By Dr. Robert Thorson

The Galapagos Islands off the west coast of Ecuador are a very special place. Yet some of that specialness is allegedly being chopped down and shipped around the world, in the name of athleticshoe marketing at shopping malls. This is worse than sad. It’s a profanity. It’s an obscenity when a pair of mall gym shoes reaches a price of $125, especially when that cost doesn’t include the degradation of nature.

Charles Darwin put the Galapagos — a chain of semi-arid, geologically recent volcanic islands — on the global radar screen when he published “The Origin of Species” in 1859. It was on the Galapagos that his great ideas about evolution began to crystallize, and where the evidence for his then-radical theory was strongest.

Since then, the islands have become the closest thing to Mecca for those who worship biodiversity, many of whom make a once-in-a- lifetime pilgrimage there to see what the young naturalist saw while on the round-the-world voyage of the Beagle (1831-36).

Since then, the islands have also become a veritable Disney World for Ecuador, catering to ecotourists. By putting the Galapagos under tremendous development pressure, the so-called birthplace of evolution is now being degraded by construction, water pollution, invasive species and habitat loss.

This essay about the Galapagos was provoked by my most bizarre shopping experience of 2005. My teenage daughter and I were foraging in Buckland Hills mall in Manchester for a pair of gym shoes. When I was young, a shoe store would have fewer than 10 styles of gym shoes from which to chose. But the store she walked into had, by my estimate, more than a thousand shoes and hundreds of styles. My daughter looked around for a few seconds before saying, “There’s nothing here for me.”

Stunned, I walked with her toward the exit, where my eye caught sight of a pair of basketball shoes large enough to hold a loaf of bread and with what looked like wooden inserts in the heel. Behind the shoes was a large sign featuring a muscular basketball player, a few lines of text and the name Tracy McGrady. I was so flustered by what I then read that I copied down the text, word for word, on a check deposit slip, embarrassing my daughter. Here’s what it said:

“You see that wood inside the shoe? That’s there because T-Mac has to always have a piece of the court with him. Thing is he got it from the trunk of a tree down there in the Galapagos. T-Mac wanted it because the tree actually makes it rain on the island the way he makes it rain on the basketball court.”

I knew right away about the trees that make rain. They grow in what are called tropical montaine cloud forests. Their evergreen leaves intercept the mists and fog that would otherwise float right on by, creating tiny droplets that merge into drops heavy enough to drip to the forest floor. Such forests create a special type of ecosystem.

According to the 2004 “Cloud Forest Agenda” by the U.N. Environment Program, such cloud forests constitute only 1.2 percent of all tropical forests in the Americas, and only about a quarter- percent of the total world land area.

From its introduction: “Cloud forests face many of the same threats to their existence as other tropical forests, but their unique ecology and their location on mountain slopes make them particularly susceptible to habitat fragmentation and especially to climate change. …

“Cloud forests are generally unsuitable for commercial timber harvesting because the canopy trees have slow growth rates, short stature and contorted shapes. In addition, the rugged terrain makes logging difficult.”

Though I knew about the trees, I had no idea who the basketball player was. So, for the first time in my life, I logged onto a sports website. I read that T-Mac, as he is called, is an NBA star and a pretty nice guy, based on a list of his community service projects.

Like T-Mac, I also love wood products. And I believe that a basketball court can be an appropriate use for specialty timber, provided that it is cut from a well-managed forest. But unlike T- Mac, I would never use timber from a Galapagos cloud forest, much less brag about it.

But the worst thing about the whole wood-in-the-shoe marketing gimmick is that it’s fake wood, though this is not what the sign says. I got fooled myself until I later read the fine print in the product description.

I wonder how many kids with too much money on their hands are trotting around thinking that, like TMac, it’s cool to see the tree rather than the forest.

An enormous corporation (Adidas) is using the superstition (wooden shoe) of a basketball player (TMac) to sell a high-end shoe. Their advertising misleads the consumer and makes it sound like logging the Galapagos cloud forest is a cool thing to do.

It’s not. In low-elevation, rugged settings like the Galapagos, cloud forests have great difficulty regenerating. Mature forests can persist indefinitely, because they capture the moisture they need. But when the trees are cut down, the water-capturing mechanism is gone, making it too dry for the forest to come back without decades of irrigation.

Sometimes I wonder what Charles Darwin would have done if he had spotted the fake Galapagos wood inside the T-Mac 5 at the Buckland Hills mall. Perhaps he would have thought that the world was devolving.