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The way things
turn out, the Earth’s rotation on its own axis and its year-long voyage around
the Sun result in a permanent condition whereby half of the planet is in light and half
of it is in darkness, with some borderline twilight conditions, periods we call
dawn and dusk, and some lengthening of the periods of night or day nearer the
North and South poles. But over the
course of a year, that evens out too.
Our planet is intended to be evenly split, day after day, year after
year, between light and darkness.
Humans always
played by these rules, working during daytime and sleeping during
nighttime. Fireplaces and candles
provided some minimal leeway, but these habits were generally followed until
about a hundred and fifty years ago, when Thomas Edison invented the light
bulb. That changed everything, enabling
us to turn darkness into light, and nighttime into daytime.
 |
| Edison and his invention |
That worked out
fine for us, electric lighting enabling working and social activities to extend
into evening hours, roadways to be made safer, night baseball to supplant day
games, and produced vast areas of artificial light, such as the Las Vegas
‘strip,’ illuminating our planet as never before. Satellite views of the dark side of our
planet reflect these vast areas of ‘light pollution.’ You can see them from a plane if you are
flying at night.
Unfortunately,
as beneficial as this might be to us, it is disastrous to other creatures,
insects, plants, and even microbes with which we share the planet. This ‘light pollution’ disturbs
their feeding, mating, and migratory habits to the extent that some species are
becoming extinct. Humans were designed to be daytime creatures,
whereas other species are able to do things in darkness based on visual,
auditory, and sensory abilities far different, and often superior to ours. (The giant squid has eyes the size of dinner
plates, so as to be able to spot its predatory enemy, the sperm whale, a great
distance off, even in the darkness of the ocean depths, something human eyes
cannot do.)
For many if not most species, these activities take place during darkness, some of which they are deprived of by our turning nighttime into daytime. The crucial mating habits of insects that are prey to other insects that might pollinate a plant or be a food source for other creatures along the food chain, including humans, can be drastically changed. Without being able to mate and reproduce, they are on the path to extinction. Have you ever wondered where many of the beautiful butterflies you remember from years ago have gone?
And plants that provide food
for us can be similarly affected by our taking darkness, a period of rest for
some and activity for others, away from them. And the same holds true for the inhabitants
of the seas, from microbes on up to whales.
Do you like to eat seafood? Those delicious lobsters and shrimp fed on something that fed on something, that fed on
something else that would not have survived without darkness.
This past week,
to reduce light pollution on my small piece of property I have turned off the
lights that illuminate the plants and trees in front of my house, just leaving
the two bulbs adjacent to the garage door working. I hope our local night-loving creatures will
appreciate that.
(Inspiration for
this piece comes from ‘The Darkness Manifesto’ written in 2020 by Swedish
scientist, conservationist, and writer Johan Eklof, whose field of expertise is
‘bats,’ creatures who prefer darkness to light.
It’s an easy book to read, with nice, short, not particularly technical
chapters.)
JL
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Climate
Change is Upon Us
And
continuing the theme of the previous article in this posting, the bad news is
that climate change is no longer a threat to prepare for. It is upon us already, right now. The hot weather and forest fires throughout
the world are no longer just warnings. They are indications that climate change has
arrived. There are many reasons for this but let us just touch on one.
Emissions
from the use of fossil fuels (coal, petroleum, even wood) to produce energy
have contributed to raising the surface temperature on the planet. We
know that energy resulting from the use of wind, solar, tidal, and even
nuclear, sources can reduce such emissions but our conversion to these
alternate sources just hasn’t advanced sufficiently to avoid our present
changing climate.
 |
| New Yorker Magazine 7/31/23 Cover |
The
increase in the planet’s temperature has, for example, caused the Greenland
icecap to begin melting. This is raising
the level of oceans worldwide, causing flooding, and mixing fresh water from
the icecap with the seas’ salt water, reducing the density of the water in the
oceans. As a result, colder waters,
formerly comfortable at the seas’ bottom, can rise to dominate ocean
currents. Scientists foresee this potentially
doing away with, or changing the paths of, ocean currents such as the Gulf
Stream, which plays a large role in the weather systems bordering the Atlantic
Ocean. Less rain in North America,
affecting agriculture significantly and a frigid coastline are possible
results.
 |
| As the Hanging Gardens of Babylon once might have appeared, before episodes of climate change took place. |
Areas
of the world that once were verdant have become almost desert-like as the
result of climate changes in the past. It
would be presumptuous to believe that such change cannot again occur. The least
we can do is to stop contributing to the changes that clearly are already
taking place.
