UUSD to hold Darwin Day program online Feb. 11

The Unitarian Universalists of Southern Delaware will hold its eighth Darwin Day celebration online from 10:30 a.m. to 12 p.m., Saturday, Feb. 11, via Zoom.

Professor Carla Guerrón Montero will address the topic, Darwin Was an Ecotourist: Evolution, Conservation and Tourism in the Enchanted Island.

English naturalist, geologist and biologist Charles Darwin visited the Galapagos Islands for five weeks in September and October 1835 on his famous voyage of the HMS Beagle when he was 22 years old. Ever since then, Darwin and the Galapagos have been inextricably linked.

In this presentation, Guerrón Montero will share a brief history of Darwin’s expedition to the Galapagos and the islands’ multispecies encounters. She will also discuss the tension between conservation and development that permeates this history, which successive Ecuadorian governments have attempted to resolve through ecotourism.

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. 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 Caribbean nation-states Brazil, Ecuador, Grenada and Panama.

UUSD’s Darwin Day celebration is free and open to the public. To register and obtain the Zoom meeting link, email AdultFaithExp@uussd.org by 12 p.m., Friday, Feb. 10.

For more information, go to uussd.org.