Saturday, February 21, 2015

On not losing the sky


On Friday, before the weekend snow storm started blowing in, I went with a friend to the Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge, where I’d never been. To tell the truth, I’ve never felt drawn to this place, despite its handy proximity to Denver (and to a slightly lesser extent, to Boulder) and its reputation as home to a range of wildlife. My strongest association to the arsenal comes from my childhood, when I remember it as a sort of mysterious place where important wartime activities occurred—though I never knew what sort of activities those were. Then I remember a period when they were pumping waste into the ground, and Denver suddenly experienced a rash of small earthquakes. My mom told a humorous story of being in a sort of … um … compromised sitting position and getting, in her words, “jostled” from her throne by one of those small tremors. The next thing I recall was the plan to clean up the arsenal, and then tales of eagles and deer making a home there, along with other winged and four-footed creatures.


When my friend suggested a trip to RMA NWF, I was more than willing because I’ve been hankering to get outside, having been cooped up by my lingering orthopedic miseries. My friend, with whom I’ve walked many, many miles over the years, was game to make it a mostly-driving and light-walking outing, so off we went. Sure enough, we saw flocks of assorted species of ducks on the lakes, lots of red-tailed hawks, a couple of harriers, a slew of magpies, a kestrel, many mule deer and a few white-tail deer – and other stuff I’m not recalling now. We also heard a lot of meadowlarks, whose lovely liquid song always signals the arrival of spring for me. Every year, my heart smiles the first time I hear it, even as I realize I’d forgotten to notice its absence over the winter.


But maybe best of all, we saw a blue, prairie-wide sky, saw sky and clouds reflected off of lakes, felt the breeze in our faces and watched it in the grasses and cattails. I hadn’t realized just how much I’ve been missing the wonderful, complicated Colorado sky. I’ve written here before about how much I love this sky, and this blog is splattered with sky pictures in assorted hues. Still, like the meadowlark’s song, I hadn’t realized how much I missed it until it was there, above and all around me.

Then, serendipitously, today’s New York Times carried an article called “What If We Lost the Sky?” This article was prompted by a recent report by the National Research Council exploring the possibility of “geoengineering,” artificially changing Earth’s climate—especially techniques for cooling the climate through artificial means. Among these would be introducing aerosols into the sky to reflect back some of the sun's radiation and thereby reduce the incoming heat—a strategy that might turn the sky white. The idea of fixing through human intervention what we’ve broken by human intervention carries a whole host of promising and frightening implications, which I’ll save for another time. But the title of this article really caught my attention, took me back to Friday’s excursion and then to many other days and nights beneath gorgeous skies.

What if … ?

Although some folks might turn immediately to practical questions prompted by the notion of messing with the sky (what would that do to agriculture?), I was especially struck by a different question raised by this article: the question of awe. It turns out that some folks have studied the importance of awe in our lives, that sense of feeling connected to something much larger than ourselves, of being a (small) part of the vast cosmos. It seems that this experience of awe is especially evoked by the sky—in fact, a clear starry night sky, the Milky Way arrayed overhead, is sort of the prototypic source of that feeling. Awe may also come in moments viewing the ocean, the Grand Canyon, the open rolling prairie, the mountains, and more. But the sky seems to be the premier source of awe.

Maybe this is what I’ve been missing, I thought. Not only the fresh air and scenery and the wide sky, but that sense of vastness, with me tiny in its presence. Interestingly, this research has also shown that the feeling of awe may be an antidote to egocentrism, may form a foundation for our connection to others and our commitment to our collective well-being. Hmm. Maybe I’ve been short on that, too.

So, it seems that the clear recommendation for our individual mental health and the collective good is simple: spend some with the sky. If you’re interested in taking on this project, you can warm up to the task by watching a short video embedded in this article, which shows 365 days of hour-by-hour videos of the sky over San Francisco. Nice. Nice music, too.



© Janis Bohan, 2010-2015. Use of this content is welcome with attribution and a link to the post.

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