ECOLOGY SCHOLARSHIP

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 32838, 11 February 1972, Page 8

ECOLOGY SCHOLARSHIP

Mr A. A. Maclntyre, a B.Sc. graduate at Canterbury University and the son of the Minister of Lands and Minister for the Environment, has been awarded the Takaro Trust Fund’s first ecology and conservation scholarship.

The scholarship, for which three Canterbury and three Auckland students applied, will enable him to study in the United States for three years.

It will provide him with travel to and from the Davis campus of the University of California, plus $2500 a year for the three years. In addition, he will be assisted to find suitable work during the university summer vacation. Mr Maclntyre was bom at Hastings in July, 1949, and received his secondary education at Christ’s College, where he was head prefect and a venture group instructor. In 1968 he was awarded an Upham Scholarship. In the United States he will complete about two years of course work studying environmental planning, the social responsibility of the biologist, human ecology and problems of the environment before spending up to two further years on his final Ph.D. thesis. On his return to New Zealand, he hopes to become established as an independent ecology adviser. Mr Maclntyre, who has been described as ranking among the top 5 per cent of Canterbury University’s zoology B.Sc. honours graduates, said in his application

for the Takaro scholarsh that through his study of th environmental crisis, th. world’s resource limitations, and the way’ in which population was booming, he had come to have great concern for the future of man on earth.

The problem was for man to be able to educate, plan and organise himself so as to redirect his individual selfishness into a desire to do ecological good for mankind, he said. There was a need to manage the global environment, which would require international co-operation on a scale as yet never seen. The scholarship was established by Mr R. Stockton Rush, of Christchurch, a former American stockbroker who in 1970 opened a luxury shooting and fishing lodge near Te Anaii. Mr Rush formed a New Zealand company, Takaro P roperties, Ltd, and the tourist lodge is named Takaro Lodge. The three-year doctoral scholarship is administered by the University Grants Committee. Its purpose is set out as being to enable a graduate in biology, biochemistry, geography, civil engineering or another “appropriate discipline” to undertake advanced study overseas in the fields of environmental conservation, ecology, or wildlife and

water conservation “. . . so i that he may return to New i Zealand and apply his know- i ledge to the problems of con- < servation, especially the :

application of ecological science to human affairs, the improvement of the natural environment and wildlife management.”