Product Description

Mention the Galápagos Islands to almost anyone, and the first things that spring to mind are iguanas, tortoises, volcanic beaches, and, of course, Charles Darwin. But there are people living there, too -- nearly 20,000 of them. A wild stew of nomads and grifters, dreamers and hermits, wealthy tour operators and desperately poor South American refugees, these inhabitants have brought crime, crowding, poaching, and pollution to the once-idyllic islands. In Plundering Paradise, Michael D'Orso explores the conflicts on land and at sea that now threaten to destroy this fabled "Eden of Evolution."

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #560249 in Books
• Published on: 2003-10-09
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 368 pages

From Publishers Weekly
When Charles Darwin first set foot on the Gal pagos Islands in 1831, he was captivated by an Eden untouched by man. But when D'Orso (Like Judgment Day) arrived on the scene in 1999, it was a different species all together that had brought him and that he found worthy of Darwin-like study-man. D'Orso explains that 3% of the Gal pagos Islands are occupied by an exponentially growing population of people whose migration to the islands began in the early 20th century with a few eccentric Norwegian settlers. The islands have more than 20,000 inhabitants, a motley crew of nationalities ranging from German to Ecuadorean, who call the Gal pagos both a refuge and a home. Predictably, these inhabitants bring inevitable dangers to the idyllic nature of the region-poaching, pollution, overfishing, crowding, ecotourism and the political warfare that will define the islands' future. With rich, witty prose as colorful as the characters he describes, D'Orso reveals the human side of the Gal pagos, including the owner of the Gal pagos Hotel, Jack Nelson, an American who has lived there since 1967; Christy Gallardo, an American who visited the island as a tourist and fell in love with and married an Ecuadorean man; and Mary Rodriguez, the wife of a Gal pagan farmer who in 1992 opened the first and only "gentlemen's club" called Quatro y Media. This is a stellar study of the alchemy of man and nature.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
The isolated Galapagos Islands, home to a unique ecosystem, are, thanks to Charles Darwin, the epicenter of evolutionary biology, and numerous scientists have chronicled the lives of the islands' giant tortoises, iguanas, and diverse bird species in his wake, but journalist D'Orso, author of Like Judgment Day (1996), is no nature freak. Instead, he spent three years researching and exploring the islands to learn about their overlooked human inhabitants. Captivating in both his lucidity and precision, D'Orso seamlessly blends island history, political reportage, ecological analysis, and vivid portraits of islanders as he traces the radical changes that are turning this once pristine natural paradise into a besieged and endangered ecological battleground where poachers, scientists, and ecotourists come into sometimes violent conflict, invasive species threaten native plants and wildlife, and corrupt Ecuadorian officials siphon off millions of tourist dollars, condemning islanders to abject poverty. By telling the stories of those who have dwelled precariously, often lawlessly, on the inhospitable Galapagos, from whalers and buccaneers to refugees, mavericks, Ecuadorians fleeing the collapsed mainland economy, and valiant Park Service officers, D'Orso brings into focus the entire spectrum of Galapagos life, a very different world from that shown in romanticized documentaries or glossy tourist brochures. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About the Author

Michael D’Orso is the author of the New York Times bestseller Like Judgment Day: The Ruin and Redemption of a Town Called Rosewood and has collaborated on many notable titles, including Walking with the Wind, with Senator John Lewis. He lives in Norfolk, Virginia.

Customer Reviews

PLUNDERING OBJECTIVITY ?
D'Orso's book highlights some very serious issues regarding the conservation of the Galapagos. Some accounts are dramatic and perturbing, mostly so because given the unique and sensible nature of the islands, any disruption in them seems specially worthy of concern.

The problem I see with the book, however, is that the author shines a negative, unconstructive light on most every single subject that he mentions in a self-serving attempt to add to the impact of the book, even at the expense of loosing objectivity.

D'Orso's book is so unreasonably pessimistic on all fronts that one can't help but wonder why, if according to the D'Orso the present and, mostly, the future is so utterly bleak for the Galapagos Islands, have the islands repeatedly been deemed one of the best preserved natural parks in the world or one of the last remaining natural paradises in near pristine condition.

