Recently, I read a Steinbeck quote – “It’s so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone.” Sometimes the absence of something is required to identify the nature of that “something”. The meaning, as I understood it, was that we go through life with certain assumptions and don’t question them until they no longer exist – at which point we realize the true nature of the thing that is no longer present. The “You don’t know what you have until you loose it” idea. What about that same thought in the negative? What about things that are unpleasant that you’d like not to exist but assume that they always have to be present?
Albuquerque is a nexus for domestic airline flights. On days when the atmospheric conditions are right for condensation of jet exhaust at 35,000 feet, the contrails make the sky look like a sheet full of tic tac toe games. Emanating from these contrails, high altitude, icy clouds can spread over hundreds or thousands of square miles and have often made me wonder about the impacts of pumping millions of gallons of spent jet fuel into the upper atmosphere of the earth every day.
Anyone who thinks that climate change is not induced by humans needs only to contemplate these figures to realize the absurdity of the idea. How can 98 billion gallons (27,000 tanker trucks per day) of jet fuel get burned into our upper atmosphere each and every year and it not have an impact on the climate? And that’s just one source of contamination that we inflict on the air that sustains us.
Then the Covid came. Jet travel seemingly diminished to near nothing and for the first time in my adult life I was able to view the evening sky without contrails. We enjoyed a full year of clear skies unaffected by the icy exhaust trails that cluttered the sky pre-Covid. It was delightful.
Yesterday, we left the house for a hike in the Sandia mountains an saw this at about 8 a.m.
Contrails over ABQ
Yikes! They’re back, I thought. Quixotically, I wondered why we, as a society, can’t have balance in our lives. This scene does not seem to represent an “in balance” condition. Is this is an overreaction to the recent pandemic restrictions? Was it like this before? Just to put a positive spin on the whole thing….. At least we were able to see the daytime sky, as nature intended, for a year of our lives and I, for one, thoroughly enjoyed that. Maybe, somehow, contamination by jet traffic in it’s various forms will be reduced in the future by some event or technology and we can enjoy the clear daytime sky again. That, I hope.
As my wife and I discussed this yesterday on our hike, another example came up. Before Covid, the flu was a common and persistent threat to the human population. We assumed that this was inevitable and accepted the illness and death that followed. However, this flu season just didn’t happen. It never materialized. We now realize that the flu season and it’s resulting fallout are results of a choice we make as a society – not an inevitability.
why-the-flu-season-basically-disappeared-this-year
Interesting to think about how much sickness, lost productivity, hospitalization, and health care cost and overall misery could be reduced if we could just stay home when sick, distance ourselves as we move about and wear masks in confined spaces. Also interesting to think about things like ways to minimize visual and physical sky pollution. The world might be a much better place. Or we could just assume that these things are inevitable.