BBC World Service and now witness history. Today we're taking you back to the 1990s and

to the Galapagos Islands where a bitter and at times violent dispute broke out between

fishermen and conservationists. The conflict affected the whole community and it all

sent it around one thing. Sea cucumbers. In 2020, Mike Lanchin spoke to Marco Escarabai and

Alan Tai. It sounds trite to say it but it was just a fabulous place to work and the best

times were the feeling that I'd get from being alone on an inhabited island.

I agreed that there are pristine areas where we need to look

carefully at whether fishing is destroying the ecosystem or not. But we fishermen need to catch

fish. That's what we do. That's how we make a living. Located some 900 kilometres off the coast

of Ecuador in South America, the Galapagos Archipelago is made up of a chain of 21 largely uninhabited

islands. They were discovered in 1535 and 300 years later the legendary British naturalist Charles

Darwin first set foot on its rugged volcanic terrain. In the morning of the 17th we landed on

Chatham Island, which like the others rises with a tame and rounded outline. Interrupted only

here and there by scattered helix, the remains of former craters. The natural history of this

archipelago is very remarkable. It seems to be a little world within itself. Darwin went on to base his

groundbreaking theory of evolution by natural selection on what he'd observed in this little world

within itself. As a specialist working on plants there, I was just amazed by the way that plants

had evolved to deal with this harsh landscape. It's just an example of how oceanic tropical islands

used to look. That's British biologist Alan Tai. He arrived in the mid 1990s to head one of the

science units at the Charles Darwin Research Station on center Cruse, one of the inhabited Galapagos

islands. The population of the Galapagos had risen from about 1500 in the 1950s to some 15,000

by the 1980s mainly because of migration from mainland Ecuador. I'm from a long line of fishermen,

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