The author came to Ecuador during very difficult and trying times for the country. As an Ecuadorian, I readily admit that we are rough around the edges in many ways and that we have a long way to go on some fronts. We do. But D'Orso's journalism, it seems to me, is like going to the US during the LA riots, the ENRON debacle, the Marion Barry scandal, the Exxon Valdez spill, the O.J. soap opera, the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, etc. and passing all this as everyday America in a book called "Plundering Nation" This would be wrong, wouldn't it? But doing so with mockery and disdain, as D'Orso does, is even less correct !

The Galapagos islands face many threats and what's being done to protect them may not be ultimately sufficient on all accounts, so improvements are becessary. Better controls, more funding and more political compromise may be needed.

I do dare say, however, that the current state of the islands and the ongoing control and conservation efforts are a source more for optimism than the other way around.

In the past several years introduced animals have been eradicated from several islands, land tortoises, reproduced and bred in captivity, have been repatriated to many islands; marine iguanas have also been bred and repatriated to islands where they were disappearing (as is the case with Baltra Island). Quarantines and controls have been implemented, education efforts have been undertaken, migration bans have been enforced. Several laws which require strong political will have been enacted. The Galapagos have been declared a marine reserve, where industrial fishing is completely off-limits.

However, according to the author, the Galapagos are a place were con-men arrive to evade the law..., where there are rusted Toyota's for taxis...(I've been to the Galapagos some 8 times and have never seen a rusted Toyota passing as a taxi!), a place to which Ecuadorians "flee along with their families from Quito and Guayaquil were the streets are awash with poverty and crime and the air stinks of corruption and despair...", etc., I could go on and on with this.

One last quote from the book (as it very much describes the scornful spirit with which D'Orso's book was written): "With such riches, there seems to be no reason for this nation to be spiraling downward like the swirl in a flushing toilet..."

Bottom line: the book is important and helpful in many ways and rightly unsettling, but its very flawed too.

The Most Invasive Animal
You know the Galapagos Islands. Darwin made them famous, of course, as a spark for his initial insights on evolution. The specks of land on the equator, off mainland Ecuador, have continued to perform as observatories for evolution. The tiny islands, burned by volcanoes and equatorial sun, have far more life than such an environment might seem able to support, but besides the famous and unusual bird species, there are hundreds of species of starfish, eighty species of spiders, and many others. If you watch TV documentaries or leaf through photo books, you get a flavor of just how rich and strange the life there is. You might know that the animals are so unused to humans that they have not learned to flee even hunters. You might have the idea that the deserted islands harbor but a few scientists and the ecotourists who come to see the unique offerings. _Plundering Paradise: The Hand of Man on the Galapagos Islands_ (HarperCollins) by Michael D'Orso offers a different view of the islands, specifically about one of its newest and most intrusive species. There are about 20,000 humans who make the Galapagos their home, or at least their workplace. They are not just scientists, but hoteliers, nightclub owners, poachers, beggars, religious proselytizers, law enforcers, and more. The title of this eye-opening book isn't a surprise; all these people are not doing the islands any good.

"These islands were simply not made for people," D'Orso writes, but he has interviewed a lot of them for this book to portray humans that are making a go of it anyway. Some of them are eccentric, some admirable, but the islands are few, and have desirable properties, and surpassing written law, the law of supply and demand holds sway (just as Darwin knew). Humans have a poor record of improving the lands they have inhabited everywhere, but D'Orso is withering in particular scorn for the corrupt Ecuadorian government, colloquially called "Absurdistan." Such an environment only encourages people to grab any profits they can, and makes impossible long range planning for conserving the islands' resources. Global agencies are reluctant to invest as they can predict how little money would make it to environmental improvement. There has been a proposal that the Galapagos should be under UN trusteeship; after all, it is one of those sites that requires little imagination to view as belonging to the heritage of all humans. From time to time someone suggests banning tourism. Neither proposal is likely to impress those who are currently gaining incomes from things as they stand.