JL
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Nationhood and The Problem in Niger
 |
| Landlocked Niger, not to be confused with Nigeria. |
I have always felt that there are certain prerequisites of nationhood, more specifically (1) logical borders such as mountain ranges or bodies of water, (2) natural or human resources sufficient to support a viable economy, (3) an ethnic, religious, or linguistic commonality of its population, making it distinct from those of neighboring areas, and (4) a sufficient number of educated people, dedicated to and capable of, effectively managing it as a nation. When thirteen of England’s North American colonies chose independence in 1776, they easily satisfied all four of these prerequisites.
It appears to me that lack of even one of these,
however, can lead to instability and a neo-colonial dependence on outside
powers, or a takeover, usually claimed to be, but rarely is, temporary, by whoever
controls the military or by the military itself.
This seems to be the problem in Niger and
elsewhere in Africa, if not the world.
JL
* * *
Slavery Taught Skills – Pure
Bullshit
Florida’s change in its
educational curriculum for teaching history has reached a new low by stressing
that slavery offered slaves the opportunity to learn skills. Even if after emancipation, such skills
turned out to have been helpful for some, using this argument to help sugarcoat
the awful truth about a brutal system that treated human beings as ‘chattels,’
to be overworked and beaten, and bought and sold, totally ignoring family
relationships, is horrible. It denies that slaves were human beings, equal in their
humanity to their supposed ‘masters.’
 |
| '... And you can teach her to cook and sew too' |
If this revelation is disturbing
to any of Florida’s high school students, as some narrow-minded ‘moms’ may
feel, that would be a good thing for
them and a long overdue awakening.
Any person of color, or anyone for
that matter, who votes for any of Florida’s shameless legislators who supported
their governor’s inhuman approach to history, would have to be out of their
minds.
JL
*
* *
Nostalgia Quiz #4
Match these well-known novels
with their authors:
a.
‘The Sound and the Fury’
b.
‘American Pastoral’
c.
‘The Naked and the Dead’
d.
‘Beloved’
* * * * *
1.
Philip Roth
2.
Toni Morrison
3.
William Faulkner
4.
Norman Mailer
The answers will appear in the
next posting of Jackspotpourri.
The answers to Nostalgia Quiz #3
are:
Riverfront Stadium –
Cincinnati Reds,
Sportsman’s Park – St.
Louis Cardinals,
Polo
Grounds – New York Giants,
Shibe
Park – Philadelphia Athletics and Phillies,
Comiskey
Park - Chicago White Sox,
Briggs
Stadium – Detroit Tigers
JL
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Housekeeping on Jackspotpourri
Email Alerts: If
you are NOT receiving emails from me alerting you each time there is a new
posting on Jackspotpourri, just send me your email address and we’ll see that
you do. And if you are forwarding a posting to someone, you might
suggest that they do the same, so they will be similarly alerted. You can
pass those email addresses to me by email
at jacklippman18@gmail.com.
Forwarding Postings: Please
forward this posting to anyone you think might benefit from reading it.
Friends, relatives, enemies, etc.
If you want to send someone the
blog, exactly as you are now seeing it, with all of its bells
and whistles, you can just tell folks to check it out by visiting https://jackspotpourri.blogspot.com or
by providing a link to that address in your email to them. I
think this is the best method of forwarding Jackspotpourri.
There’s another, perhaps easier,
method of forwarding it though! Google Blogspot, the platform
on which Jackspotpourri is prepared, makes that possible. If you click on
the tiny envelope with the arrow at the bottom of every posting, you will
have the opportunity to list up to ten email addresses to which that blog
posting will be forwarded, along with a comment from you. Each
will receive a link to the textual portion only of the blog that
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typography, or the 'sidebar' features such as access to the blog's archives.
Either way will work, sending
them the link to https://jackspotpourri.blogspot.com, or
clicking on the envelope at the bottom of this posting, but I
recommend sending them the link.
Again, I urge you to forward
this posting to anyone you think might benefit from reading it.
JL
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