TERRA was given the festival’s “Grand Prize for Best Film” (the Jury: Jon Bowermaster takes us with stunning images on his sailing boat and kayak right into the beauty of the seventh continent. A place, not many of us will ever have the chance to see. He delivers a subtle message about climate change as we visit various research stations. The funding acquired for this film shows in professional visuals and a round delivery.)

And DARWIN was given the prize as “Best Environmental Film” (the Jury: The message is clear in this film stuffed with beautiful shots of all the famous Galapagos species such as the turtles, iguanas and marine life. Simply too many people are pressuring the 3% of the island that is accessible for the public. Tourists and the people depending or co-depending on tourism “visiting” nature to death.)

I’ve obviously seen the films many times now, in small editing rooms, various computer screens and on big screens and each time out I pick up small things I hadn’t seen previously. More interesting each time out is watching and listening to the audience, getting a sense of what they respond to in each, what they laugh at, what they moan at, when it is that they start looking at their watches.

While the two films are quite different, set in two very different environments, they share one common theme: Both are pristine environments threatened in part due to man’s rapacious desire to put his/her footprints … everywhere. In both places booms in tourism have both benefited and put at risk environments that we love. The challenge for the very near future is to figure out how to both protect these special places while at the same time making them just accessible enough that visitors can come, see and return home as ambassadors for protecting them.

This coming weekend both films show at the prestigious San Francisco Ocean Film Festival, at Pier 39 on the Embarcadero. (TERRA at 1 p.m. on Saturday, DARWIN at 4 p.m. on Saturday.)

This National Geographic-sponsored exploration is a one-of-a-kind look at Antarctica from a unique perspective – sea level.

For six weeks we explored the Antarctic Peninsula by sea kayak, sailboat, foot and small plane, observing the fast changing evolution of this most remote place. Impacted by climate change – temperatures have warmed along the Peninsula faster than anywhere on the planet during the past 50 years – this part of Antarctica is also experiencing a boom in tourism and nations fighting over who owns what as its ice slowly disappears.

Given my interest in and commitment to exploring the world’s ocean and bringing back stories from it we couldn’t ask for a better honor than to be regarded as the film “that most effectively raises awareness and increases understanding about environmental and sustainability issues facing the oceans and its inhabitants.” That is exactly our goal.

Near the front of the protest is a solitary gringo, a sixty-something man in a red polo shirt and khaki shorts, carrying a placard and a megaphone. Jack Nelson’s father came to the Galapagos in 1961, by thirty-six-foot sailboat; he opened its first hotel. When the son came a few years later, hoping to avoid the U.S. draft and maybe adapt to island life, he never anticipated staying. He went on to become the Galapagos first tourist guide and is still here, watching the place he loves evolve. The hotel has been sold but he still co-owns a dive shop, so is actively interested in who’s getting new tourist permits … and who is not.

“The human population in the Galapagos is doubling every five years. What is really significant about that number is not just the environmental impact or living standards, but it’s political in that the political majority has been here just five years. There are people who don’t know anything about the place, don’t really understand what the issues are but since they have become the majority the government responds to their demands.”

Does he still love the place? “In some ways. It’s certainly still very beautiful but it’s becoming less enjoyable to live here because of the political problems and conflicts and things like increased noise pollution and contamination.

“One thing that’s killing the place is the introduced species that arrive with all the increase in tourism and business. Here’s a great example. A young lady arrived at Baltra with a rose that her boyfriend gave her wrapped with tissue and foil around the base to keep it damp. At the airport the national park rangers jump her, take it away and burn it with their cigarette lighters because it’s an ‘introduced species.’ Simultaneously at the dock a few miles away a ship is unloading thousands of tons of uninspected cargo – bales, boxes, crates and bags of stuff, much of it carrying invasive species of one kind or another.

“What do we need? Desperately, better public education about the local issues and economics, in a way people on the street can understand. Pretty presentations with university level vocabularies are meaningless. If people can’t understand where the money is coming from … or not… they don’t care about anything else.

