Illegal Immigrants and Invasive Species on the Galapagos Islands, Ecuador
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
INVASIVE LIFE: ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS AND INVASIVE SPECIES ON THE GALAPAGOS ISLANDS, ECUADOR Paolo Bocci A dissertation submitted to the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Anthropology. Chapel Hill 2017 Approved by: Margaret Wiener Neel Ahuja Arturo Escobar Rudolf Colloredo-Mansfeld Townsend Middleton Peter Redfield © 2017 Paolo Bocci ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT Paolo Bocci: invasive life: illegal immigrants and invasive species on the Galapagos Islands, Ecuador (Under the direction of Margaret Wiener) This dissertation is an ethnography of out-of-place human and more-than-human presences. Focusing on the highlands of the archipelago’s four inhabited islands, it examines how illegal farmers and invasive species have encroached on both the Galapagos National Park, where no one can officially reside, and the areas outside of the park, which are designated for contained human settlement. As a result of concerns about island conservation, the Ecuadorian state has required a permit to reside on the Galapagos since 1998. Yet, due to tourism’s exponential growth, mainland Ecuadorians have continued to migrate to the islands, though largely lacking official residency. Illegal residents concentrate in the highlands to work as farmers, while invasive plants coming from the continent have covered large swaths of farmland and park areas alike. Excluded from the protections of Ecuadorian citizenship, these migrant farmers cope with new plants and insects that invade the crops. Yet they also find ways to procure a livelihood in these changed landscapes. Accounting for the unexpected thriving of illegal farmers and invasive species, I treat them as both a symptom of a conservation paradigm in crisis and actors that enact new forms of nature-culture. I move past a critique of conservation and contends that the emerging multispecies entanglements in the highlands are suggestive of iii ways to live in today’s world of ecological ruins, beyond modern promises of recuperation and betterment. iv For Dietra v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thanks to everyone on the Galapagos Islands and mainland Ecuador who listened and spoke to me, showed me things, spent time with me, helped me. All names have been changed to protect their anonymity. Thanks to my advisor, Margaret Wiener, who has followed me during my entire graduate school education in the US. Thanks to my committee members, each offering suggestions and encouragement. Thanks to my friends in the US and Europe who have offered support and advice. I see the completion of my PhD as a function of love and privilege, both coming from my family. My grandparents have unwavering considered education as the most important opportunity for their children, my parents. They, in turn, have done the same to me, being there for me each step of the way. My parents have always considered helping me as obvious and imperative. I use this acknowledgments to tell them that I in fact deeply treasure their support, without which there would not be a dissertation below these lines. If there is a person singularly responsible for my graduate studies in the US, this person is Pr. Angelo Borgese. After a few words one evening he decided to support my application for a fellowship that lasted two years and in fact took me two years to get it. At that time, in Italy, I was jobless and frustrated. That opportunity changed my life in a strikingly dramatic, and luckily irreversible, way. My gratitude for him has not faded. I hope he draws a sense of deserved pride from knowing that he gave a young adult a new life within his life. vi Dietra: this PhD has been a very long and especially arduous journey. I had not anticipated the quality of the challenges; I had especially not realized how much the preoccupations, anxieties, and fears would have undeservingly affected your otherwise serene life. I hesitate dedicating this work to you, acknowledging the many challenging times I brought into our relationship. On the other hand, we spent unique moments during fieldwork, and now it is a moment of joy. I want you on my side now that clouds have dissipated; I want to see your smile open and feel excitement about our future together. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER1: INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………….………1 WaterBoxx®………………………………………………………………………………1 Crisis in Eden………………………………………………………………….…………10 Beyond crisis………………………………………………………………….………….14 Dissertation project: invasive life in the highlands…………………………….…………19 Dissertation outline…………………………………………………………………..…..25 CHAPTER 2: DIMINSHED COLONIALISM……………………………..……………………28 The crushing of tropical fantasies against the rock of equatorial reality……..