By TINA IYER
Features Editor

A double major in biology and anthropology, Leduc spent her junior semester abroad last spring on a School for International Training program in Botswana. It was here that she developed, and consequently deepened, her interest in the ivory trade. Through Bates, she was awarded a grant by the Hoffman-Mellon Foundation to stay in the country through last summer, where she continued research she had begun during her termtime independent study project.

An active member of the Bates Democrats, a participant in the Maine Won't Discriminate campaign, and the host of her own radio show, Leduc is currently working on an honors thesis in anthropology in the same area of research as her talk.

During her independent study in Botswana, Leduc lived in a rural community on the border of a national park. Remarking on the large elephant population of Botswana that has made the ivory trade such an important subject, Leduc explained that while living in this community she spent time interviewing the members of the surrounding area about their own interaction with the animal life.

According to Leduc, the reopening of the ivory trade is encouraged and desired by both the government and the people of Botswana, and the issue is relevant internationally.

Leduc travelled to Botswana with her own ideas and feelings about the ivory trade; originally, she was against the reopening. "I walked in with a lot of misinformation, I realize," she said.

Leduc said her opinions changed once she spent an extended period of time in Botswana and with local people. She became a lobbyist for a local non-governmental organization, arguing to reopen the ivory trade.

She also conducted her research in a few other communities, and is now a strong proponent of having communities control their natural resources, rather than allowing a "top-down" control that gives priority to the desires of those in power.

Leduc said that she is interested in the broader concepts of "how people perceive their natural environments, and the north-south economic issues in terms of environmental issues.

"I wanted to look at anthropological issues and how they're surrounded by wildlife issue," she said.

For Leduc, much of our commonly-held concepts about the environment are Western ones, and she aims to connect the situation in southern Africa to that of Bates, where many students are concerned about "how to be green" in the United States. The Western idea of environmentalism "is completely nonsensical in other places," Leduc said. "And a lot of people don't question that."