This is a regular session but with a Christmas twist. Please come early and listen to Christmas music & song
Special Music 11:45 am - 12:05 pm - Gilbert Paterson Handbells 12:30 - 1:00 pm (during lunch) - Gilbert Paterson Select Choir
As we approach Christmas and the spirit that goes with it, environmental challenges – to air, water and land – are not going away. In Alberta we are polarized between development and environmental safeguards, between job and habitat protection, between corporate interests and citizen lobby/protest groups, between the dividends offered by hydraulic fracturing and those who fear its threat to water and health.
The speaker will offer some guiding principles and insights that the human community might use to journey through this bewildering forest of choices and options. He will propose some spirited guidelines that might lead the way in our care of the earth, our care of one another and ourselves. And they may be principles we can all agree on.
Speaker: Lorne Fitch
Lorne Fitch grew up on a mixed farm in west central Alberta. He left the farm but the experience of growing up in semi-wild circumstances never left him. Lorne has been a biologist for over 40 years, working mostly in Alberta but also in other parts of Canada and internationally with the many issues related to use of land and water.
Those experiences have allowed Lorne to conclude that how we treat the land and water is a result of how we see these elements, how we value them, and what our vision is for their future. It has led him to understand how knowledge levels affect people’s environmental opinions and has caused him to become an educator because if we want a future with clean water, productive soil, fish, wildlife and space, we must make proper choices now.
Lorne is the Provincial Riparian Specialist with the Alberta Cows and Fish program. He is also an adjunct professor with the University of Calgary