South Georgia Island: A Wilderness Replenished

By Matt Ridley

South Georgia is an island near Antarctica. It’s about the size of Rhode Island but with mountains rising to over 9,000 feet.

The island was uninhabited when, on Jan. 17, 1775, HMS Resolution dropped anchor in what is now called Possession Bay, and Captain Cook claimed it on behalf of King George III. His men discharged their weapons “to the utter amazement of the seals and the penguins,” wrote the naturalist George Forster.

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A century ago, however, when the explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton and his five companions landed here, after bringing a small boat through 800 miles of stormy seas following the sinking of their ship Endurance, there were no fur seals and few penguins to greet him. The reason Shackleton came to South Georgia for help was precisely because it wasn’t wilderness but was inhabited, indeed industrialized. He was heading for one of island’s four small towns, in which lived nearly 2,000 people, mostly Norwegians and Scots.

The people had come first for the fur seals (to make felt hats), but they soon took elephant seals for their blubber and penguin eggs for food. In the first half of the 20th century, it was the turn of the whales, which were all but wiped out in the surrounding ocean by 1960.

Yet today the island looks again much more like it was in Cook’s day than in Shackleton’s. The total human population is about 25 in summer (though some 8,000 tourists visit each summer on cruise ships and sleep on board). There are now some four million fur seals. They are everywhere, growling and moaning in crowds on the beaches, in the tussock grass and in the ruins of the towns. Elephant seals snooze and belch in heaps on every beach. King penguins abound: One colony has gone from 350 pairs in 1912 to 60,000 pairs today. Even the whales are back: Humpbacks and right whales were blowing regularly off the coast last month.

The plunder of South Georgia’s seas has also been halted. Fisheries regulation arrived with the declaration of a 200-mile limit around the island in 1993. In exchange for a hefty fee a handful of licensed vessels fish these waters for krill, ice fish and Patagonian toothfish (known on menus as Chilean sea bass). Each boat has a beacon transmitting an automatic identification system and carries an observer on board. No boat may fish in water shallower than 700 meters or in certain closed “boxes,” where the young toothfish live. Illegal fishing has almost entirely ceased.

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A spectacular ecological restoration has occurred, a wilderness replenished—on a scale probably unmatched anywhere else in the world. Last month, as I sat at the dining table of Pat Lurcock (one of three government officers for the whole island) at King Edward Point, eating potted krill and watching the light fade on the glaciers, I surveyed a wondrous scene: Stormy petrels flitted up the bay to feed their young, fur seals porpoised through the water, king penguins cooled their feet on the snow, and plump elephant seal pups snoozed on the steps of the laboratory.

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But after centuries of foolish plunder, pause to reflect what an astonishing transformation has been achieved by wise management. We can now see what Captain Cook saw: an ice-capped island looming over verdant bays teeming with wildlife. There is a lesson here for the whole planet: With prosperity and technology and determination, we can restore wilderness.

—The most recent of Mr. Ridley’s many books is “The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge.” He is a member of the British House of Lords.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/south-georgia-island-a-wilderness-replenished-1454688892