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How humans living amid an abundance of diverse flora and fauna help us rethink conservationFamous for their geographic isolation and high proportion of endemic species, the Galápagos Islands have long been promoted as the premier destination for tourists and scientists seeking to escape humanity's impact on the world. This idyllic vision dominates the islands'conservation policy, which, despite calls for a more integrated human-environment approach, continues to emphasize restoration. It ignores the people who call the Galápagos home, who must instead partner with their plant and animal neighbors to secure a thriving future for all. Drawing on years of fieldwork, Paolo Bocci's Viable Ecologies brings attention to the farmers and other marginalized locals who enact their own ways of caring for, and living on, the islands. Through extended observation and experimentation, they craft conservation strategies based on mutual dependence and long-term accountability. They fuse their livelihoods to the ecosystems around them and, in doing so, challenge the image of the Galápagos as a place to be studied and visited but never inhabited. As Bocci argues, the farmers'methods of remediation and recuperation broaden the scope of what conservation can—and should—be.Connecting environmental policy and science to matters of immigration and belonging, Viable Ecologies offers strategies for crafting a future in which humans and nonhumans may thrive.

The terrestrial organisms of the Galápagos Islands live under conditions unlike those anywhere else. At the edge of a uniquely rich mid-ocean upwelling, their world is also free of mammalian predators and competitors, allowing them to live unbothered, exuberant lives. With its giant tortoises, marine iguanas, flightless cormorants, and forests of giant daisies, there's no question that this is a magnificent place. Long before people traversed the Earth, evolution endowed native species with adaptations to these special conditions and to perturbations like El Niño events and periodic droughts. As the islands have grown ever-more connected with humanity, those same adaptations now make its species vulnerable. Today, the islands are best viewed as one big social-ecological system where the ability of each native organism to survive and reproduce is a product of human activity in addition to ecological circumstances. In this book, William H. Durham takes readers on a tour of Galápagos and the organisms that inhabit these isolated volcanic islands. Exuberant Life offers a contemporary synthesis of what we know about the evolution of its curiously wonderful organisms, how they are faring in the tumultuous changing world around them, and how evolution can guide our efforts today for their conservation. The book highlights the ancestry of a dozen specific organisms in these islands, when and how they made it to the Galápagos, as well as how they have changed in the meantime. Durham traces the strengths and weaknesses of each species, arguing that the mismatch between natural challenges of their habitats and the challenges humans have recently added is the main task facing conservation efforts today. Such analysis often provides surprises and suggestions not yet considered, like the potential benefits to joint conservation efforts between tree finches and tree daisies, or ways in which the peculiar evolved behaviors of Nazca and blue-footed boobies can be used to benefit both species today. In each chapter, a social-ecological systems framework is used to highlight links between human impact, including climate change, and species status today, Historically, the Galápagos have played a central role in our understanding of evolution; what these islands now offer to teach us about conservation may well prove indispensable for the future of the planet.

In this innovative volume, the author addresses some important challenges related to the effective and equitable governance of marine protected areas (MPAs). These challenges are explored through a study of 20 MPA case studies from around the world. A novel governance analysis framework is employed to address some key questions: How can top-down and bottom-up approaches to MPA governance be combined? What does this mean, in reality, in different contexts? How can we develop and implement governance approaches that are both effective in achieving conservation objectives and equitable in fairly sharing associated costs and benefits? The author explores the many issues that these questions raise, as well as exploring options for addressing them. A key theme is that MPA governance needs to combine people, state and market approaches, rather than being based on one approach and its related ideals. Building on a critique of the governance analysis framework developed for common-pool resources, the author puts forward a more holistic and less prescriptive framework for deconstructing and analyzing the governance of MPAs. This inter-disciplinary analysis is aimed at supporting the development of MPA governance approaches that build social-ecological resilience through both institutional and biological diversity. It will also make a significant contribution to wider debates on natural resource governance, as it poses some critical questions for contemporary approaches to related research and offers an alternative theoretical and empirical approach.