By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, April 2, 2006
In early February, Galapagos National Park officials announced with great fanfare that they had prohibited Celebrity Cruise Line's Xpedition, a 94-passenger cruise ship, from traversing the area's waters for two months. The temporary ban aimed to penalize Celebrity for letting some of its crew members illegally fish for shark last year.
But when I arrived Feb. 12 on the island of Baltra to board the M.S. Islander -- a boat operated by Lindblad Expeditions, one of Celebrity's rivals -- the Xpedition was docked just offshore and waiting to accept passengers, just as it was on Feb. 19 as I returned to shore. It was my first glimpse into the varying shades of ecotourism in Ecuador.
While some companies have devoted considerable time and expense to protecting the very ecosystems they market to their clients, other firms are not always so careful. And the Ecuadoran government, which has passed a series of laws designed to protect its flora and fauna, does little to enforce its own rules.
"If tourists are well guided, if they have someone who's responsible, the impact would be minimal," said Maria Ramos, an Ecuadoran naturalist who has worked for both Lindblad and Celebrity. "There are two ways of doing things. One way is careful, where you do not affect the environment too much, and the other way is when you say it doesn't matter."
On the face of it, the Galapagos would seem like a magnet for conservation efforts. The birthplace of Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection, the archipelago contains dozens of creatures that appear nowhere else, including an array of finches and marine iguanas. Tourism is highly regulated: About 100,000 visitors come each year, and they can stop only at specific islands. Just 84 tour ships are allowed to travel the area's waters each year, and none can carry more than about 100 passengers.
Some companies strive especially hard to be environmentally sensitive. Lindblad staffers, for instance, provide biodegradable shampoo in cabin showers, serve meals on china rather than plastic and sort guests' trash into recyclable categories. The company's president, Sven Lindblad, said environmentalism makes economic sense.
"It's not philanthropy," said Lindblad, who first came to the Galapagos almost 40 years ago. "You're not going to have a good business in a degraded place. Guests aren't going to want to go to a degraded place."
To be sure, a Lindblad cruise is one of the more exclusive ways to see the archipelago. While guests are expected to get up at dawn to trek to the highlands in search of tortoises, they receive fresh-squeezed juice and piping hot cookies upon their return. After snorkeling, there's hot chocolate, and the ship boasts a full-service spa. Each morning between 6 and 7 on my cruise, expedition leader Cindy Manning would gently urge passengers to wake up with the promise of a sunny 78-degree day outside.
"This isn't a holiday," she chided when some guests groaned. "This is an expedition. You're going to have to sleep in when you get home to recuperate from this."
But she quickly reassured guests that during the seven-mile trip to the top of the Sierra Negra volcano the following day, Lindblad would provide extra-large water bottles and an Ecuadoran nicknamed Tex who would travel along on a donkey with extra water. Sure enough, Tex appeared early in the hike with a five-gallon jug in tow.
* * *
Celebrity officials do not officially endorse illegal fishing of sharks and other vulnerable marine species, and on Oct. 28, the cruise line issued a statement saying that it "deeply regrets" the shark-fishing incident. The line said it "accepts full responsibility for the infractions of its crewmembers and will accept any consequences of the investigation."
When Galapagos National Park officials proposed suspending Celebrity's local operations for 60 days, however, the company appealed the suspension. The park approved Celebrity's operating permit for 2006, and its boats have continued to sail. (Park officials have not responded to repeated requests for comment, and a Celebrity spokesman simply e-mailed two earlier press releases about the incident to The Post.)
The recent influx of tourists has strained Ecuador's natural resources in other ways, as mainland Ecuadorans have come here in search of better economic opportunities. Between 1974 and 1997, the Galapagos population grew by 6 percent a year; five of the archipelago's 13 major islands are inhabited, and the current year-round population numbers between 25,000 and 27,000. In March 1998, Ecuador adopted a special law that sharply curtails migration between the mainland and the islands.
