Rakan Zahawi: Giant ambitions at the Charles Darwin Foundation

About this episode:

Following on from two episodes recorded on San Cristóbal Island, this episode finds David having set sail across the Galapagos archipelago for Santa Cruz; destination: the headquarters of the Charles Darwin Foundation — the research institution founded alongside the Galápagos National Park, and still at the heart of how science becomes conservation on the islands.

Joining David is Rakan Zahawi, CDF’s relatively new Chief Executive. Rakan is a botanist and restoration ecologist who arrived after running botanical gardens in Hawaii and Costa Rica, and now helps steer one of the most ambitious ecological recovery efforts anywhere on the planet. At the centre of this conversation is the Floreana Project: a multi-decade initiative to restore the Galapagos island of Floreana to a natural state, one pre-dating humankind’s arrival in the Galapagos. By tackling invasive species at scale and rebuilding ecosystem function from the ground up, Rakan explains why removing cats and rodents is only the start, and how quickly native wildlife can rebound when pressure lifts — from finches and reptiles to the startling reappearance of the Galápagos Rail for the first time since Darwin’s 1835 visit. With that groundwork laid, attention turns to what comes next: a carefully sequenced programme of reintroductions, led by the recent (last week, no less!) return of giant tortoises to Floreana — hybrids, standing in for a lineage wiped out long ago — as a headline step in a restoration story decades in the making. All that, plus the methodical science behind biocontrol, the worries of a parasitic “avian vampire fly” that threatens Galápagos avian life, and what lies ahead for CDF and its present and future partnerships.

This episode was recorded live at the Charles Darwin Science Centre on Isla Santa Cruz in the Galápagos.

David's thoughts:

I keep coming back to the same question whenever I hear someone describe a “restoration” project: “restoration to what?” Because the word carries a false promise – that there is a place to which we can return, a perfect version of an ecosystem unaffected by our hubris, a baseline that will unite all conservationists and ecologists alike. But ecosystems are processes. They move. Evolution is constant – especially when we try to hit rewind.

As a student of evolutionary ecology, I have had a lot of the conversations with fellow evolutionary ecologists – about biodiversity, habitat loss, protection, restoration, rewilding, etc… – and eventually we land on this same tension: Everything is always changing; so why bother getting involved?! And it’s at this point that the conservationists among us get involved and the “Pure Evolutionary Ecologists” – a noble breed – head to the pub to discuss the nuance of sexual selection or the evolution of the human eye!

Ultimately, all change is natural, especailly if you still view humans as animals: geology, climate cycles, dispersal, evolution, ecological succession, the internal combustion engine. That’s what Earth is; all of it a part of our biosphere’s evolutionary progression. But the changes we are living through now are different to anyhting that has preceded them: the biodiversity crisis and the climate crisis are unquestionably shaped by human activity. We have manifested an extinction event the likes of which, the pace of which, our planet has never seen (and may never see again.) But – remove us from the system and nature will still change – but more slowly, and without the same accelerating, destabilising force. (We’d be gone either way, but the distinction matters.)

So when I witness projects like the Floreana Project in the Galápagos, or rewilding and landscape recovery efforts closer to home — Heal Somerset near me, or the Wildlife Trust’s plans at the Rothbury estate in the north of England — the question returns: what goal are we actually aiming for?

Rothbury is framed around a sustainable recovery model: nature thriving alongside local communities, with some form of farming continuing, some tourism, money being made from nature. The emphasis is on sustainable — not “hands-off wilderness,” but a landscape that can function for both people and wildlife over the long term. Heal Somerset feels like another flavour: less about tourism or income and more about fundraising to support landscape-scale recovery, with reintroductions like beavers used as ecological tools to change the landscape, to draw in other animals, to make a “once-farm” wild again. But what then…?

