secondly, to discontinue the export (legal or illegal)
of live parrots; and thirdly, to involve local people
as much as possible in both the rationale of and the
employ of the management programmes.
Christian (1993) has described the efforts made by
the government of St Vincent and the Grenadines to
ensure the long-term survival of the Vincentian par-
rot, Amazona guildingii, which has been reduced to
about 450 birds. Aided by financial support from
bodies such as the World Wildlife Fund, the RARE
Centre for Tropical Bird Conservation, and notably
the local St Vincent Brewery, the Forestry
Department has been able to bring the conservation
message to the local population and enlist their sup-
port. A significant amount of the island’s limited
resources have been channelled into activities and
programmes that support and complement parrot
conservation. Thus this small island nation has
already made a big contribution and shown its com-
mitment to biodiversity conservation. Christian
stresses the importance of continuing to demonstrate
the links between habitat protection for the parrot,
and the opportunities for ecotourism, extraction of
minor forest products, and soil and watershed pro-
tection. He cautions that failure to demonstrate such
direct linkages would risk the loss of public cooper-
ation and support so vital for conservation.
This final section has served merely to introduce
a few of the topics of sustainable development of
islands and to present, briefly, the case that islands
have many problems different in kind from those of
larger land masses (for a fuller account see Beller
et al. 1990). There is in this a parallel with the under-
lying ecological or nature conservation problems of
oceanic islands. In short, small or remote oceanic
islands are ecologically special: they constitute evo-
lutionary treasure-houses, threatened by contact
with other regions and especially the continents.
The nature of the ecological problems involved is
now well understood and the pattern of continuing
degradation and species loss is all too obvious and,
in the general sense, predictable. Dealing with these
problems requires a sensitivity to, and respect for,
the island condition of the human societies that
occupy them (Nunn 2004). There are remedies, but
they require solutions tailored to the islands and
not simply exported from the continents.
12.4 Summary
Island societies face many problems, some common
to those of societies everywhere, and others that are
specific to the island context. We illustrate a few of
these special problems by reference to the implica-
tions of the loss of very small islands to rights of
access to marine resources, and by reference to the
potential loss of entire island societies through
(projected) future sea-level rise.
In an increasingly globalized world, the effective
isolation of many oceanic islands has been broken
in the last few hundred years and especially in the
most recent decades. The devastation of Nauru
through mining of phosphate-rich guano deposits,
and the huge socio-economic changes (and conse-
quent environmental pressures) brought by mass
tourism within the Canaries, provide evidence of
these processes, which can be particularly difficult
for small island societies and governments (like
those of Nauru) to cope with. The societal dimen-
sion of these processes and phenomena is a crucial
part of any serious effort to plan for biodiversity
conservation in island settings.
In considering some of the conservation responses
that have been attempted on remote islands, we
briefly review the use of biological control, translo-
cation, captive breeding and re-release programmes,
and of ‘high-tech’ approaches to the removal of
feral animals from islands: just a small selection
of the wildlife conservation tools that may be crucial
to conservation efforts. Integrated programmes
involving the re-insularization of populations, for
instance by transferring them to small offshore
islands from which predators have been eradicated,
offer some hope for the persistence of particular
threatened island endemics. We also illustrate
through the Canarian example, how for larger
oceanic islands, it is possible—and arguably
crucial—to adapt the legal instruments of protected
area planning and species protection, for application
in an insular context.
Many practical problems continue to face island
conservationists, and they are illustrated here by
reference to the Galápagos, wherein the political,
financial, and socio-economic problems are argued
to be the key drivers of conservation problems. The340 ISLAND REMEDIES: THE CONSERVATION OF ISLAND ECOSYSTEMS