……………28 National Sovereignty……………………………………………………………..………30 The colony………………………………………………………………………..………34 The utopian hacienda……………………………………………………………………..36 State ambivalence towards the Galapagos………………………………………………..43 Escapism…………………………………………………………………………………48 Conclusions………………………………………………………………...…………….60 CHAPTER 3: BECOMING ISLAND…………………………………………......……………..64 Introduction………………………………………………………………………………64 The island multiple: Provincializing Islands’ provincialization……………………...…..66 Filiate Science Antrorse………………………………………………………….………71 Science-inspired fantasies………………………………………………..………………75 Evolutionary humanism………………………………………………………………….81 Man’s destruction of the Earth; Science’s salvific power…………………...……………84 The Antarctica model…………………………………………………….………………90 viii CHAPTER 4: MINOR THRIVING………………………………………………….…………104 Ecological history…………………………………………………………….…………106 Illegal thriving………………………………………………………………..…………112 Teresa and Enrique………………………………………………………………...……137 Between the park and the city: illegal farmers’ minor possibilities. ……………….……140 CHAPTER 5: INVASIVE KNOTS……………………………………..………………………143 Goats notwithstanding……………………………………………………..……………143 Care for Culling…………………………………………………………………………149 Excess, transgression, invasion, eradication: on goats on islands……………….………154 Killing goats……………………………………………………………………….……159 Resisting care……………………………………………………………...……………165 Caprine humanities…………………………………………………...…………………173 CHAPTER 6: UNPLANNED PLAN(T)S………………………………………………………183 Rubus niveus………………………………………………...……………………….…189 Cinchona pubescens………………………………………………………………….…193 Novel Ecosystems………………………………………………………………………199 Plant entanglements………………………………………….…………………………203 CHAPTER 7: CONCLUSION………………………………………………………….………218 Practices of hope…………………………………………………..……………………222 Hope on the Galapagos, hoping for the Galapagos……………………...………………231 Changing the temporality of hope……………………………….………………………233 BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………………235 ix CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION WaterBoxx® We left P.to Ayora at daybreak: a long day awaited us. I had arranged with members of the Charles Darwin Foundation (CDF), the leading scientific institution on the Galapagos, to participate in their day trip to the highlands of Santa Cruz, the most populated island on the archipelago. We were going to install large plastic boxes underneath young vegetable plants. Called the WaterBoxx®, they are designed to retain water and therefore help plants survive in adverse environments, whether because of climate, soil, or competition from invasive species. On the Galapagos, all of these characteristics apply: CDF had promoted use of these boxes as the latest panacea to the degradation of island terrestrial ecosystems. WaterBoxx® is made of polypropylene and, circular in shape, it is installed around a young plant. The latter absorbs water from the water tank underneath, and not from the soil. Since the tank is closed, no water is lost to evaporation—a problem for plants growing in soils with heavy sun exposure. Mr. Hoff, the Danish engineer who patented this technology (Groasis), claims a WaterBoxx® can save up to ninety per cent of a plant water requirement. In planting his box, Mr. Hoff cultivates broader hopes: to fight erosion and thus reverse part of the two trillion hectares of man-made deserts; to alleviate poverty and unemployment in the world’s rural areas; and to combat climate change. Rather optimistically, he estimated that the Groasis technology could result in “an additional US$ 20 trillion for economic development;” “one trillion tons of extra food;” “the absorption of 10 trillion tons of CO2;” and, 1 along the way, “two million jobs” (“Groasis” 2015). The CDF scientist in charge of this project told me that the inventor offered one hundred boxes to the Charles Darwin Foundation because he needed the publicity that would come with a project on the Galapagos Islands. Of minuscule size relative to the planet, the Galapagos archipelago is well known around the globe. Modern natural sciences have their mythical birthplace on the Galapagos there, Charles Darwin made the observations crucial to the development of his revolutionary theory of evolution. Since its establishment in 1959, the Galapagos National Park has protected large portions of the archipelago, thus ensuring the relevance of the Galapagos for contemporary natural science research as well. Because of their isolation and conservation measures, the Galapagos have been defined as “the last natural laboratory of evolution in the world” (Stewart 2006). But the fame of the Galapagos transcends the confines of science and science history. Large numbers of tourists every year visit the Galapagos to enjoy their natural wonders, understood through the lens of, and managed in accordance to, Western ideas of nature.