Water Quality and Evolutionary Diversity are Topics for EMG General Meetings

SierraScape August - September 2002
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EMG Sierra Club general meeting are held from 7:30 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. on the 4th Thursday of the month. They are free and open to the public. The August meeting will be at the Missouri Botanical Garden and the September meeting will be held at Litzsinger School on Lindbergh (appox. 1 mile south of Interstate 40).

Jim Rhodes, PhD. will be our featured speaker at the August 22, 2002 meeting. Jim has been a member of the Sierra Club since 1988 and has been very active in the Club serving on the Executive Committee, as Chair of the EMG, as the EMG group representative to the Ozark Chapter as well as serving on the Ozark Chapter Conservation Committee. He is currently an environmental engineer with the Department of Natural Resources in the St. Louis Regional Office. Jim will present an overview of water quality concerns in relation to how DNR's Clean Water Commission regulations work. Specifically, he will cover how the DNR characterizes water quality and pollution and how point source discharges are regulated. He will also cover such 'hot topics' as the EPA's Phase II storm water program, the control of non-point source pollutants and impacts from sprawl.

The Director of the Tyson Research Center at Washington University, Jonathan Losos, PhD, will speak at the Sierra Club meeting on September 26, 2002. Jonathan graduated from Harvard University and went on to the University of California at Berkeley for post graduate work. He is now a full professor at Washington University; his research focuses on evolutionary diversification. Jonathan uses lizards, particularly Caribbean species in the genus Anolis, to study the evolutionary process. He will discuss how an integrative approach, combining molecular biology, field studies, and laboratory investigations, is the most fruitful approach for understand the causes and consequences of evolutionary diversity.