Day 3 on the Islands

This is Simon Nicholson writing. I’m the SIS Professor on the Galapagos trip, and am traveling with Kiho Kim from Environmental Science, Larry Engel from SOC, and 24 students drawn from our various programs. We arrived on San Cristobal, the first island in our four-island visit, on Saturday afternoon, and since then have been hard at work (while finding some time to enjoy the sights and local hospitality).

The students are working in 6 different teams during our two weeks on the Galapagos Islands. Each team has its own focus, ranging from the development of a web-based multimedia project that investigates ongoing conflicts between local fishermen and the Galapagos park service, to a short film looking at the positive and negative impacts of tourism. The student groups will be blogging about their work, beginning in the next day or so.

We’re managing to pack plenty of activities into each day. Yesterday, a number of the groups had an early morning visit to a wind farm that supplies about 35% of the electricity used on San Cristobal. Some of the groups followed that up with a visit to a property maintained by Jatun Sacha, a local nonprofit focused on the eradication of invasive species and the repopulation of endemics. Other groups met yesterday with local fishermen, visited the San Cristobal recycling center, spent some time at one of the island’s schools, and filmed tourists at play.

Tomorrow morning we have a two-hour boat ride to Santa Cruz, with an even busier schedule planned for our few days there. We’ll keep posting news about our travels as we move around the islands. And we’ll keep posting photos of our work and downtime, so long as the internet connection cooperates …