A letter to this week’s New Scientist ( Galapagos gains; 9 December, p. 25) responds to a news story written a few months ago by my biographer Henry Nicholls ( Trouble in Darwin’s paradise; 12 October, pp. 8-9). In the original article, Nicholls highlighted concerns that high-profile conservation biologists are expressing about the trend towards ever-larger tourism vessels in the islands. This year, the first cruise ship somehow wrangled permission to disgorge its hoard of tourists – at capacity 698 – onto San Cristobal. Nicholls revealed that a second cruise ship of similar size has also got permission to come here and is scheduled to do so in 2008. This scale of tourism operation is not sustainable.

The author of the letter, one Victoria Todd from Dunbar in East Lothian, spent six months in the Galapagos in 1995 working as a volunteer research scientist. I remember her and she was nice. But this, she seems to feel, gives her sufficient first-hand experience to argue that we should “stop being knee-jerk conservationists and put on our business heads.” She winds up by asking, “If each person on a boat has paid, for example, $6000 for their trip, would they not perhaps be able to pay another $500 to be donated to fund vital work at the Charles Darwin Research Station?

There is nothing knee-jerk about the widespread concern over cruise vessels in Galapagos. The 1998 Special Law for Galapagos mapped out the sustainable vision for tourism in the archipelago and it’s one with lots of small, low-impact, locally owned boats, where the dollars generated touch the people living in Galapagos. The cruise-ship model, which is one with few, large, high-impact, foreign-owned boats, is so clearly opposed to this vision and it remains a puzzle (and, I should add, one tinged with allegations of corruption) how the operators of this vast vessel got permission to sail through in the first place.

I would like to suggest to Victoria and anyone else that thinks these big boats have a part to play in a sustainable future for Galapagos that they are misguided. I question whether the sort of person that goes on a cruise ship, who might see a dozen or more countries on their lavish voyage, gives a monkeys about these islands or their future. We are just the next stop-off on their month-long jolly.

In an archipelago famous for the subtle but important differences in flora and fauna from island to island, it is, I think, telling that they can only set foot on one island: the cruise ship passengers necessarily miss the intense evolution vibe that a real trip to the Galapagos exudes. Furthermore, if they’d bothered to research how to experience the Galapagos with minimal ecological impact (and assuming they have some kind of ecological conscience) then they certainly wouldn’t have chosen a cruise ship in which to do it. Is this the sort of person that will voluntarily fork out an additional $500 for Galapagos conservation? I doubt it.

As the Charles Darwin Foundation’s very own Felipe Cruz has put it, the visitors on these cruise ships are the “new buccaneers”, the pirates of the 21st century. Admittedly they probably don’t realise the impact they are having and the dangerous precedent they have set. But then nor did the buccaneers of the 18th and 19th centuries, who killed and ate so many thousands of my ancestors, recognise the consequences of their actions. Cruz’s analogy is spine-chillingly spot on.

If you are thinking of visiting the Galapagos, please get in touch with your local Friends of Galapagos Organisation. They are happy to suggest operators with an eye to the long-term rather than the short-term future of these islands.