Earth Hour on Earth Day?

Earth Day, which is today, should by definition have 24 earth hours. But as it happens, Earth Hour has already been celebrated in 2017 on March 25. We missed it. And the reason for that is the confusion between the hour and the day. Those two words represent quite different environmental festivals.

During Earth Hour, which extends from 8:30 to 9:30 pm, all unessential lights must be turned off. The festival began in Australia and was first celebrated on March 31, 2007, a Saturday. Since then  Earth Hour is usually on the last Saturday of March. Our first celebration was on March 29, 2008—and we remember it distinctly—the first global celebration, on that day from 8 to 9 pm local time. The day and year was vague in our minds and took a fair amount of research to pin-point—but we were there, at our dining room table, a single candle separating us and doing is feeble best to contribute its carbon dioxide to Global Warming. That evening television brought coverage of lights going out at 8 local time as darkness covered the planet. And the feeling of unity across the earth was almost palpable.

Earth Day, by contrast, is celebrated on April 22. The first year was 1970. These days 193 countries across the planet celebrate the day under the coordination of the Earth Day Network.

Having missed the Earth Hour on March 29, we intend to celebrate it tonight at our house. Lights out at 8:30. We will endure an hour in darkness before rushing back to CNN and MSNBC to see what monstrosities DJT has managed in that hour of darkness: the Invasion of Tibet, perhaps, or the repeal of the U.S. Constitution by next Wednesday? One has to know these things in advance, you know.

Earth Day Rumination

Holidays fascinate me, particularly in the context of cultural cycles. To be sure, the existence of cultural cycles is debatable. Some who study history perceive them, others do not. Both those who do and those who don’t must ignore important regions of fact in order to become didactic in their assertions. Still, poetically speaking, I see real cultural cycles, and in that sense holidays fascinate me. The seasons have their celebrations. In religious, inward-looking cultural periods, these have a transcendental focus; in secular times a material.

This year Earth Day occurs two days before Easter Sunday and coincides with the darkest day of the Christian cycle, Good Friday. Some believers who haven’t had time to think about this might rashly conclude that Earth Day is a kind of modernist affront. Yes, each culture has its holidays, but as best as I can determine, and I have the time for such things now, no offence was intended when Senator Gaylord Nelson launched Earth Day at a teach-in on April 22, 1970.

The two dates, as it happens, rarely coincide. In 1970 Easter Sunday came on March 29, hence a conscious alignment of the two isn’t credible. These days we observe the Gregorian Easter, based on a calculation. It bounds the dates of that holiday between March 22 and April 25. In the period 1875 through 2124, Easter falls most frequently (11 times) on April 10 and April 17. In this entire period, Easter on April 24 will take place this year and again in 2095, one of the least frequent dates. This link provides all the years.

The date of Easter is, roughly, based on a lunar calendar and falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon that appears after the vernal equinox. The differences, which give rise to complex calculations, are that the full moon is not what you actually see but the 14th day of lunar month. The other is that, in this dating system, the vernal equinox is assumed to fall on March 21. In nature it might occur on March 19 or 20 as well. True to form, our age has produced a wondrous mathematical computation for this date. Here are the equations for the month and the day:

month = floor (h + L − 7m + 114) / 31
day = ((h + L − 7m + 114) mod 31) + 1

How the variables h and L and m are calculated—and more, much more—is shown here for those who are likely to enjoy the indescribable delights of mathematical juggling.

The odd thing is that the event actually celebrated at Easter, Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection, took place at the time of mass celebrations of the Passover—and were part of the social dynamics of that celebration. That celebration, it so happens, has no seasonal meaning. It marks the beginning of the Jews’ successful escape from Egypt which, based on the date of Passover, took place on the fifteenth day of Nisan, a month that falls into the March-April period.

“Deep, one might say infinitely deep, is the well of the past.” Thomas Mann in Joseph and His Brothers.