“Education about simple things too, like the problem with the introduction of species. Everybody who comes to live here wants to bring a dog. And not just any dog, but a special breed. One wants a German Shepard, another a Great Dane, another a cocker spaniel. It shows that they don’t really understand the impact of that on this place. It’s not just dogs and cats; we have five new species of introduced gecko living here that are competing with and chasing out the endemic gecko. Which changes the balance for the birds, plants and soil and on and on, a cascade of changes.

“We definitely need stricter migration policies and realistic caps on the number of boats and number of beds and how many times they can turn over each week. Now, for example, a lot of the tourist boats are running what I call the nine-day week. They sell a five-day tour and a four-day tour, which means on a couple days each week they’re doubling up, turning over a lot more tourists than the caps should allow, which raises the pressures on everything. Another problem is that local population is promoting more and more mass market, lower quality tourists because they have no access to the first-class tourists. And mass-market tourism brings heavy environmental impacts for low profit and requires even more infrastructure.

“I think we may be coming to a point where a whole lot of the laws, regulations and policies have to be reformed. When you’re in the tourism business the last thing you want is trouble. Like street protests, for example. Even perceived trouble in a tourist town can cause cancellations and wreck business for a long time. So to avoid ‘trouble’ sometimes we just go along with bad things we see happening around us. But it’s too late to ignore now.”

From a very prominent, second-story office just across from the main fishing dock on Santa Cruz Alex Cornellisen manages the Shepherd’s Galapagos operation. At the moment, it is a two-person band. His focus is on trying to keep a global audience alerted to issues of over fishing and illegal fishing. To that end the group has already donated a boat to the park rangers, to help them enforce the marine reserves rules and regulations. A veteran of Sheperd’s Antarctica campaigns, Cornellisen is happy to be in the slightly less-amped environment of Galapagos. That said, his predecessor was chased out of the country when the shark fin “mafia” put a hit out on him.

“In Ecuador you can get someone killed for $40,” says Cornellisen, standing on the balcony of his office, looking down at the main dock where small fishing boats are unloading legal catches. “So you have to take threats seriously here.” His primary concern about the Galapagos is that while there are plenty of rules against illegal fishing, enforcement is difficult.

“Last year we were responsible for several raids which resulted in the confiscation of about ninety thousand sea cucumbers, and about thirty thousand shark fins. But there is an enormous amount of illegal fishing that still continues. For example, the legal quota for sea cucumbers last year was about two million allowed to be taken out of the park. Only about 1.2 million were reported, yet there was an increase in illegally caught and confiscated sea cucumbers. What was not being reported just ended up being sold in the illegal markets.

“It’s not just a few Galapaganians doing the illegal fishing. There’s a big group from the north, from Costa Rica, that comes here to take shark fins. They catch them within the park’s marine reserve and then take them out of the supposedly protected waters where they are sold mostly to Asian countries, like Korea, Taiwan and Japan.

“All this shark finning has an impact on tourism, not just the fish population. If there are fewer sharks to observe, there will one day be fewer tourists coming to see them. Without sharks the whole ecosystem will crumble and then the question is will tourists continue to come to the Galapagos?

“Enforcement in the Galapagos is not as efficient as Sea Shehperd would like to see. Plus, there’s a lot of corruption in the local Navy. Sometimes the Navy will alert illegal fishermen that the park officials are in the area. I’ve been coming to the Galapagos ever since I first joined Sea Shepherd in 2002 and every time I come, for a month or so, we catch poachers. So it is possible. They are absolutely out there and we know how to find them and pass the information on to the park. But the Navy often warns off the poachers so that by the time the park rangers arrive … they are gone.

“Unfortunately we don’t have any jurisdiction to apprehend the poachers, so all we can do is notify the park and start pulling in the long lines, which is mostly what they use to fish for sharks.

“I think it would certainly help if the park rangers were armed. If you go to a supermarket in Quito you see a security guard with a gun protecting bags of potatoes. Here we have this beautiful pristine ecosystem called the Galapagos Islands, and the park rangers have absolutely no jurisdiction whatsoever, they are not even allowed to carry batons. I think that the park rangers should definitely be armed. I think if the word got out to the illegal fishermen that the park rangers were armed and capable of making arrests, I think it would be a lot harder for poachers to come in here and take sharks or any other species.”

