Good story on IHT.com:
No longer a lonesome outpost of life untouched by humans, today the Galápagos are a laboratory of conservation, where humans' fraught relationship with the natural world can be studied and, hopefully, repaired. In 1959, the centenary of the publication of Darwin's "Origin of Species," the Ecuadorean government declared the archipelago a national park. Today, 97 percent of the archipelago is preserved, along with 103,600 square kilometers, or 40,000 square miles, of the surrounding ocean.