Wonders of the night sky
The reason for the loss of even passable night skies is shown in the aerial photograph of Chicago (2 September). Well above ground level we still see – directly – the lamps of street lights, as we do over any other town or city. Why? Surely the lamps themselves should be invisible from above street level.
This indicates that neither society nor its leaders are interested in saving power or money. Rather, they use lighting as an ostentatious display to prove that, like the peacock’s gaudy, impractical plumage, they have more than enough power and money to waste.
Remember that if the lights had downward directing shades, all the horizontally and upwardly wasted light would illuminate the road. Thus only 30% of the power would achieve the same result. In my local municipality, when I pointed out the hundreds of thousands of dollars that would be saved, the clerk’s response was, “Chicken feed”.
When a contractor said that each shield would cost just $5 and be repaid within one year, he was fobbed off with a flippant remark about health and safety. This disinterest is a global problem. Power and money only accentuate it.
Sam Nejad
Geraldton, Western Australia
• Your piece entitled Our vanishing celestial wonder really struck a chord. Like so many other people I live in a city (Sydney) and normally see few stars – can still pick out Orion and the southern Cross – but I have also lived in the country and spent holidays camping in the Australian Outback. Away from city lights the quantity of stars is indeed amazing.
But I have a special recollection of one camp site, in the Keep River National Park, which not only was so remote from other habitation that there was no light pollution there at all, but the site itself had no outdoor lighting.
I still remember, more than 20 years later, seeing the Milky Way stretching from one horizon to the other. There are some marvellous things that city people miss out on.
Jeanette Knox
Sydney, Australia
Benefits of urban agriculture
Urban and peri-urban agriculture (UPA) have a key role to play in feeding our towns and cities, not only in Oklahoma but throughout the world (2 September). There is currently a worldwide migration from the rural to the urban sector and by 2050 70% of people will be urbanites, compared with 50% at the moment. UPA will be an invaluable help in feeding this burgeoning population while, at the same time, extracting carbon dioxide from the air and replacing it with oxygen.
UPA is also a productive way of recycling the cities’ solid and liquid wastes into irrigation water and fertiliser. Vitamin and mineral deficiencies can be alleviated in the diets of malnourished people and societies can be enriched through bringing people together for productive endeavours in cooperating groups. The creation of organopónicos helped many Cubans to endure the period after the collapse of the USSR, and they continue to do so today.
UPA can be an especially useful tool in helping to achieve the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals if it is included at the outset of urban planning, not only in Tulsa but in towns and cities around the planet.
Brian Sims
Bedford, UK
• Amy Lieberman’s Oklahoma diary reminded me of my good fortune to visit Havana, Cuba, five years ago. Despite 60 years of draconian economic sanctions by the US and its allies, I found Cuba to be a self-sufficient nation with self-confidence and a healthy lifestyle.
Nobody was starving in Havana, thanks to the proliferation of kitchen gardens. I was told that 60% of food items like vegetables, chicken, pork and other necessities were grown by city dwellers in their own backyards. Cuban authorities encouraged such a course of action to escape starvation by its people. In poor communities in the US, starvation is caused by people’s ignorance about growing their own food and their lack of knowledge about how to cook it. If these two problems can be solved by education and training, starvation can be eliminated in poor communities in the US.
Bill Mathew
Melbourne, Australia
Dangers of going online
Steven Poole’s thoughtful essay, Does it matter if Google is rewiring our minds (26 August), triggered multiple synapses. It reinforced my visceral dislike of the online universe, which I visit only when I must. I fiercely resist its colonising of all aspects of our lives, and despair over the ecocidal costs it externalises on to the Earth, whose wellbeing is inextricable from our own. I don’t know if this makes me a Luddite or a canary in the mine.
David Abrams, in his splendid book The Spell of the Sensuous, asks how we have become so estranged from non-humankind that our discourse is unquestioningly predicated on enslaving the biosphere. He postulates that it was the development of the written word that first sundered us from reciprocity and kinship with “the wild and multiplicitous other”.
In allowing technology to rewire our experience, we’re not just further selling our souls, but turning our backs on an ecological wisdom essential to our survival. All of us – microscopic diatoms, great whales, Huon pines, sea eagles – arose from stardust. We are the trees breathing, the rocks dancing. And as the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh says, “What we need in our time is to hear within us the sounds of the earth crying”.
Annie March
West Hobart, Tasmania, Australia
We need more big ideas
Will Hutton is correct when he makes the point that France would be defenceless before a fictional Abbes (novelist Michel Houellebecq’s Islamic president) who has purpose and mission (26 August). The whole western world is in the same state.
One of the big drivers of this phenomenon is our current lack of any big ideas in political debate. We have narrowed our policy ambitions to what we consider politically possible. For instance, in our fight against obesity, we know what would have a real impact: plain packaging and a total ban on advertising for all products that contain more than the adult daily recommendation in a single serving, plus a steadily increasing tax on all sugar; but we settle for a campaign to tax sugary drinks because it is seen as (perhaps) politically achievable. Ironically this narrow goal is then rebutted by soft drink manufacturers as unlikely to have a meaningful impact on levels of obesity.
Big ideas in the past have inspired us politically: witness the rebuilding of the UK housing stock after the world wars. We need big ideas to inspire us again, otherwise we fall prey to simplistic ideas, and worse still, shallow personal charisma.
Dave Read
Wairoa, New Zealand
Crime of cultural destruction
Simon Jenkins raises the question of whether the destruction of cultural artefacts should be a crime on a level equivalent to the destruction of life (2 September). A fundamental difference is, moral questions apart, while killing destroys irreplaceably, an inanimate object is, by its nature, reproducible, and is hence replaceable, however difficult that may be.
Exceptions can be recognised, as where the complete form of the original is lost. In the case of architecture, preservation of the plan makes it effectively indestructible. For a manuscript, a back-up is needed. The reproduction of artworks is endlessly debatable: while technology inexorably improves, reproduction becomes ever more difficult.
The capability of maintaining ever-increasing quantities of data leads to the preservation of everything inanimate, but destruction of life remains the ultimate unique crime.
Jack Palmer
Canberra, Australia
Briefly
• Of course it is sad that people have drowned (2 September), but perhaps the health and safety mania that has swept across our nations has met its ad absurdum moment: the sea. Although one would think traditional depictions of it as immense, abyssal, freezing, violent and storm-wracked would suffice, there is still a lack of floating, waterproof warning signs, and even the use of fluoro bathing attire is powerless against it.
Perhaps Poseidon didn’t get the memo?
Chris Brausch
Thames, New Zealand
• Decades ago, I was fined by Toronto police for wearing an Indian cotton shift to swim at what is now a “clothing optional” beach (2 September). So if I should go to the shore at Nice wearing sensible protection from the sun, will I be harassed again? Of course not: I’m white.
Donna Samoyloff
Toronto, Canada
• I’ve just read in the 2 September issue the article: ‘Trending’ toward chaos? All I can say is that I am glad that I have my nose in the Guardian Weekly for my news and not Facebook. Honestly, with all that is going on in our world today do we really need to know about a man masturbating with a McDonald’s chicken sandwich? To the man, and Facebook I say, “Get a life!” And maybe a Big Mac would have been more pleasurable.
Doreen Forney
Pownal, Vermont, US
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