UUSD held its eighth Darwin Day celebration online from 10:30 a.m. to 12 p.m., Saturday, February 11, via Zoom. Professor Carla Guerrón Montero addressed the topic: “Darwin Was an Ecotourist: Evolution, Conservation, and Tourism in the Enchanted Island.” .
Carla Guerrón Montero is an applied cultural anthropologist trained in Latin America and the U.S. She specializes in the anthropology of tourism, the anthropology of food, and the African diaspora. Her work includes investigations of globalization, race relations, gender relations, and political changes in Latin America and the Caribbean. She is a Professor of Anthropology and Associate Director of the Center for Material Culture Studies at the University of Delaware. She studies the complex identity representations among marginalized populations in Latin American and the Caribbean. She has conducted field research, living in communities and working closely with residents, in Ecuador, Panama, Grenada, and Brazil.
English naturalist, geologist, and biologist Charles Darwin visited the Galapagos Islands in September and October of 1835 for five weeks on his famous voyage of the HMS Beagle when he was 22 years old. Ever since Darwin and the Galapagos have been inextricably linked. In this presentation, Professor Guerrón Montero shared a brief history of Charles Darwin’s expedition to the Galapagos Islands and the islands’ multispecies encounters. She also discussed the tension between conservation and development that permeates this history and which successive Ecuadorian governments have attempted to resolve through ecotourism.
Click here to view a video of this informative and interesting presentation. Passcode: x2NRnd@D .