According to botanist and Lecturer on Environmental Science and Public Policy Glenn S. Adelson, most people can name more television shows than tree species.

For the past five years, Adelson and fellow ESPP Lecturer Dan L. Perlman have taught their junior seminar, ESPP 90ehf, "Conservation Biology and Biodiversity," to tie together the disparate strands of the interdisciplinary degree program--and make sure students are as familiar with a sycamore as with Seinfeld.

But as Harvard University finishes its five-year review of the concentration, the much-loved course has been cancelled for the 1999-2000 academic year.

The review finds the program in "good health," according to Dean ofthe Faculty Jeremy R. Knowles, but students past and present are protesting the elimination of the seminar, saying the interdisciplinary concentration has all too few unifying elements and its elimination will only exacerbate the problem.

No Class

For dozens of ESPP concentrators over the past several years, Adelson and Perlman's conservation biology seminar is a cherished memory.

Eric G. N. Biber'95 now a joint-degree student at the Yale Law School and the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, remembers Perlman wading into a pond with the students on Martha's Vineyard to capture pond insects.

For Charlotte J. Kaiser '96, now consulting for the World Wildlife Fund in Washington D.C., the course was a chance to meet a Cape Cod cranberry farmer, a Vermont forester and a Costa Rican environmental official.

The seminar, a full-year, intensive conservation biology course with an emphasis on fieldwork, is a rare opportunity to interweave the otherwise distinct ESPP concentration requirements, concentrators say.