Earth Hour 2011

This evening when I turn off the lights at 8:30 local time for Earth Hour, I'll be thinking of the people of the northeast [tohoku] of Japan enduring the triple catastrophes of major earthquake, major tsunami, and the ongoing nuclear crisis. My blackout will be voluntary and temporary; in the Tohoku region, which includes Tokyo, rolling blackouts are mandatory, likely to continue for a long time, and could well presage far worse to come.

It's sobering to consider one of the great cities of the world reduced to third-world privations and nuclear age terrors in less than an hour, sobering too to note that New Jersey derives over a third of its electricity from four nuclear generating stations of similar vintage to those at the stricken Fukushima Dai-ichi complex. They were "hardened" after 9/11, which not only suggests they were "soft" before, but also ignores questions of scope and degree. It would seem that it's only after – after levees fail, after the financial sector crashes, after the carefully calculated assumptions and omissions of the five-year or the 50-year or the 500-year risk analysis crumble – that we forego for a time the belief that it can't happen here, oh no, not in a thousand years.

Which is not to suggest I plan to waste spend my Earth Hour sitting in the dark, flagellating my conscience and bewailing the fate of humankind. Nor does a heedless Totentanz of denial make any sense to me. I have socks to knit and a crank lantern to knit them by, and that's what I plan to do for a quiet spring hour, come flood, computer bluescreens, or medieval pox.

Photos to come. Of socks, not pox, of course!

Added March 28: It occurs to me I neglected to mention that roundabout Exit 151 there indeed has been flooding, computer blues, pox, and divers and sundry other events in the weeks (!) between the last post and this one. Also not nearly as much knitting as one might hope – I missed the first round cut for Sock Madness, but continue to knit on, even during Earth Hour.



I'm knitting the first-round pattern, Supporter's Socks by Linda Pankhurst, in my own fingering spindled from Into the Whirled Superwash Blue Face Leister. The pattern and socks are worth a longer discourse, to follow ::cough:: soon. Right now I'm playing catch up... and missing Knitting and Crochet Blog Week. Ah well.