Topic: Hamilton Chapter Meeting
Time: Jan 21, 2022 04:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)

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Edward Berkelaar will address the topic "Creation Care in an Age of Planetary Boundaries." The presentation should be about 45 minutes leaving up to one-half hour for discussion. The presentation is normally recorded and made available to members afterwards.

Creation Care in an Age of Planetary Boundaries
From the Bible we learn that we are both part of God’s amazing creation and that we have been tasked with its care. At the same time, from the many sub-disciplines of environmental science, we continue to learn details about the impacts of our collective activities on creation—on its climate, its biodiversity, and levels of contaminants in air, soil and water. In a highly globalized world of almost eight billion people, environmental concerns have, in recent decades, increasingly become global, rather than local in nature.

This talk will introduce the concept of planetary boundaries, a model that helps us identify and quantify that status of important planetary processes that allow life to flourish. It will then show how a local undergraduate research project fits into this broad framework while giving students a chance to learn as they participate in an ongoing project to monitor water quality of Chedoke Creek, an urban watershed in Hamilton, ON.

Edward Berkelaar is at Redeemer University where he serves a Professor of Chemistry and Environmental Science and Associate Dean of Natural Sciences and Mathematics. He did his graduate studies at the University of Guelph in plant science and toxicology and then worked for three years as research director at Educational Concerns for Hunger Organization, an NGO based in Florida. His research interests have focussed on the bioavailabity of trace elements (cadmium, thallium and selenium) to plants and more recently on measuring levels of contamination in urban watersheds in Hamilton, “The City of Waterfalls.”