've just returned from having traveled through time. I came as close as I'm ever going to get to visiting a prehistoric world. I was surrounded by dozens of species which exist nowhere else on Earth. The creatures among which I walked showed no fear, perhaps because they were not behind bars, caged in a zoo—and so instead of meeting them while they were trapped on my turf, I was meeting them on theirs, as equals. It was almost like visiting the Garden of Eden. I was visiting a spot I'd long dreamed about, but to which I never thought I'd actually get—the Galapagos Islands, a volcanic archipelago 600 miles west of the coast of Ecuador, where Darwin's theory of evolution was born.
It was a rare and wonderful thing to be so far from the news of the world, hidden from e-mail contact, cut off from the ringing of the phone. Instead of facing the endless, depressing news reports that had confronted me for the previous weeks, suddenly all that faced me was an endless horizon of ocean dotted with ancient islands. My first break in years from long days spent hunched over a computer screen could not have occurred in a place more opposite in nature.
The beaches were strewn with what I at first thought were boulders, but which, as I drew closer, transformed into sea lions. The islands were so dense with wildlife that my problem wasn't one of spotting the animals, it was one of not stepping on them. On Española Island, I saw a sea lion pup just hours old, umbilical cord still trailing, attempting to suckle from its weary mother. In the cold waters off Champion Island, I snorkeled beside a sea turtle as it hunted for food, and watched as it chomped down on a jellyfish. In the highlands of Santa Cruz Island, I moved through the muck searching for wild tortoises, finding 13 of them, and the elusive vermilion flycatcher as well. Wherever I looked there were penguins, iguanas, blue- and red- footed boobies, albatross, flightless cormorants, the finches that inspired Darwin to his discovery and countless other species; the abundance of these islands could not be exaggerated.
Mending a broken planet
But even as I admired the peaceful richness of these islands, in the back of my mind there was always the thought that they were not quite as rich as they once had been. In the 19th century, the Galapagos Islands had been a popular spot for whalers, who would come there in search of fresh meat for their long voyages. They would capture the giant tortoises by the thousands to stack in their holds, keeping them alive for future consumption. Humanity attacked the wildlife in indirect ways as well, through the escaped pigs and goats who gained a foothold on the islands and devoured tortoise eggs in the nest. So where once the beaches were full, there are now some species of tortoise of which there is only a single living specimen left.
But what humanity has broken, humanity can choose to mend. At the Charles Darwin Research facility, naturalists are working to repopulate the islands. While people elsewhere are trying to destroy the world, here are people dedicated to saving it. In many places, the introduced species that worsened what the whalers had done are slowly being eradicated, and now that the islands have again been made safe, thousands of tortoises raised in capivity have been reintroduced to the wild in one of our planet's greatest success stories of a rescue from extinction.
There is one species of tortoise, however, that has not been that lucky. Of the Galapagos giant tortoise from the small island of Pinta there is only one living example left. He has come to be known as Lonesome George. A mate has yet to be discovered, and science has been unable to figure out a way to continue the species. But as it's likely that George will live another 100 years, we can hope that in that time either a mate will be found hidden in the wild, or else science and technology will discover a way to keep the species going.
Since George will outlive me, as well as all of those here reading these words, his peaceful, patient presence will allow me to hang on to an extra bit of hope that suddenly seems even more precious than it might have seemed a few short months ago.
Scott Edelman started his trek to the editor-in-chief position at Science
Fiction Weekly back in 1974, when he began working as an assistant editor at
Marvel Comics. Between these two positions, this four-time Hugo Award nominee in
the category of Best Editor was the founding editor of the
award-winning magazine Science Fiction Age, and also edited SCI
FI, the official magazine of the SCI FI Channel, in addition to
Sci-Fi Universe, Sci-Fi Flix and Satellite Orbit. A collection of his short fiction, These Words Are Haunted, has just been published by Wildside Press.
