Vonnegut, MPAs, and Shifting Baselines

Kurt Vonnegut visted the Galapagos Islands in the early 1980s and wrote looking back on the future of the islands (shifting baselines). I read Vonnegut's Galapagos while in the islands and my favorte line, then and now, is still:

[The Spaniards] did not claim the island for Spain, any more than they would have claimed hell for Spain.

Today, we all have a different impression of Galapagos. The Galapagos Marine Reserve is one of the largest in the world and the archipelego has been named a World Heritage Site. The BBC and National Geographic just released a three-part series that captures some of the islands' spectacular underwater beauty. Organized tourism began in the islands in 1969. When Kurt Vonnegut visited, there were fewer than 15,000 tourists coming to Galapagos annually. By 1995 tourism had grown to 56,000 visitors. This year it is estimated that more than 100,000 tourists will visit the archipelago.

But, we might be loving Galapagos to death. Just yesterday, Ecuador's President Rafael Correa issued a warning that the ecosystem of the Galapagos archipelago is in jeopardy and urged a study to determine its status and insure its protection. So the Galapagos Islands could be hell in one moment and heaven in the next, wrote Vonnegut...