national parks : mackenzian

It turns out there’s such a thing as too much light.

Light pollution is the feature of modern industrial life that means that 33% of the planet doesn’t see the same skies as our ancestors did. Thousands upon thousands of stars would be visible to the naked eye were it not for street lights, lit billboards, traffic lights, home lighting systems, and miscellaneous haze. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 80% of people who live in the US don’t see the Milky Way at all.

Photographer Daniel Kordan recently took some remarkable photographs of the Milky Way from the high plains of Bolivia.¹ The photo below is so clear, so bright. And the glorious swathe of light in it shows us what’s perceptible when we’re not faked out by clouds of artificial illumination.

Daniel Kordan's photo of the Milky Way. The sky is bright blue, purple, and orange. Daniel stands in shadow on a bright, reflective plain. The plain is made of white salt. — Photo credit: Daniel Kordan (Instagram | Facebook)

In the U.S., some of our national parks are just about the last refuge of darkness –- places like Yellowstone and the desert southwest,’ said co-author Dan Duriscoe of the National Park Service. ‘We’re lucky to have a lot of public land that provides a buffer from large cities.’

Light pollution does more than rob humans of the opportunity to ponder the night sky. Unnatural light can confuse or expose wildlife like insects, birds and sea turtles, often with fatal consequences.”

We live in a time with incalculable quantities of data and information. Commentators explain how the exobyte data storm overwhelms us cognitively: our brains don’t have the capacity to manage such a swamp of input.

So we use artificial constructs, frameworks, models, and increasingly powerful computing systems to help us manage the grandeur of the natural and social worlds. Our mental frameworks aren’t objectively real, but the tools and structures we build with them are, and all of them have real consequences. With these constructs, we can navigate our world in ways that would otherwise be impossible.

At the same time, there’s much we don’t get to perceive because our pre-perceptual frameworks create a fog between us and the rest of the cosmos. There’s so much we aren’t aware of and can’t grasp with our current thinking. And the little we can discern is distorted by common fluorescence.

“Look through the telescope,” we say Galileo said (though it probably didn’t happen quite like that). And in the film Enough Room at the Table, I talk about those who because of their models and beliefs cannot or will not shift to an Observe-First, Expel-Later approach to life and difference.

But it’s not quite that simple. Conflicts aren’t resolved simply because we “shift to observation.” We still use our artificial but functional constructs to perceive and interpret the observed world.

Some, meeting a Black man with locked hair, perceive a world-class musician and potential national hero. Others, encountering a man just like him, perceive an Other whose presence in their family merits theological explanation.

Sometimes it’s good to head to a metaphorical national park, to switch off our artificial lights and put our preconceptions on hold. There is a world beyond our notions, we are part of it, and we so easily forget.

It’s worth it to remember.

Thanks to Hugh Hollowell for pointing me to this photo series. [Back to text: ◄]

Photo: Four coastal redwoods viewed from the trunk up. They are in the foreground against a light blue sky with streaky clouds. — Coastal redwoods at Muir Woods National Monument, CA. Photo © Keisha E. McKenzie. All rights reserved.

If you’re ever near San Francisco, CA, take a trek north to Mill Valley. Spend a couple of hours walking around these thousand-year-old trees and see if you don’t leave the grounds with clearer lungs and a fresh perspective on time.

I brought back a bag of sequoia seeds in a can when I visited Muir Woods last spring. I planted them dutifully, watered them, stored them in the fridge, shocked them warm in their plastic greenhouse, and waited.

Two seeds sprouted. They’ve been about two inches long since November.

“What if they’re dead?” I asked last night.
“They aren’t dead,” my favorite American said. “Aren’t they still green?”
“Yes.”
“Then they’re not dead.”

Beautiful things sometimes take thousands of years to grow.

Beautiful things can also seem to spring up overnight, like the cherry blossoms I photographed on Christmas Day that arrived on the region’s trees four months early. There are reasons they bloomed out of season this year: in a complex system, all outcomes have causes, and many outcomes have several. But from where we stand, from our tiny vantage point and limited perspective, some outcomes seem wondrous.

At Muir Woods I walked among trees older than seven of my family’s generations. Some of the trees were forest fire survivors; others had survived world wars and cold war; and all of them were threatened by anthropogenic climate change—the risk of a few degrees and the loss of the cool humidity that has helped these tree guardians to thrive for so long.

We take our whole lives to grow up, but the distance between our state yesterday and our state today isn’t large enough for us to notice the difference. Our societies seem to grow even more slowly than we do, and that makes it hard to motivate substantive change.

Sometimes it feels as if our promising world is two inches tall or dead altogether, but there are still green leaves on the branches. The world is in motion, and things do change. But the process is too slow and we’re too small in the context of change to sense it. We have the ability to imagine our world regardless, to re-envision and reshape the way things are and the social world that we came, found, and sometimes take for granted.

We’re not big enough, don’t live long enough, and don’t perceive widely enough to know all causes for an outcome. Nor can we guarantee the results of what we’ve contributed or limit ahead how much time the seeds we’ve planted and nourished will take to yield results.

We can guess. We can model and project. We can hope.

Nothing about life in this quadrant of space promises us any long-term outcome no matter how anxiously we hover over what should be and isn’t yet. We’re not promised sure victory or an inevitable arc. All we’re promised, as Krishna tells Arjuna, and Steven Pressfield tells us, is the intrinsic reward of our daily work and the distance and time to grow between one state and the next.

Our job is to press for a world we’ve never had, and to inspire every generation that follows us to keep pressing until that world is real.

Beautiful things sometimes take thousands of years to grow, and the chance we have to nourish them is its own reward.

In the dark

Beautiful Things Take Time To Grow