Hell and Eden at World’s End: Early Twentieth Century Settler Life on the Galápagos Islands

Elizabeth Hennessy
History, UW-Madison
Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies

Monday, February 5, 2018
3:30 PM
212 University Club

The Galápagos Islands are best known today as a natural laboratory of evolution where biologists and tourists alike can venture to see nature as Charles Darwin himself did nearly two centuries ago. For much of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, these Pacific islands at the “world’s end” were the site of quite different understandings of place. Dozens of U.S. and European expatriates went to the Galápagos seeking an island Eden where they fancied themselves Robinson Crusoes escaping modern life. Yet for their Ecuadorian contemporaries, the islands were not an escape, but a prison: a place of penal colonies and forced plantation labor. This talk examines the collision of these different geographical imaginations and how they both spurred conservationist concern and continue to disrupt ideals of preserving the islands as a timeless natural laboratory.

Elizabeth Hennessy is Assistant Professor of World Environmental History in the History Department and the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at UW-Madison. She is part of the Center for Culture, History, and Environment (CHE) and serves as the faculty advisor for CHE’s graduate-student-run digital magazine, Edge Effects. She is also affiliated with the Latin American, Caribbean, and Iberian Studies program (LACIS) and the Holtz Center for Science and Technology Studies. Trained as a geographer, she works at the intersection of political ecology, science and technologies studies, animal studies, and environmental history. Hennessy was formerly a fellow of the SSRC, ACLS, and Rachel Carson Center at LMU in Munich, Germany. Her first book will be published with Yale University Press in 2019.