The Gravity of Resilience
This morning, I am flying through the darkness.
My flight path crosses North America on the day that a total eclipse occurs on the eastern side of the continent. My plane should pass near the zone of totality. I saw a partial eclipse at school when I was 11 that stunned me. A few years ago my family was lucky enough to have the zone of totality pass over our house, which was far more dramatic.
We sat on the side of a valley, with a view down the valley. As the time of the eclipse approached, we could sense a change in the air, with a wind growing in strength from the south. Looking in that direction, I could see the intense shadow of the moon flying across the landscape, dozens of miles away, headed towards us, even before our light began to weaken. The temperature dropped suddenly as the shadow reached us, as trees bent from the growing breeze as if in fear of the eclipse. We put on our protective glasses and looked up at the sun.
The moment of full totality was brief but powerful, as the coronal flames stood out in the darkness for only a few moments. We were cold, not least from the power of an event that reflected great objects in space we really didn’t understand. We all gasped, unable to talk. Nothing was familiar in the gray light so different than any “day” I had ever experienced. I could see how an eclipse could stop a war or lead to abandoning a city or a start a new religion — documented events that have all occurred following past eclipses. I was atomisticly small in a big universe.
Today’s event will be less dramatic, at least for me in a fast-moving plane, but I’ve chosen a window seat and have some eclipse watching glasses at hand just in case.
Chatter in the media and social networks about the eclipse has been speculating about the “meaning” of today, ranging from shrugged shoulders to real fear and anxiety about the state of our society and political order. For an astronomical process as old as the earth having a moon (i.e., a few billion years), the conversation seems strangely reminiscent of how I hear people discuss climate change — a series of rare, more or less random and mysterious events. An opportunity for a quick review of basic science to “explain” things on a short newscast but not really tell us what this all means.
In practice, I suspect many of us feel the awe of disruption on the moment of totality, the grandeur of gravity’s curving dance through the vastness of our solar system. And then the darkness and coronal fires disappear and we go back to … before?
An eclipse is not like climate change, unless the eclipse were to cause drifting continents to shift direction, new mountains to arise, or sea levels to leap inland overnight. Eclipses result from predictable, cyclical processes. While we know the causes of climate change, the impacts are harder to track and predict, echoing and ricocheting off of one another. Climate change — at least as far as we are concerned — is non-cyclical and directional, even if we can’t discern the path too far ahead. Eclipses are physics; climate change is history.
Yet we need meaning here too. Instead of seeing an eclipse as a byproduct of the pull of great masses of matter as they “fall” through space literally every day, we focus on a few seconds of an isolated event. Ecliptic thinking is expressed in climate change around our fears of disasters and dramatic events over the gradual shifts we constantly renormalize, like tuning out elevator music and only hearing the booming finale of the 1812 Overture. Or realizing your young son can now wear your shoes, when he has been growing all along. Or not seeing that your reservoir has been trending lower for decades.
The invisibility of gradual change — or rather our resistance to seeing it — is perhaps the most important obstacle to effective adaptation and resilience. Tools should help us re-see, to grasp the trends and changes over time. To feel the gravity that is always there. Such tools are both rare and incredibly powerful.
My life will not be different from today’s eclipse, but my work should be different because of this year’s climate. I hope yours will too.
John Matthews
Corvallis, Oregon, USA