“I have realized a few things in the last few years regarding how best to preserve the Galapagos, primarily that it doesn’t matter how good your technical arguments or human arguments are, it’s not about that. It’s mostly, and unfortunately, all about economics and politics.

“I try not to be critical to tourism as an economy. In fact, if we analyze it in one way, tourism is probably the best way in which nature can pay in cash for its survival. If I were to go back to the islands as I saw them for the first time, nineteen years ago, I would probably find the same biologic, ecologic and evolutionary processes still happening, the same blue-footed boobies still nesting on the same trails. The same for the sea lions and penguins. Tourism has actually been well controlled, despite its growth. It’s the indirect impacts of tourism that we need to control.

“For that we need to be able to make some hard political decisions which then need to be followed out by everyone. Unfortunately when you have, let’s say a mayor who is looking for a re-election, he may not favor some regulations that sound restrictive for some of his potential voters. While some of our politicians are aware of the fact that natural resources are limited here in the Galapagos, that there is not enough water, not enough land, that we can’t produce much here locally, who understand the importance of conservation, most regard those as things that can be ‘negotiated.’ Nature cannot be negotiated.

“My children are growing up here and there couldn’t be any better place for a child to grow up. It’s fantastic, they are having experiences no other child – certainly no city kid – can have, which is very important. But do I think we’ll have to leave the Galapagos eventually, because it’s changing too fast. There are simply too many people. All of a sudden there are things here that didn’t used to be here, like violence and crime, a result of too many people.

“The frustration is that I think we know how to save and protect the Galapagos, but I don’t think we have the political will to follow through. In a way, I have become a Galapagos expert, working in different trades and that experience allows me to be analytical right now, to see things from different perspectives, and I still think it is possible there is room for optimism. Again, though it sounds cliché, I really do believe we can make a difference otherwise I wouldn’t be working in conservation, I would probably still be working in tourism, making more money while I can, having a great time scuba diving every day.

“But I know that things can be better managed, especially on land. The difficult part is that we are now surrounded by a one-hundred-and-thirty-eight-square-kilometer marine reserve, which is harder to manage. Thanks to illegal fishing and a boom in industrial fishing many of the beautiful fish that make the Galapagos special are at risk. On paper we are able to come up with strategies to protect them. But we have to have strategies that go beyond the limits of the Galapagos, beyond the marine reserve, all the way to the mainland and further.

“Ironically the Galapagos National Park and the Galapagos Marine Reserve are far advanced in terms of having the right tools and the right resources for managing the impacts of people. Many other protected areas in the world look up at us because we are breaking new ground here, things that are then replicated in other protected places. But we also have our failures, which unfortunately are also being replicated.

“Tourism, if well managed – and I emphasize, if well managed – has a chance to become the best opportunity for people to make a living here, without effecting the environment. But we have to keep our eyes on not just what happens to the visitor sites but the rest of the Galapagos. Let’s not be so short term. But if you look at the numbers, the growth in tourism is scary. We’ve had sustained growth for the past twenty years of twelve to fourteen percent a year and don’t see it slowing down.

“We have allowed market pressures to rule tourism in Galapagos. Many of my friends are tour operators and I ask them all the time what if something gets out of control here – species disappear, too much pollution — and tomorrow people start canceling their trips to Galapagos. What would happen then? They have no answers. Neither does the government on mainland Ecuador. Everybody knows we have a so-called golden goose here and that we need to take care of it. I hope as a society, and as institutions, that we can cope with this challenge. I believe there is an important group of well-intentioned people working in the right direction. All we can do is hope for the best.”

With ninety seven percent of the islands off-limits and under national park protection – small, guided tours limited to 60 designated sites – the system that introduces tourists to the nineteen Galapagos islands has long been regarded a model of eco-tourism. But the success of that model is what puts them at such risk today: In 1991 there were 41,000 visitors, this year there will be close to 200,000; during that same period human population has risen from a few thousand to 40,000. Those are a lot of combined footsteps – as well as ship and plane traffic — for such a fragile eco-system (the so-called “Mona Lisa of biodiversity”).

The sudden arrival of so many people from so many parts of the world introduces parasites which threaten both flora and fauna; permanent residents arrive desirous of re-creating their mainland lifestyles, including cars, dogs and cats, and air conditioning; tour operators are pushing to expand their offerings to include sport fishing and skydiving. The Ecuadorian government has tried, with limited success, to limit migration and is considering raising the national park fee paid by every tourist from $100 to $135, an attempt to slow the numbers.

