IMAGE: Carter Hunt
The Fulbright Program is the U.S. government’s flagship international educational exchange program and is designed to build lasting connections between the people of the United States and the people of other countries.
With the Fulbright Scholar Award, Hunt redirected his ongoing research that seeks to understand how conservation-based tourism affects people who live in and near protected areas. His initial Fulbright work in 2019 identified a need for further anthropological understanding of the diverse human population in the islands, where over 35,000 people now reside.
People and the Galapagos Islands
With archival resources on the human history of Galapagos gathered from the CDF, Hunt proposed a new study, “Migrant worldviews and emergent ecological knowledge,” which was funded by the NSF in 2020. This project will explore the ongoing cultural convergence underway in the islands, which were recognized as the first UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1979. Despite having no native population, the Galapagos has undergone rapid human population growth since about 1950. This migration to the islands has brought different ways of thinking about conservation and human impact on the sensitive local environments.