No Stranger to the Sea

In his review of Carl Safina’s book “A Sea in Flames: The Deepwater Horizon Oil Blowout” (April 24), Gregg Easterbrook refers dismissively to the actions of Jane Lubchenco, administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. He notes that she graduated from Colorado College, “a thousand miles from seawater,” and that this was “perhaps ill suited to prepare” her for the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

This observation might have been relevant had Lubchenco spent her entire life in Colorado, but she is in fact a world-renowned marine ecologist, who studied at the (coastal) universities of Washington and Harvard, and who, for some 30 years before becoming N.O.A.A. administrator, was a professor of marine biology and zoology at Oregon State University. Far from a landlubber, she is, indeed, an old salt.

Easterbrook’s egregiously misleading statement about Lubchenco casts serious doubt on his judgment and reliability concerning the matters at hand.

GREGORY C. MAYER
Kenosha, Wis.
The writer is an associate professor of biological sciences at the University of Wisconsin, ­Parkside.

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