Jack Nelson is one of the Galapagos’ most-veteran tour operators, coming to the islands to live permanently in 1967. Like others like him, in different settings around the world who have watched their own personal paradises become overly popular, he is alarmed. “To a tourist, things look good. You still see a lot of animals, and not many other people,” he says. “But get outside those controlled (national park) parameters, and you’ll find a big mess nobody can figure out what to do about.”

While we were filming in and around the islands we met longtime Galapagos guide Sylvia Vargas on a few occasions. A native Ecuadorian, she’s been coming here for more than twenty years and has lived in Puerto Ayora off and on since first visiting as a teenager. She feels both blessed to be working in such an incredible place and worried that tourism and migration may be taking too big a toll.

“Personally, I think tourism should be capped for the moment. Higher entry fees haven’t worked to slow the growth. One tour operator I work for recently told me that the people who are coming to the Galapagos today are coming with a different idea about the place – they don’t ask as much anymore about wildlife, their first questions are about the comfort of the ship. They want more air-conditioning, more service, nicer cabins, a massage, a more comfortable mattress and expect a lot of chemicals on board to keep things clean and tidy … all of which have a direct impact on the Galapagos. More energy used, more garbage created, more pollution.

“I came first in 1984 when there were two thousand people living in town and two cars. I knew everyone on the street and was offered food by friends every day. The electricity on the island used to shut down at night. Now there are twenty times as many people and two hundred times as many cars. And we have electricity twenty-four hours a day. I miss the peacefulness of back then.

“But I have talked with people who work as guides in other places and they always say that we Galapagos guides are spoiled because we see such incredible wildlife every day. I guess they are right. But for me the most popular sites are too crowded, sometimes there are so many people I feel … embarrassed.

“My biggest worry is that more people living here means more demand for everything. I don’t see people thinking about having a different lifestyle than what they have on the mainland. They will tell you they came to the Galapagos to live in a peaceful place, but they expect to have exactly the same things that they had on the mainland. Why would you have a pet dog or cat here? Why would you have a car if you live in town? Why would you build a new house with air conditioning, when electricity is so hard to create? At Christmas on the mainland we decorate our houses with lots of outdoors lights and now they do the same thing here even though the power comes from a gas generator and the gas comes from far away.”

And pirates are on everyone’s minds and lips here. Just the day before Somali pirates grabbed a tuna boat with a crew of 29 just to the north of where we motor, near Denis Island. A few days before they had taken a commercial dive boat and before that a private sailboat. Apparently being thwarted in waters closer to home – the Seychelles are easily six hundred miles from the coast of Somalia – due to an increase in navy ships patrolling, the brash pirates have headed here for new booty.

File Photo

Walking the hot-hot streets of the capital of Mahe yesterday it was hard to avoid the subject. Headlines in the daily “Nation” claim “Piracy at Top of President’s Agenda.” Lunch of garlic prawns is at the Pirate Arms (right next to the Pirate Arms Shopping Complex). On the docks, fishermen tell me they’re not going out to sea, for risk of being hijacked for ransom. In the Museum of Natural History literally the first exhibit in the door tells the story of the Seychelles’ very first residents: Pirates. From sometime in the 15th century to 1730, these islands were the hideaway of some of the most notorious, most famously the celebrated Olivier Le Vasseur, alias “La Buze,” who was said to have been the best of the best, or the worst of the worst, dependent on your take on pirates.

Last week I was a thousand miles to the east in the Maldives; I’ve come here to continue exploring the boundaries of what was once called the Sea of Zanj. Who knew that the news-garnering Somali pirates would show up at the same time?

Here, quickly, are a few things I know about the Seychelles, other than their pirate history: A 115 island archipelago, a mix of granite islands and coral cays, stretched over 700 miles (all its land combined makes the entire chain about twice the size of Washington D.C.). Arab traders were most likely the first to spy them; officially Portuguese Admiral Vasca da Gama first recorded them, in 1502. A former French and British colony, the country has been independent since June 29, 1976 and boasts the smallest population of any African state. Independence brought a 30-plus-year dictatorship, endemic corruption, and a thriving black market and near bankruptcy; only a recent IMF emergency loan kept it from sinking.

