Ancestor's Trail Hike

Approximately 1 billion years ago, individual cells started aggregating to form colonies of cells that were the precursors of all animal and plant life that we recognize today.  We start this twelve and a half kilometer hike from Erindale park in Mississauga and will follow the Culham trail which, for the most part, runs along the banks and across the Credit River ending at Pinecliff Drive park in Streetsville.  The entire hike is expected to take three and a half to four hours.

This year's theme is 'CARBON - Why should we care about it?'

All life on earth is based on this fourth most abundant element in the universe after Hydrogen, Helium and Oxygen.  It was created in the furnaces of early stars and seeded into the universe by their dying explosions.  Its unique properties lend well to polymer building but also to unique combinations with other elements most importantly for building life studied by the field of Organic Chemistry.  But this property of harnessing the energy of the sun to nourish carbon based life by photosynthesis created a large deposit of energy underground when they died and were buried underground for hundreds of millions of years.  Those stores are now being exploited and the resulting release of stored carbon in the form of carbon dioxide is changing the climate more rapidly than ever before.  The history we will be hiking through is only the most recent connection with this wonderful story of life on earth.

Last year's the theme was 'Why We Shouldn't Eat Our Cousins' referring to the exploitation of our evolutionary cousins from molluscs to octopus to fish to birds to mammals for their flesh, secretions or an unfertilized ovum.  To our detriment, it is our love for flesh, whether domesticated or wild, that lead to the mutation of a wild virus to become infectious to and between humans causing the greatest pandemic in a century as well as previous epidemics of SARS, MERS and EBOLA.  As we proceed, we will discuss how we can prevent another pandemic.