savings to get there and back. We had a child and, well, you can imagine the rest.
Sixteen years later, the old check-box-marking urge has returned. We’ve got enough money to make the trip. My daughter is a big tortuga fan: When she was five, she saved dozens of hatchlings on a Mexican beach from certain death-by-seagull. And her school is on Galapago Street, serving as a daily tourist billboard aimed at me.
I’m really torn about whether to scratch the itch.
On the one hand, the opportunity to see those marvelous creatures in their natural habitat is diminishing incredibly fast. As outlined in World Wildlife Fund (WWF)’s recent analysis, there’s been a “60% decline in the size of populations of mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, and amphibians in just over 40 years.” I don’t want my daughter to live in a “Silent Running” world, where her only contacts with nature’s most exotic wonders will have been at zoos, on screens, or at carefully-curated “wildlife experiences.”
On the other hand, the WWF report illustrates that we humans are the primary cause of that decline. We’re ripping up and polluting animals’ habitats. We’re “harvesting” (how I hate that euphemism) and eating them. We’re hunting and fishing too many of them just for sport.
Not to mention, flying to the Galapagos puts me on the hook for 0.70 metric tons of carbon emissions.
Maybe we’ll all be better off if I say “no, I won’t go.” But I’m not convinced.
I believe that responsible ecotourism is possible, and the Galapagos Islands are perhaps the best example. With its heavy restrictions on interactions with the local flora and fauna and its imaginative ways of preventing poaching and profiteering, Ecuador’s Special Law of 1998 has, at a minimum, halted the island habitats’ downward destructive trajectory. (There’s still lots of room for improvement, though. The biggest problem now is not tourists, but a rapidly increasing number of people wanting to live there. Its permanent population is on pace to quadruple in the next 12 years, despite no change in the amount of land available for human habitation.)
We’re rich enough to drastically increase funding for effective conservation measures without blinking. A recent study found that an average of $1.2 billion (not even a rounding error in the world’s $107 trillion economy) spent over 12 years on natural reserves and parks in 109 countries resulted in a 29 percent decline in the rate of decreased biodiversity. In other words, a few pennies a year per person prevented that 60 percent loss of animals from being even worse.
I’m more than willing to pay that price and much more.
(A reminder to Congressional leaders: It’s about time to renew the long-standing $900 million Land and Water Conservation Fund, the biggest source of conservation funding in the U.S. It wasn’t re-authorized in the most recent budget deal, despite strong bipartisan support. Every day it’s dormant, more acres are lost to development, and more nature is lost.)
We should also be making the Endangered Species Act stronger and better enforcing it, instead of going backwards, as far too many in the Trump Administration and Congress want.
Finally, we’d be better off by heeding the real-life example of Gerald Durrell, the 13-year-old budding naturalist in one of my daughter’s favorite TV shows, “The Durrells in Corfu” on PBS.
As a child, Durrell obsessively collected all manner of animals in his childhood home on the Greek island of Corfu. (He even had a two-toed sloth in the kitchen.) But he came to regret his possessiveness. As early as the 1950s, he helped pioneer the idea of creating huge nature preserves in ecologically-rich countries, such as Mauritius, Madagascar and Belize. He came to think that zoos should exist primarily as a last-ditch way to enable endangered species to survive, via breeding captive animals for eventual reintroduction into their natural habitats. Educating the public is an acceptable secondary purpose, but entertaining them is a big no-no — a “look, but don’t touch” policy.
“To me, the (destruction) of an animal species is a criminal offence, in the same way as the destruction of anything we cannot recreate or replace, such as a Rembrandt, or the Acropolis (in Athens).”
I agree with that philosophy.
But should I forebear any travel that might — in some small way — make me an unwitting conspirator in such a crime? Or will my adventures, if done in as environmentally-friendly a way as my no-longer-young body can handle, be a net plus for the blue-footed boobies of the world?
I’m not sure. What do you think?
Should I stay or should I go?
