Noted Scholar Will Lecture on Ecology

Global warming. Depletion of the Earth’s protective ozone layer. The leveling of the Amazon rain forests.

These and other ecological threats facing mankind will be discussed at UC Irvine today by Peter Raven, director of the Missouri Botanical Gardens.

Raven’s lecture, “The Global Ecological Crisis: A Biologist’s Response,” will begin at 4 p.m. in the Whitby Research Auditorium at the College of Medicine complex near Bison and California avenues.

Raven, the Engelmann Professor of Botany at Missouri’s Washington University in St. Louis, has been active in efforts to heighten public awareness about the ecological crisis in the tropics and the importance of saving plant and animal species from extinction.

President Bush appointed Raven to the National Science Board in 1990. The Japanese government awarded him its International Prize for Biology in 1986, and in 1990 he shared the Prize of the Institut de la Vie in Paris with sociobiologist E. O. Wilson. Raven also serves as home office secretary for the prestigious National Academy of Sciences.

The lecture is free and open to the public. For more information, call UCI’s biological sciences office at (714) 856-5315.