Resources for Teachers and Students

Prepare: Theo Colborn is a former Senior Fellow with the World Wildlife Fund, where she specialized in freshwater ecology, toxicology, and endocrine disrupters found in aquatic ecosystems. She is currently a professor of Zoology at the University of Florida, where she also holds an appointment as Pew Fellow in Marine Conservation. For more information on Colborn, please visit her biography and a list of her publications.

Read: Theo Colborn wrote an original essay for the Architects of Peace project. In it, she describes the intricate balance of the endocrine system, and the dangers that synthetic chemicals pose to "the inner environment."

Explore: Theo Colborn's most celebrated book is called Our Stolen Future, co-written with Dianne Dumanoski and John Peterson Myers. This book has so radically altered our notions of "safe chemicals," and has engendered so much further study, that it now has its own website, with extensive information on the new science being conducted as a result of the book's initial publication.

Write: In her Architects of Peace essay, Theo Colborn makes the provocative statement, "Peace begins in the womb." She complains that as a result of all our scientific interest in outer space, we seem to have forgotten the inner space of the womb. Does peace really begin in the womb? Write a two-to-three page imaginative reflection on the metaphor of inner space, attempting, if possible, to expand upon Colborn's image of the womb as the place of origin of peace.

Extend: The World Wildlife Fund has long been concerned that effective conservation efforts require a solid scientific foundation. For this reason, they founded the Conservation Science Program (CSP) in 1990 to advance biodiversity conservation through the development of innovative science. Summaries of a great deal of the research from this program are available to the public through their website.

Additional Resource: The Public Broadcast System (PBS) produced an interview with Theo Colborn titled "Fooling With Nature." A transcript of this interview, as well as related special reports, can be found on their website.

Biography of Theo Colborn