The economy is based on the twin Ts: Tourism and Tuna. A world leader in sustainable tourism, more than fifty percent of the island nation is nature conservancy. As the sun begins to glow along that line where blue meets blue, it reveals a smattering of tall green islands, rimmed by boulder strewn and white sand beaches.

By the end of the day yesterday there were rumors on the streets of Mahe that a French navy ship had attacked and freed the Taiwanese tuna ship and its crew; rumor also has it that a U.S. military ship is on the way from patrolling near the Gulf of Aden.

In the last few weeks the Somali pirates have roamed far from their own coastline, moving south and east to the Seychelles and Comoros Islands, where there are no international naval patrols. They want bigger, more expensive ships to hold for ransom and tuna boats to use as “mother ships” to town their speedboats. These are not all rag-tag independents; there’s talk of a “pirate mafia” and suggestions that one reason they’ve come to the Seychelles is to distract its Navy thus making sneaking drugs into the country easier. The pirates are trained fighters who frequently dress in military fatigues; their speedboats are equipped with satellite phones and GPS equipment and they are typically armed with automatic weapons, anti-tank rocket launchers and various types of grenades.

At the moment a total of 14 vessels and about 200 crew members are currently under their control, despite increased patrolling by warships from China, the U.S., France and India. They are gambling that warships will not be sent this far south. The fact that the seas have been calm has allowed them to roam too and they have come back in force, seizing five boats in a 72-hour period from Somalia to the Seychelles.

“We’re going to end up probably playing a cat-and-mouse game in the next six months,” said Graeme Gibbon Brooks, managing director of the British company Dryad Maritime Intelligence Service Ltd.

From where I sit this morning, looking one hundred eighty degrees over a calm sea, it looks like a very, very big arena for playing games.

Like all Maldivian towns this is laid out in squares. From the start of any street you can stare down it and see blue ocean at the other end. A four-hundred-foot tall, red and white striped telephone tower adorned with a variety of satellite dishes shouts modernity has arrived; the head scarves worn by all women over thirty suggests a powerful connection to centuries-old tradition hangs on. As I walk the streets, obviously an outsider, I stop to chat people up and the responses are friendly, smiling. Everyone I meet – man, woman, child – gives me good, hard handshake as a hello. Though poor, this is not an impoverished place.

Despite the booming tourist business that exists on islands all around, most of these people have little contact with outsiders. Tourists in the Maldives are confined largely by geography to the resort islands. Water surrounds and there aren’t shuttles or ferries or water taxis to take people easily from island to island. During the recently ended thirty-year dictatorship, locals were strongly discouraged from mingling with visitors, concerned that negative influences from the west might rub off. Tourists drink alcohol, run around mostly naked and come to party, after all. By comparison, the local populace does not imbibe and is called to prayer several times a day (though there is reportedly a sizable heroin habit among many of the Maldive’s young people).

Concrete-block-and-cement walls lining the streets are painted in bright orange and purple and faded blue; older walls are made from pieces of coral, a construction now forbidden due to efforts to preserve the fragile reefs. Many of the walls bear stenciled black-and-red “Vote for Saleem” signs, which rather than feel defacing are actually a reminder of a positive thing that’s come to the Maldives in the last few years: Democracy.

I visit with a woman dressed in purple from head to toe; she is bundling reeds for roofs, explaining she is the breadwinner since her husband is sick. Fifty-two, she came here thirty years ago from a nearby, smaller island. In that time, she says, everything has gotten better. The economy. Politics. The way of life, including fifty channels of satellite television. And yes, she worries about rising sea levels, but primarily for her kids. “The seas are climbing … but what can I do?” is the plaint I hear from most here.

On the far side of the island a Woman’s Collective has turned out for a late-afternoon communal sweeping of a corner of the island. Bent at the waist, wearing headscarves and long dresses, they whisk brooms over the sand/dirt ground along the edge of the sea. Paid a small salary by the local government, the clean up is a good thing. But a bad side of island life here is evident just behind where they sweep: Piles of plastic garbage bags, which apparently did not make the once-a-month barge that carries garbage away to a nationwide rubbish-island near Male.

