Environment: Visit to the Enchanted Isles

The Galápagos are fighting for their survival

Lying astride the equator in the Pacific Ocean some 600 miles off the coast of South America, the Galápagos Islands are a fabled natural wonderland—of giant tortoises, dragonlike iguanas and birds so fearless that they ignore the approach of a human. Old Spanish explorers called them Las Islas Encantadas (the bewitched or enchanted islands). It was here, among the exotic flora and fauna of the isolated islands, notably their startlingly varied finches, that the young Charles Darwin found the key evidence for his theory of evolution. Yet...

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