Lecture

Some 200 years before Al Gore and Live Earth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote of the consequences of crime against birds and beasts. In 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner', the epic of a seafarer who brings disaster upon his ship by killing one of the greatest of all seabirds, the albatross, Coleridge penned some of Western civilization's most enduring lines: 'He prayeth well, who loveth well/Both man and bird and beast./He prayeth best, who loveth best/All things both great and small'.

Both a poet and a scientist, Doughty earned his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1971, the same year he came to the University of Texas. His nine books include Return of the Whooping Crane and Endangered Species: Disappearing Animals and Plants in the Lone Star State. His poem 'Ponds' includes the following lines: 'These wide-wings stretch and teeter. Their needle beaks tap soft earth, pluck worms, insects too small to see except by ruffled jousters'.