A new port reinforced by thick cement walls has been dredged in the last year, long enough to accommodate thirty to forty fishing boats. It was needed post-tsunami, which turned the local fishing fleet into matchsticks in December 2004. “You ask where the tsunami hit,” responds a 70-year-old man in green polo shirt, faded madras skirt and red Nike flip-flops. “Everywhere. That wave came from every direction at once.” He lucked out when the wave hit, since he was twenty feet up a coconut tree knocking off cocos.

Deeply tanned, his shaved head boasting a thin veneer of graying stubble, he tells me he still fishes when there’s a bit of wind, necessary because his boat has only a sail, no motor. A jack of all island trades, he’s fished, collected coconuts, worked construction and, not so long ago, was paralyzed over half his body due to some unexplained (to him) malady. Today he shows off his good health with the strongest handshake yet.

Quark reports no tear in the ship’s hull, thus no leakage, which is a good thing. And lucky. According to Quark president Patrick Shaw: “We are grateful that no environmental damage occurred and that all travelers who were aboard Ocean Nova are safe.”

What I noticed yesterday when news of the grounding raced around the world – it’s incredible how fast news of tragedy moves these days, even from the planet’s most remote corners – was a definite decrease in appetite for another Antarctic accident. When the “Explorer” sank in November 2007, it was a very big deal to the world’s media. When the “Ushuaia” went aground in December 2008, it was again a big deal … I think because most of the media world assumed it would lead to another sinking. With the “Ocean Nova” there was a burst of interest, but now the media understands the difference between a grounded and a sinking vessel and there was a bit of a ho-hum emitted.

Which is concerning. I hope it’s not soon taken for granted that accidents in Antarctica are common place, thus less newsworthy. The reality is that each season there are more and more accidents – tourist ships hitting ice, rocks, etc. – and they need to be reported. My concern now, given the frequency of accidents along the Peninsula, is that in the very near future the only accidents in Antarctica to be deemed newsworthy are if there is a sizable leak, a sinking, a loss of life. All of which would be tragic for this still-pristine place.

One word of self-promotion in regard to the Antarctic Peninsula, “Paddler” has just published a very beautiful story drawn from our expedition last year by sea kayak, sailboat, foot and small plane. On the newsstands now!

The ship apparently ran into trouble due to high winds, not unusual more than one hundred miles south of the Antarctic Circle. According to Quark, the 64 passengers and 41 crew are “following a normal programme of lectures” while the ship is stuck. They are awaiting arrival of the Spanish Naval ship “Hespedrides” and another Quark passenger ship, the “Clipper Adventurer.” If the ship cannot be unlodged, passengers will be transferred to the “Adventurer.” [14:00 EST, ALL PASSENGERS HAVE BEEN PUT ONTO THE "CLIPPER ADVENTURE," WHICH WILL SAIL FOR USHUAIA, ARGENTINA. DIVERS HAVE INSPECTED THE STILL-STUCK "OCEAN NOVA" AND ARE REPORTING NO LEAKING.]

In early December I was fifteen miles from the site of another Antarctic grounding, the M/V “Ushuaia,” which rested on the rocks for a couple days before being dragged off by a Chilean naval ship. It ultimately limped back to dry dock in Punta Arenas, Chile, its season cut in half.

It has been a rough season for Quark-chartered Antarctic ships. Earlier in the season the “Lyubov Orlova” – which the company was chartering for the season – was held at the dock in Ushuaia for several weeks by Argentine port authorities for failing inspection. Its passengers were either sent home or placed on other Antarctic-bound tourist ships.

Though overall tourist visits to the Antarctic Peninsula are down, probably due to sour economic times worlwide, there will still have been 40,000+ during the 2008-2009 season. More demand combined with less ice means more visits and more statistical risk of accident. Tour operators contend that it is still a small number, which is true relative to how many people visit a national park in the U.S. on any given summer day. But the consequences down south are potentially severe. If any of the ships currently plying the Peninsula were to run aground and sink – which the “Ocean Nova” could still do – it would leave behind a very tangible, and very difficult to monitor or clean-up, mess.