Why Darkness Matters Pdf
Yrko Philogene
That is why it matters who is there. It matters who we seek out when we are curious about something. It matters what night sky they look at and where they are looking at it from and it matters what barriers they experience to viewing it at all. Europeans have written Greek stories on top of the constellations, just like they mapped Euclidean squares onto a curved land, but we all had our own ways of understanding our relationship to the stars just as we have our own ways of understanding our relationships with each other. We exist in the spaces between: the space between earth and the sky that would crush us and the spaces between us as people.
We think of creation as something that happened. Something that took place a long time ago and we\u2019re not really sure what happened. Big bang, big thoughts. Six days of work and then it\u2019s Miller time. But creation is ongoing and we participate in it. One of the really neat things that Tyson Yunkaporta notes in his book Sand Talk is that \u201Cthere is no valid way to separate the natural from the synthetic (p151).\u201D He\u2019s talking about cell phones and he makes a good point. Everything we call synthetic is made from something that came out of the earth. It\u2019s reconfigured and processed but so is the leather I use to make moccasins. Our languages evolve to incorporate these new things just like they evolved before to incorporate other ideas. Creation is an ongoing process.
Yunkaporta is a member of the Apalech clan, an Indigenous tribal group in what is currently northern Queensland, Australia. In the creation story that he shares in his book, before creation space was solid and it sat upon the earth a heavy thing that crushed everything that tried to come into existence. My friend Vicki who is Maori told us a similar story, that the sky needed to be pushed up and into where it is now so that life could come into being. This ancient story about space having weight reveals, to Yunkaporta anyway, that his ancestors had an understanding of dark matter. And that made me think about Chanda Prescod-Weinstein\u2019s book The Disordered Cosmos because she is a physicist who studies particles and the cosmos and she also writes about dark matter. And one of the things that she wrote about is the expanding universe. The weight of space is still being pushed away from us. The Apalech and the Maori understood that too.
The way that western science, and indeed western knowledge, is organized and collated is the result of some very particular historic events. Europeans went out in a rush of violence and conquest and in addition to gold and tomatoes they brought back knowledge and they fit that knowledge into their own systems, disconnecting it from the places where it had emerged and the people who had developed it. Prescod-Weinstein also note that their understanding of how things worked had to be consistent with justifying their \u201Cabominable behaviour (p100).\u201D So when universities talk about diversity they are generally talking about the untapped resources of that people represent, not other ways of knowing or understanding the world. Yunkaporta talks about diversity differently, he talks about maintaining individual difference as a way of counteracting the narcissism that so easily overtakes us. The narcissism that Prescod-Weinstein describes in the Enlightenment era thinkers who laid the foundations for the way that we develop and maintain knowledge systems today.
She uses the example of Euclidian geometry to describe these foundations. In small spaces Euclidean geometry works beautifully and the rules keep everything contained in predictable shapes. But we live on a sphere beneath a curved sky and if your GPS relied on Euclidean geometry, you\u2019d get nowhere fast. We are told that, like linear time, these angles lines are intuitive but they aren\u2019t. Not all societies developed linear time and straight lines, which doesn\u2019t mean they don\u2019t know how to use them they just know better than to rely on them exclusively while living on a sphere that spins and orbits within a solar system and a galaxy that are in constant motion. Even Facebook understands cyclical time, it is constantly reminding me what I was angry about the last time the planet rushed past this part of the solar system. I read that bit about Euclidean geometry in her book and thought about the ways that early colonists and settlers mapped squares onto Indian territory, turning our lands into farms and pinning everyone down so they couldn\u2019t move. Yunkaporta notes that when they tried that in the Bible God smashed the tower of Babel and sent everyone traveling again because societies that live in relationship with the land instead of their egos tend to be more mobile.
To return to dark matter. Prescod-Weinstein, whose field of research is dark matter, writes that it isn\u2019t dark and it might not even be real. It\u2019s a theoretical explanation for why some parts of the universe act the way that they do. In trying to figure out why stars and galaxies act the way they do there appeared to be something missing from their observations, something they couldn\u2019t see and so back in 1906 Henri Poincar\u00E9 coined the phrase mati\u00E8re obscure, dark matter, and the name stuck. She would rather it be called invisible or transparent matter, because as a society our associations with the dark are not exactly stellar. Darkness, whether we\u2019re talking about an abundance of melanin or an absence of light, is suspect. People don\u2019t like it in their suburban neighbourhoods and they don\u2019t like it in space.
That speaks to the problem with how knowledge is collected and maintained, with how gatekeeping works to include some and exclude others from the places where thinking happens. The valuing of some relationships and the devaluing of others. Because it isn\u2019t that knowledge development lacks relationship, it\u2019s that it only values certain kinds of relationship that can be quantified in certain kinds of ways. Yunkaporta wrote his book by walking song-lines and yarning and carving things and it appears to have taken a long time. His citations are hardly APA format, something I\u2019m sadly familiar with as I work through my own book, and his style reminded me of the vast unknowing of particle physics and the cosmos. All those scientists with their different theories yarning along the songlines that connect quarks and galaxies and somehow in that space between them finding answers, or maybe just asking different questions.
Materials
Three traffic cones
1 copy of the pictures you will use under the traffic cones: 1 milky way, 1 deer, 1 picture of the ocean at night, and 2 small pictures of cities at night
Printed pictures of the sea turtle, bird and mountain lion (they can be used as visuals or 1 can be given to each student as they pretend to be that animal)
Background for Teachers
Just as food, water, shelter and space are essential for animal survival, darkness also matters. Some animals need darkness to hunt prey or forage. Breeding and nesting must be done in the dark for some species. And some animals migrate using the stars to guide them and tell them when it is time to travel.
Animals need a day and night cycle for their survival. Hundreds of thousands of years of dark skies have led animals to utilize darkness for migration, reproduction, foraging and safety. Recently humans have lit up the night. In the last century we have significantly altered the nighttime environment with electrical outdoor lighting. Unfortunately, this can confuse animals and sometimes jeopardize their survival.
In this activity you can use three animals to demonstrate different ways animals are adversely affected by light pollution. Students will learn the importance of darkness for reproduction, migration, and hunting.
Examples:
1) Sea turtles live in the ocean but hatch at night on the beach. Hatchlings find the sea by detecting the bright horizon over the ocean. Artificial lights draw them away from the ocean. They can only stay on land for about 4 hours during the night but once the sun comes up they have a much greater chance of dying. If they follow the wrong light they quickly overheat from the sun or can be caught by predators like birds and crabs. Millions of hatchlings die this way every year.
2) Many birds migrate or hunt at night and navigate by moonlight and starlight. Artificial light at night can cause birds to wander off course. Birds often die by colliding with needlessly illuminated buildings and towers. Birds also get stuck and confused in city lights, using energy resources wandering around aimlessly. Migratory birds also depend on cues from properly timed seasonal schedules. Artificial light at night can cause birds to migrate too early or too late and miss ideal climate conditions for nesting, foraging and other behaviors.
3) Predators such as mountain lion are primarily nocturnal and hunt under the cover of night. They have an advantage by seeing over a greater area, and their prey must seek darkness and spend time hiding. Lighting changes the predator/prey relationship. The prey has less time to use for normal activities, while the preda-tor has a smaller range to hunt in, avoiding the bright lights of the city.