A Review of La mirada imperial puesta en Galápagos

La mirada imperial puesta en Galápagos, edited by Alberto Acosta, Elizabeth Bravo, Esperanza Martínez and Ramiro Ávila (Action Solidarité Tiers Monde [ASTM], 2025)

La mirada imperial puesta en Galápagos (The Imperial Gaze on the Galapagos), a collection of essays edited by Alberto Acosta, Elizabeth Bravo, Esperanza Martínez and Ramiro Ávila, brings together critical perspectives on the multiple meanings of the islands: ecological, symbolic, territorial and geopolitical. The collection is based on a fundamental premise: to understand the Galapagos beyond an instrumental and human perspective, refocusing on the plurality of the beings who have woven their memories there for thousands of years.

Before becoming an object of scientific interest, a border between states, a tourist commodity or a geopolitical enclave, the Galapagos were, for centuries, a place of silent equilibrium. Giant tortoises, sea lions, flightless birds, and marine iguanas existed in a web of life that has no need for human words.

The book invites us to consider the Galapagos being at a crossroads where not only the life of the islands is at stake, but also the possibility of imagining other futures for our planet.

On the various meanings of life in the Galapagos

La mirada imperial puesta en Galápagos reveals the incessant process of transformation that the meaning of life and living on the islands has undergone. Throughout history, various beings —tortoises, birds, iguanas, sea lions, plants and insects— have given the archipelago a special meaning, which has guided their ways of existing and coexisting in the territory. The Galapagos are not only a natural heritage, but a constellation of interconnected worlds, whose voice still influences the course of life on the planet.

Desacralization – sacralization of the Galapagos

What might sound illogical—attributing sacred significance to nonhuman communities—is nonetheless valid in the current debate. So explains Ecuadorian biologist Anamaría Varea, a specialist in the ecology and conservation of the species of the Galapagos, who, in describing the lives of the creatures she has studied, reminds us of modern science’s original sin: that it was born as an act of the desacralization of nature.

Charles Darwin arrived in the Galapagos in September 1835. His vision was aimed at observing, classifying, and concluding: in other words, to understand life as a process of adaptation and bodily transformation in response to objective environmental conditions. From this emerged the heralded idea of ​​the “survival of the fittest,” later neatly transferred to the field of human societies. From such a perspective, the islands appeared to be an ideal setting: a territory “empty” of human meaning, where life could be observed without “sacred” interference.

But the symbolic status of a place can never be dismissed. For any society, declaring a space as sacred expresses a collective feeling-thinking that incorporates it into the fabric of its territorialization. Varea’s understanding of this dimension, denied by modern science, emerged through her own experiences: after years of research and living on the islands as a guide, she perceived an inexplicable energy within them, visible in the flow of non-human communities. A force that revealed to her the Galapagos as a sanctuary: a venerable place, inspiring respect and devotion.

The Galapagos lies at a crossroads, as the authors explain, between the modern perception that turned them into an objective laboratory of science, and the profound experience that recognizes them as a sanctuary, a sacred place of life on Earth.

Territorial utility of the Galapagos

A second moment in history redefined the meaning of the Galapagos as something other than that sustained for millennia by the non-human communities that persist on the islands, resisting and re-existing despite the changes imposed by humans. This new meaning emerged with the creation of the republics of Latin America following independence from Spain, as part of the process of delimiting national borders. The islands became part of the definition of the territorial boundaries of Ecuador, a way of thinking that ignored the living memories of tortoises, sea lions, birds and iguanas, even though it is they who have woven the longest memory of the archipelago.

Later, the concept of “continental shelves” would be added to such national boundaries, extending sovereignty to the sea and subsoil. Each island or promontory thus became a point of expansion: its mere existence generated a perimeter of maritime dominion, some 22.5 kilometers outward and downward, which increased the reach of the state. In this way, the Galapagos Islands acquired a strategic utility that transcended the biological or the symbolic: they became a tool of sovereign expansion. The Galapagos Islands have a utility value in republican logic: they are a useful, capitalizable territory, incorporated into the domain of the state.

