This morning, while it is snowing outside here in New Jersey. When you come downstairs, you are greeted by this happy tree, before it is overhung with decorations. Just lights and the greenery. Nice!
Anybody that has read Tove Jansson's books about the Moomin Trolls knows that she has a special relationship to the sea. The book Moominpappa at Sea ('Pappan och havet' in Swedish) takes place during a summer at a lighthouse far out in the archipelago on a little island, remote, scary, and beautiful. Lighthouses are amazing buildings, sturdy by design, but isolated and lonely. To get up to the action, the light, you have to step and step and step upwards through dark stairs, like a tunnel through a mountain. The last night in Costa Rica I went up on the hotel roof, on the 5th floor, and looked out into the Central Valley around the city of San Jose. It was so black, and with little dots of lights here and there.
Maybe not, it depends on where you live. And soon you might not see many stars in most places, due to light pollution. There is a great article about this on Design Observer: Starry Night. The most stars I have seen recently were in Costa Rica. It is amazing to think that all those thousands of stars are here in New Jersey too, but we flood them out with lights. Our township, for example, have parking lights on at the highschool even in the evening when nobody is there. Neighbors sleep with floodlights on. Princeton glows with a pink haze some nights. Imagine how many northern lights are being missed because of our electricity obsession. Most of those lights are just wasted electron movements created by coal, oil, gas, or nuclear power. The article is great, and a good read, so take a look and check out the maps too (Europe included).
We are losing daylight quickly now, and today is the first day with "wintertime". The sun is fading so the clock is turned back to it´s real position for half a year. Now the sun is passing south every noon, not one o´clock.
But light is fading, as you can see in this scheme over sunrise and sunset in Södertälje the coming week. Minus 30 min. But it´s only two months til it turns and daylight becomes longer again.
(A Fresnel lens is a special type of lens developed by A-J Fresnel for
lighthouses)
But what surprised me most was that they must have employed some real biologists to work on the movie (see article here). Animals, fungi, and plants were based on shapes and forms that exist on Earth, just in new compositions, combinations, and colors. Take a spiral algae from the ocean and put it on a tree branch in the rain forest. Aquatic hydra colonies are becoming branched fungi. Animals are still vertebrates, but are hexapods instead of tetrapods.
Everything is connected, like a large Gaia, and luminous, like feelings and neurons showing of light. Of course, as a botanist, I can't help think about what they didn't change. Tree trunks and branches are the same, fern leaves and palm stems are just like on Earth - someone needs to do some biometric studies to see if this is likely (especially since humans can't breath the air, but everything else can). But I think it is more a fact of that it is easy to create large masses of green with palm and fern leaves, they are so easily fractalized and scaled up or down.
Seeds that swim like fluorescent jellyfishes in the air - gorgeous!
Of course there was lots of violent action, bad people vs. good people, story lines from Fern Gully, Pocahontas, Save the Earth, Greenpeace, the Iraq War crazy president we finally got rid off, and grassroot heroes. But the real take-home message was: Life is beautiful. That Sigourney Weaver is a botanist is just mentioned once ('she is famous, she write THE flora of Pandora"), but science and biodiversity is portrayed in an unusually accurate way. You can read more about this aspect in this great article in New York Times. (And here is a kind-of-stupid article as a contrast.)
