| Author(s): silverlocke
Date: 13 April 08 C8. Get up an hour before dawn and watch the sunrise. Engage in a creative piece of art, music, or writing that captures the experience. It is no hardship for me to meet the dawn--it's an old, old friend. I work nights and stay up until early the next morning on my nights off. When planning this project I checked sunrise/sunset times on an NOAA weather page ((7:02 AM for 12 April) to ensure I would arrive at my location on time. And since it was a chilly morning with the temperature in the 40s, pulled on a light jacket before heading to the car. The car was necessary because I live in the urban jungle around the huge Dallas/Fort Worth Airport and thus normally don't see the sun until it rises up far enough to clear the buildings around my apartment complex. But the airport is only a couple of miles from me and, more to the point, is on a slight elevation compared to the surrounding area. My destination was not the airport, but one of the two golf courses owned and operated by the Hyatt-Regency--the East course--which I had played a couple of times in the past. Apropos of nothing whatsoever, it's one of the hardest courses in Texas. I parked my car in the darkened lot and although it perhaps comes as a surprise to non-golfers, it was not that easy to find a space. Many golfers who prefer to start this early tee off the instant there is enough visibility to follow their ball and some don't even wait that long! I walked out to a point far out on the course where there is an area set up for restrooms, water fountains, and includes a couple of benches which are (relatively) immune from bad golf shots and sat down on an Eastward-facing bench which looks over the airport. I was a few minutes early, but already it was light enough that I could hear golfers behind me starting to tee off. The area around an airport is never really quiet, but those in proximity learn to develop something of a jet engine rejection filter. During the day there are multiple take offs and landings without any gaps of even a few minutes, whereas after midnight the frequency of flights is greatly reduced. And the rush hour traffic on the adjacent main road had not shifted into full gear yet. Thus I could hear the night birds sleepily chirping as they looked for their roosts and the day birds complaining about their upcoming shift.  I spared a couple of minutes to think about my fellow Winds team members. I had half-heartedly tried to arrange for us to all watch the sun come up from our respective homes and all write about the experience, but we just could not manage that much synchronicity. So I visualized each of them watching the sunrise as I was watching and I felt closer to them.
| It was slightly misty and there was a cold dew which rose off the ground in layers of tendrils. Thus, the golden-red colors that slowly appeared in the East as the sun rose made the sky appear a smudged canvas--like the background to a pointillist or impressionistic painting.  But I was here to contemplate the meaning of Earth Day from the micro to the macro and draw some conclusions if possible. Back when golf was invented by bored Scottish shepherds, the droppings of the sheep were sometimes used for fuel, although peat was more convenient. Their golf balls were tightly wrapped feathers and their clubs their shepards crooks or crudely shaped tree branches and roots. They had no need to fly to the course since it was already in their backyard. In other words, there was nothing synthetic or un-natural in any of their actions nor did they affect their environment at all as they didn't build golf courses, but played the natural contours of their environment and, at worst, might have dug a small hole or two along the way or built up a pile of sand to use as a tee. Flash forward to the golf course alongside one of the largest hotels in the world alongside one of the largest airports in the world and there is just no way to start calculating the mangling of the environment and the energy use just for a typical day is nearly beyond comprehension. Electric golf carts and mowing machines and sprinklers and power for the huge clubhouse and the huge hotel and let us not even start on the airport. Just take the energy cost and pollution from a single average-sized airplane and multiply by about 2000--I looked that figure up--it's the average number of flights in and out in one day. The question then becomes, what price progress? If we decide that progress is not worth digging up the earth, polluting the environment, and raping the resources, then at what point do we stop the progress? Should we have stopped in 1000 BCE? Or 1400 CE? Or 1800? Where do we fix it in amber and say it's not worth the price to advance the economy and technology one step further? If we decide that the god progress must be worshipped, then perhaps we might conclude that the condensation--the density--that this airport and the hotel represents is actually better than 12 smaller airports and hotels scattered over a somewhat wider area. I am confident and optimistic that, given our current level of education and technology, that we can find, if not a perfect, at least a satisfactory compromise between stewardship and responsibility to future generations and reverence for the earth and its inhabitants and continue with the progress essential for growth and support of a growing population. |
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c8 (sl) |