The Galapagos are not only perceived as a living, autonomous archipelago, but as an object of sovereignty, an asset whose function is to generate material profit for the republic that administers it. The value of the islands is reduced to their productivity and profitability, prolonging the objectification and desacralization of nature. In other words, when the Galápagos are treated primarily as an asset of sovereignty and profitability, their living essence is overshadowed by utilitarian logic. This is exactly the warning carried throughout La mirada imperial puesta en Galápagos: the archipelago stands at a crossroads where the desacralization of nature collides with the memory of non-human communities that have inhabited these islands for millennia. To defend the Galápagos today means resisting their reduction to mere instruments of profit or geopolitical control, and recovering them as a constellation of interconnected worlds whose survival is tied to the future of life itself.

The commercialization of a sanctuary

Until not long ago, for the tortoises in the Galapagos, humans were rare visitors, occasional passers-through amidst the solitude of the archipelago. But one day, almost without understanding why, they witnessed them multiply: they no longer arrived just by boat, but by increasingly frequent airplanes, the roars of which frighten birds, deafen sea lions, unnerve penguins and disturb the calm of all the species that have woven life into these silent islands.

The Ecuadorian historian and anthropologist Pablo Ospina Peralta in his book chapter “Crecimiento económico o sustentabilidad: El desafío ambiental de Galápagos” (Economic Growth or Sustainability: The Environmental Challenge for the Galapagos), puts it clearly: the growth of the archipelago’s population is not due to a natural increase in births, but to immigration from the mainland, driven by an excess of tourism that requires more workers, more materials, and more services. In turn, such tourism makes the islands dependent on external sources of energy and materials, multiplying flights and transport that affect their non-human communities, whose uniqueness, once recognized as of ecological value, is reduced to a mere commercial attraction.

In this manner, according to the authors of this collection of essays, the very conservation of the Galapagos has become subordinate to the logic of the tourism market. The economic growth that ensures the archipelago’s “utility” or usefulness, simultaneously entails a profound alteration of its living space and a growing threat to the endemic, ancient and vulnerable species that have inhabited it.

Geopolitics and the Destruction of Life

In this context, what is “useful” no longer lies in the native species, nor in their ecological or scientific value, nor even in their economic or commercial potential. Usefulness lies in the territory itself, in its strategic position for war. The decision of the current Ecuadorian government to cede the Galapagos to the United States for the construction of military bases is not only an act of colonial submission: it is also a symptom of the progressive dissolution of nation-states as we knew them in the 20th century.

The structures of Latin American states, regardless of the ideology proclaimed by their governments, whether right-wing or left-wing, have been corporatized. Therefore, it is not surprising that a “progressive” government, such as the Kirchner administration in Argentina, handed over territories to China for aerospace research projects, nor that the right-wing government of Daniel Noboa allows the United States to use the Galapagos Islands to monitor the Pacific and control the Panama Canal. Both examples arise from the same logic of corporate-colonial subjugation.

By restoring to the islands the density of their multiple meanings, from the life of the non-human species to the onslaught of extractive tourism and military geopolitics, the book directly challenges the way we think about sovereignty, conservation, and ecological justice. Reading it reminds us that defending the Galapagos today is not only about preserving a natural sanctuary, but also about contesting the very meaning of life in the face of the utilitarian and commercial thinking that threatens to erase the slow and persistent memory of the tortoises.

Marcos Colón is the Southwest Borderlands Initiative Assistant Professor of Media and Indigenous Communities at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. He is the author of The Amazon in Times of War (Planeta, in print) and the editor of the essay collection Amazonian Utopias (2025).

You can read the book reviewed here:

 https://www.accionecologica.org/wp-content/uploads/LA-MIRADA-IMPERIAL-PUESTA-EN-GALAPAGOS.pdf

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