Since Charles Darwin's famous visit to the Galapagos the reputation of the archipelago has been growing in the Western imagination as a place where one can study and understand evolutionary processes.  Scientists who were concerned with collecting and classifying animals and plants from the Galapagos, with the support of UNESCO and other international organizations and universities, created the Charles Darwin Foundation in 1959. That same year, the Ecuadorian Government founded the Galapagos National Park, in charge of protecting 97% of the Archipelago's terrestrial area. Since its beginning the GNP sought to restore degraded ecosystems and thus craft a "natural laboratory". Part of the plan to protect the flora and fauna of the Islands included the creation of a large tourism industry based on cruises that go from island to island.  Conservationists' efforts in the 1980s and 1990s focused on protecting the oceans around the Galapagos and controlling and managing fishing for sea cucumbers, lobsters and sharks. Local people, and in particular the fishermen, resisted the efforts made by the government, conservationists, and the booming and powerful tourism industry, to impose a globalized conservation strategy and discourse and to control and limit local residents' activities. They developed new forms of resistance, appropriation and negotiation to deal with the government and the different conservation organizations.  As extractive activities became illegal and criminalized and as fishing became less important from an economic point of view, local people, including the fishermen, began to view tourism as an important alternative economic pursuit. During the late 1990s new decision making bodies emphasized consensus and instituted a participatory management system in the Galapagos Marine Reserve. These organisms were not entirely successful, however, and conflicts and tensions reemerged after their creation. Despite their participation in these organisms, many local people felt ignored and marginalized while many managers and conservationists felt that locals, and especially the fishermen, had been abusing the system and the management process. The "Galapagos Paradox" results from a process by which the very same conditions that cause the Galapagos to attract the attention of scientists, conservationists and of tourists, are being put at risk by the success of its reputation and the increasing number of residents and visitors.  These visitors and residents threaten the isolation of the archipelago, which has been critical in maintaining the uniqueness of the islands.Key words: Galapagos, national park, conservation, resistance, fishing.

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Like many other oceanic islands around the globe, environmental conditions, social circumstances and forces of globalization combine to challenge the sustainability of the Galapagos Archipelago of Ecuador. This paper describes a food-supply system in Galapagos that is mainly controlled by population growth, weak local agriculture, imports from mainland Ecuador and the influence of a growing tourism industry. We use system dynamics (SD) as a modeling technique in this paper to identify the main driving forces operating on the Galapagos food system to create a series of future scenarios and to examine the subsequent implications across the supply system structures. We model the supply side of the food system using secondary data collected from governmental and non-governmental sources. We find that the consumption profile of the local inhabitants of the Galapagos is on average higher than consumption in the Ecuadorian mainland. This fact, plus rapid growth of the local population fueled by the tourism industry, has created a decrease in per capita local food production and an increase on food import dependence that now, challenges the sustainability of the archipelago. Imports are the largest source of food in the archipelago. Approximately 75% of the agricultural food supply was transported from the mainland in 2017. Our model projects that this fraction will increase to 95% by 2037 with no changes in food policy. Moreover, any plan to increase tourism arrivals must be accompanied by a plan to address the subsistence needs of the new population that the tourism industry attracts. Policies to promote local agricultural growth should be central to the development strategy implemented in the Galapagos.