The law is still not strictly enforced: While population growth fell to 5.04 percent a year between 1998 and 2001, several Galapagos residents I talked with said they knew of Ecuadorans who had obtained false identification cards to live on the islands.
In February 2004 three researchers, including two New Zealanders and one Ecuadoran, published a policy paper warning that the influx of immigrants was straining the area's natural resources and introducing alien plant and animal species that threaten to destroy native flora and fauna.
"Tourism is the main economic driver, yet the migration it induces threatens the future of tourism," wrote the authors, who published the study through Motu Economic and Public Policy Research in New Zealand.
Local tourism promoters anticipate that as many as 150,000 tourists will soon flock to the Galapagos each year, and the number could go higher in the future.
Alan Tye, interim director of sciences at the Charles Darwin Research Station on Santa Cruz Island in the Galapagos, said tourism amounts to "a classic two-edged sword. If there weren't ecotourism, there wouldn't be people here, and the problems would be much more manageable. But if it weren't for ecotourism, there wouldn't be any money for conservation."
* * *
As it stands now, Lindblad stands a better chance of producing environmental converts than any Ecuadoran-sponsored PR campaign. Few of my fellow passengers initially chose the cruise line because of its reputation for conservation. Lindy Street, a retired marketing executive from Louisville, said she and her husband, Bill, came on the tour because it boasted several naturalists and Lindblad had "a reputation for quality."
All 38 passengers on my ship eagerly delved into the tour's daily activities, including kayaking and birding expeditions. They gawked at the sea lions that wandered lazily on the beach and the small Galapagos penguins and Pacific green turtles that swam fearlessly alongside them as they snorkeled.
Protected from land predators for tens of thousands of years, Galapagos creatures rarely flinch when humans come near and sometimes even approach tourists to investigate. During one deep-water snorkel off Floreana Island, several penguins on a nearby rock dived in with passengers and spent more than 15 minutes entertaining us, zooming up to snorkelers' cameras and darting around a floating log.
When the ship's crew asked for donations for island conservation, most of the guests gave money without hesitation. Lindblad raised $520,000 last year from its passengers for conservation in the Galapagos, and it covers all administrative expenses for distributing the money. It also matches $250 donations with cruise vouchers that can be used toward future Lindblad trips, giving guests an additional incentive to help the cause.
Lindblad is not the only cruise company that devotes money to the environment, according to Conservation International. Disney Cruise Line collects donations from its passengers as well, which it distributes without an administrative fee to environmental groups. Since 1998 the line has donated $8.5 million to more than 450 projects worldwide, including a sea turtle conservation project in the Bahamas and an iguana recovery program in Jamaica. Holland America helps protect a bird sanctuary on a private island in the Bahamas its guests visit, and Royal Caribbean has awarded $7 million in the last decade to ocean conservation.
Even Celebrity Cruises has worked on conservation in the Galapagos, providing a high-speed Zodiac so park officials can patrol its waters and helping recycle plastics in the region. The Xpedition has a special generator to reduce air pollution and a water purification system that should be installed this year. However, according to Alan Tye, a senior scientist at the Charles Darwin Research Station in the Galapagos, no tour company has given as much to area conservation recently as Lindblad.
Sven Lindblad said the fundraising pitch his crew members make at the end of each Galapagos cruise is "not pounding on the door saying, 'Give us money.' " Instead, he said, the tour aims to show guests why it makes sense to support the region they've just visited.
"Their conservation needs should be funded by the businesses and the visitors," he said of the Galapagos. "They shouldn't be going out, hand in hand, to ask for money."
Trips on Lindblad's Islander cost between $3,650 and $6,280 per person double, plus about $1,080 to fly round trip between Washington and the island of Baltra. The cruise fee covers guides, lodging and all meals, but not alcohol. Details: 800-397-3348,http://www.lindblad.com.
Juliet Eilperin is the national environmental reporter for the Post.
View all comments that have been posted about this article.