D'Orso's book brings an important problem to light. It is written as an entertaining profile of different members of the human species who have washed ashore on Galapagos. There are the ex-hippie who has run a hotel there for thirty-five years, the German recluse, the park ranger who endangers himself by hunting poachers, the charmingly corrupt mayor, the Jehovah's Witness naturalist guide, and more. In describing their activities, he has given a human profile to the islands. It is a sad look, nonetheless. Market forces are no way to run an ecosystem.

tale of greed, poverty, and corruption
Christian Science Monitor, Jan. 30, 2003

The Galápagos Islands have the honor of being the only sizable, habitable land mass to remain unpopulated into the 20th century. The islands' lower slopes and some of the smaller islets are a weird moonscape of ancient lava flows devoid of fresh water. Uphill, however, are permanent water sources and soil capable of supporting orange, papaya, and coconut trees, to say nothing of herds of cattle.

Despite these lush conditions, no community had attempted to live on the Galápagos until the publication in Germany in 1923 of a travel book called "Galápagos: World's End" that described the islands as a tropical paradise. A few eccentrics came to see for themselves. They have been coming ever since.

Michael D'Orso went to the Galápagos in 1999 to chronicle the unusual native fauna. Not the huge iguanas that dive into the surf to feed, the finches that obligingly speciate while ornithologists watch, or the vast colonies of blue-footed boobies. The animals that fascinate D'Orso are the more eccentric members of species of homo sapiens, a type in which the Galápagos abound.

Take the charmingly corrupt mayor, leader of the 20,000 mostly impoverished Ecuadorians who stretch the ecosystem of the archipelago well beyond its capacity. Mayor Sevilla is only 41, but he grew up on the islands before the advent of automobiles and electricity.

"We ate a lot of tortoises," D'Orso quotes him saying. "It was free meat, just roaming around. We didn't understand why people would want to protect the animals when God gave us the animals to eat. Even to this day, I feel this way." Which explains why the mayor lets poachers out of jail as fast as National Park Rangers arrest them.

Or take Godfrey Merlen, who stumbled onto the islands in 1970 as an aimless youth working as crew on a rich man's yacht. He stayed, hung around the research station, made himself useful to field scientists, and has become a well-published, highly respected biologist in his own right without ever leaving the islands or taking an advanced degree.

D'Orso keeps trying to drag his attention back to the project that brought him here: to write about the more colorful of the gringo inhabitants - the beachcombers, con artists, and barefoot philosophers. But instead, his attention keeps drifting to the real story of these islands in the 21st century. The world's educated elite prizes the Galápagos for their dramatic and unique biology. But they belong to one of the poorest, most overpopulated, and corrupt nations on earth.

"Banana republic" is an insufficiently scornful term to describe a political system that not long ago saw three presidencies within an hour. The trouble with Ecuador is nothing new in the world: A small number of very wealthy families manage the country for private profit.

These families allow the National Park to exist, but do not, for example, allow the rangers to stop commercial fishing in park waters. The boats take everything: tuna, sea cucumbers, coral, shark fins. (Not the whole shark. They cut the fins off and throw the creatures back to die. Fins fetch astonishing prices in China where shark fin soup is a traditional wedding-banquet delicacy.)

D'Orso's casually powerful storytelling draws us in to the grotesquely unequal struggle between a unique and fragile ecosystem and the humans bent on getting rich fast.

Not that the environment pays all of the costs. On the outer islands, beyond the reach of law, and far beyond the reach of any kind of medical care, hundreds of desperately poor men dive for sea cucumbers using antiquated, badly maintained scuba gear. No one records how many die every year. No one records the tonnage of sea cucumbers shipped illegally to China, which are bought by men foolish enough to believe that sea cucumbers are an aphrodisiac.

Nor is there indication that anyone with power in Ecuador cares, certainly not the legislator who represents the Islands in the national congress. The flat roof of her house is covered with illegally harvested sea cucumbers, curing in the sun. Part travelogue, part history, and part sociological study, D'Orso's story should help shed light on these exotic islands of corruption.

Diana Muir is the author of Bullough's Pond