You may have heard about the mid-January grounding of an uninsured, unseaworthy, single-hulled oil tanker on San Cristóbal Island in the Galápagos Islands. The Galápagos lie about 1,000 kilometers west of Ecuador, which "owns" the 19 islands. Designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the Galápagos, in a sense, belong to all humanity. Charles Darwin visited these islands, renowned for their unique animal life, in 1835; their unusual fauna contributed to the formulation of his ideas on natural selection.

Oil-spill containment and cleanup were delayed for days by private and government greed, according to e-mail reports I received from Sea Shepherd Conservation International (SSCI). SSCI President Captain Paul Watson has twice co-taught Honors Collegium courses with UCLA faculty. SSCI's ship "The Sirenian" is stationed in the Galápagos to assist the National Park Service in thwarting wildlife poachers. Help in removing the oil came from the Park Service, the U.S. and Ecuadorian navies, the Darwin Research Station, SSCI and Birdlife International. But the real hero was Mother Nature, who blew most of the oil slick out to sea.

While the oil spill received extensive media coverage, another and potentially more serious event last November passed essentially unnoticed. Fishermen on Isabela Island, the largest of the Galápagos Islands, attacked and burned offices of the National Park and the Darwin Research Station. Everything was destroyed and station staff were threatened. The reason for this terrorism? The park and research station had set quotas on lobster catches. The fishermen also reportedly killed tortoises and giant manta rays.

The fishermen have been getting away with murder because of private greed and government corruption. Pirate fishing ships from Ecuador, Asia and elsewhere hang around the islands, encouraging the fishermen to overexploit marine resources like lobster, sharks and sea cucumbers.

Such practices are much more dangerous than oil spills. No one wants oil spills and, with care, they need occur only rarely, particularly as world oil production declines in the not-distant future. But many of the 6 billion (and counting) humans would like to plunder the biosphere - future generations and other species be damned.

Author Carl Safina, a vice president at National Audubon Society, referring to the Galápagos, remarks: "The real issue here is too many people, not enough resources and the practice of a kind of fishing that takes out those resources much faster than they can recover."

Explosive human-population growth threatens to destroy the Galápagos just as it did Easter Island, not very far away and not very long ago. The population of the Galápagos, barely 1,000 in 1950, has surpassed 16,000, doubling in 14 years.

What can Californians learn from the Galápagos? We suffer the same problems of overpopulation and lack of regard for our region's biodiversity, but on a much larger scale. If people cannot be persuaded to save such a special place as the Galápagos, then, in the longer run, what chance is there for the biosphere as a whole?

Ben Zuckerman is professor of physics and astronomy and a member of the UCLA Institute of the Environment.