Environmental pollution addressed in lecture

By: Vinayak Pande

Posted: 4/9/04

University of Washington Zoology Professor P. Dee Boersma delivered a lecture titled, "Penguins, People, Pollution and Politics: When Science is Not Enough," at the Dodd Center Thursday.

The lecture, part of an ongoing series of lectures titled "Nature and The Environment: The Edwin Way Teale Lecture Series" illustrated various points about penguins with the help of humorously arranged pictures, cartoons and recordings of penguin calls that had the near capacity crowd giggling. Boersma showed how her extensive research of the penguins of Punta Tombo yielded data that showed how the Magellanic penguins were adversely affected by the oil spills caused by the tankers that went through the penguins' feeding area.

By drawing the Argentinian government's attention to the results of her observations, she said she was able to convince it to regulate oil tanker routes and create a reserve for the penguins where their numbers were able to recover to the levels seen prior to the disruptions. Boersma said she believes the environment suffers when people are not able to regulate their consumption of the world's resources, especially the people of the developed world who, despite comprising a smaller percentage of the world's population, use a majority of its natural resources. Boersma said she intends to extend her work in Argentina to the penguins in Brazil and Uruguay, who she believes are being affected by the activities of oil giants like Exxon and Petrobras.

The lecture was attended by professors and students alike, including Andrew Townesmith, a former graduate student who came expecting this lecture to live up to the standards of previous lectures in the Teale series, and was not disappointed.

"[They] appeal to many people," he said. "[They] are interesting. The current lecture lived up to expectations."

Head of the department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Greg Anderson said the Teale series would continue for the rest of the year and include lectures looking at environmental issues through perspectives other than purely ecological ones. He cited an upcoming lecture on environmental law as an example.

The lecture series is in its seventh year and is developed as a joint effort of a number of departments, primarily within the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and organizations from other areas of UConn. Boersma's academic research is in the area of conservation biology, and has focused on seabirds as indicators of environmental change. She has been an adjunct faculty member in the Women's Studies department at the University of Washington and was associate director of the Institute for Environmental Studies from 1987 to 1993. She has also directed the Magellanic Penguin Project at Punta Tombo, in the Chubut province of Argentina, in her role as a scientific fellow for the Wildlife Conservation Society, since 1982. Over the past 14 years, she has carried out research on Magellanic penguins in the south Atlantic, assessing their biological characteristics and the effects of human disturbance and policy changes on their survival. She has also been enlisted to take on numerous national and international leadership and advisory positions in such diverse roles as adviser to the U.S. delegation to the United Nations World Population Conference in Romania, as a member of President Richard Nixon's Task Force on Women's Rights and Responsibilities, member of the Board of Trustees of Central Michigan University, and as a member of the Board of Directors of Zero Population Growth. An energetic personality, Boersma has numerous other honors, which include being on the advisory board of Disney's Wild Kingdom since 1994.