Two quick notes: (1) The 22nd Eric Williams Memorial Lecture that honors the founding father of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago takes place March 26 at the University of Texas and features Danez Smith on “Prose Poetry as Rebellion”. (2) The third posting of my current series on Jamaica has been put back to April.
This year I mounted my strongest resistance to Daylight Saving Time. My resistance was complex and experimental, a journey across inner landscapes, though accompanied by changes impinging on me. To start with, authoritative people at the same time were helping adjust their readers and listeners to new worldviews. The juxtaposition between my tilting at windmills and their grip on redeeming Earth shrieked of absurdity.
I was reading about Sara Zewde [Zow-dee]. an Ethiopian-American landscape architect, commissioned to redesign a neglected eight acres at Dia Beacon, a museum in a recycled paper plant in the Hudson River Valley National Heritage Area. Zewde merges cross-currents of history and culture, environment and the pleasures people find from walking outside
across landscapes reimagined while under restoration from ravaging by the Industrial Revolution.
I was also a couple days past my granddaughter Wyatt’s birthday. My sculptor wife Mary Lee was hanging our family photos taken years ago by retired Popular Photo Editor Richard F. Busch when we lived in Miami and our own daughters were pre-teens. Wy told her grandma that at 21 she is happy. So am I, going on 93.
My radical act
Daylight saving time (DST) will end on Sunday, Nov. 3, at 2 a.m., while local time won’t pick up again until Sunday, March 9, 2025, as a link at Quora explained.
Only Hawaii and Arizona (with the exception of the Navajo Nation) do not participate in DST. Both prefer cool weather earlier in the evening (while at least when I was a young adult the movie business also preferred darkness so people could extend winter leisure indoors). As for the Navajo Nation, it spreads across three states where for Navajos. eons measure time.
Of course my resistance to DST was the loss of an hour’s sleep from setting our clocks forward. For two or three weeks of awakening, I would feel deprived of that hour incessantly lost until I simply got over it.
In the past, I have set the clock ahead by an hour before DST kicked in. That helped, but this year I leapt forward radically.
Two days ahead of DST, I set the clock forward by two hours. That meant that before the official change in the wee hours of Sunday, instead of having to reset my clock an hour forward — sullen in deprivation imposed by legislation — I would actually set the clock backward by one hour, the same as I looked forward to when I could again “fall back” seven months later.
That meant toggling between my bedside clock and my computer clock. Tension built. The social order insisted on having its way. I avoided looking at computer time in that lower far right corner of my screen and also when I shut the computer down. (I was less troubled by DST when it pops up on my phone whenever I switch that device back on because I don’t use my phone nearly as much as the trudging mass does or the limousine-driven privileged do.)
It helps that there are millions like me, including those two states that officially resist. We are part of a different way of thinking about this. I scratch a libertarian itch.
A quixotic fight for change v. the global fight for climate action
Sara Zewde adopted the Lenape tribal rejection of “author[ship]”
over land. As The New York Times reported in an interview about her work at Dia Beacon, Lenape representatives told her that ‘in the Indigenous tradition, we name people after landscapes, we don’t name landscapes after people. We’re all just passing through.”
Gary Hilderbrand, the chair of landscape architecture at Harvard’s graduate school of design, views Dia’s choice of Zewde for the project as a conscious shift. “It is a reflection that their values as an institution simply must be updated around sustainability in every dimension and the urgency of environmental crises,” he said, “putting that on par if not exceeding” a singular artist’s imprint on the land.
I felt supported by Zewde’s vision of restorative landscapes, while that reading of Lenape resistance triggered my own radical resistance to time change, and especially by that wisdom of naming people after landscapes and not landscapes after people.
Atmospheric scientist Katharine Hayhoe once again inspired me to think big by an interview she did on the eve of this month’s Aspen Ideas Festival, where she was an opening presenter in Miami Beach. Hayhoe emphasized that to convert “denialists” to those taking climate action that it’s vital that we focus on how their action will benefit them, not take something away.
It became clear that although Hayhoe didn’t mention the Industrial Revolution, she did talk about a “world with skies that are clear and blue, cities that are bursting with nature, food and water that is enough for all, and safe places for everyone to live.”
So the bogeyman wasn’t climate action. It was civilizational upheaval that swept across Earth by its failure to account for industrial waste. I’ve referred to this in earlier postings, but now I’m gobsmacked by how we’ve been greenwashing globally for two centuries.
To live better — to realize Hayhoe’s challenge — how could it be up to anyone else but the granular each of us?
Which brings up the absurdity of my radical DST act, like some Rube Goldberg contraption, for overcoming the annoyance of DST, contrasted with Hayhoe’s infinitely greater and infinitely more absurdist civilizational context of the climate movement that Hayhoe helps lead.
Is it possible that after 200 years of denial about the planet-killing waste that our economies produce but that the world somehow still envies, that we continue to drag our feet on the denialists’ otherwise assured outcome?