I have a guilty secret. Alongside beavers and wolves and lynx and bears returning to the UK, I have a genuine longing to see wildflower meadows return to Britain – the sort of everyday abundance that existed pre-industrial agriculture, certainly pre-pesticides and fertilisers. That’s not “pre-human” at all; it’s surprisingly recent, maybe only a century or so ago. But it also relied on human land use: grazing, hay-cutting, proper management. By then we’d already removed wolves, bears and lynx from the island – we’d had much of our wicked way – and yet something astonishingly beautiful still existed. Which makes the baseline question feel less like a single point in time, and more like a dial: how far back do you turn it, and what do you accept as part of the picture? And – why does it have to be just the one past? Can’t we pick and choose from an array of beautiful nature-ful wild states of yore?

In the Galápagos, that dial becomes both sharper and more complicated. The stated ambition of the Floreana Project is to restore the island — holistically — towards a condition closer to what existed before people arrived. Not in a tiny fenced plot, but across an entire inhabited island. That’s a bold thing to attempt, not least because the minute you add humans into the equation, everything becomes harder: agriculture, livestock, trust, safety, economics, politics. And Floreana is the fourth inhabited island of the archipelago.

But the Galápagos also undermines the comforting idea of a fixed “before.” The archipelago is a living demonstration that baselines slide. Islands are born from volcanic activity, drift, erode, subside, and eventually disappear beneath the sea – and new ones will form again over geological time. The earliest Galapagos islands are now beneath the waves in the South East; new ones will rise up above Pinta and Darwin and Wolf in the North. Even without humans, the system never stands still. Which means “restoration,” in the end, is always a human construct: a term for an attempt to repair the damage we’ve done, using the best tools and knowledge we have.

That is not to pooh-pooh the project; far from it. It is why I found Rakan Zahawi’s framing so compelling in this episode. Yes, the aim is to push Floreana back toward a baseline – to reduce invasive pressure, rebuild ecological function, and reach a point where the system needs minimal intervention. But crucially, it doesn’t freeze there. It continues. He recognises that. Other forces take over: dispersal, competition, behaviour, evolution, climate. The goal isn’t a perfect replica of the past; it’s a future shaped by a better starting point. It’s a statement of future intent. We can move forward by making amends for our past.

It also provides hope. We get to witness native wildlife respond, and respond fast! A pulse of life. Finches, reptiles, birds. The Galápagos Rail appearing again on Floreana for the first time since Darwin’s 1835 visit. That’s the part that makes your spine straighten: not because it’s sentimental, but because it’s ecological cause-and-effect playing out in real time. Because it means, maybe, we haven’t entirely f*cked things irreperably.

Then comes the headline moment: the return of giant tortoises to Floreana. Not a “pure” resurrected species – that lineage is gone – but hybrids returning to take up the ecological role that was removed. It’s restoration by function as much as by history. A pragmatic, hopeful kind of substitution that admits loss without surrendering to it. But, give them some evolutionary time, and you will have the blood line of past Floreana Tortoises becomine the future Floreana projects. And purity becomes a foolish construct of perspective. Does it matter?! GIANT TORTOISES!! What more do you need?!

For me, Floreana is exciting not only because of what it could mean for Floreana, but because of what it represents for everywhere else. Island restoration has always been a kind of proving ground – places where you can easily/clearly see cause and effect. I’ve watched smaller-scale examples before, like Lundy’s rat eradication work to help protect seabirds and the endemic Lundy shrew. Floreana is that idea scaled up: bigger, messier, more ambitious, and therefore potentially more instructive. So I’m rooting for it – for Rakan, for the Charles Darwin Foundation, and for their partners. Not because it promises a pristine, pre-human Eden (that’s not really the point), but because it tries to give an ecosystem back its options. To restore resilience. To prove that with enough science, enough funding, enough patience, and enough trust built with the people who live inside the project, you can shift a whole landscape away from collapse and towards recovery.

It isn’t just about protecting what remains, but about rebuilding what was lost – at scale, and in the real world.