Could This Eclipse Be Foretelling Doom Or A New Age of Togetherness and Stewardship for Us and Our Planet?

A Commentary by Niagara At Large reporter/publisher Doug Draper

Posted April 7^th, 2024 on Niagara At Large

In ancient times, there were whole cultures of people who saw a solar eclipse as a sign of doom – a warning that the apocalypse was coming.

Then again, there were also many people in those times who believed the earth was flat and that the sun and every other terrestrial body they could see in the sky revolved around it.

Nevertheless, and as strange as it may seem to so many who are on the edge of their seats with excitement over the total solar eclipse that will unfold in the skies on April 8^th,  the dark minutes we will all experience this Monday afternoon when our earth’s moon completely covers the sun could be taken as a metaphor for some pretty dark and dangerous times we are now living in.

Just this March, for example, the Opinion section of the Sunday New York times devoted a who five pages to the growing possibilities (with Putin, that mad man in North Korea and others) of a nuclear war.

“The risk of nuclear conflict is rising,” begins one of the articles written by the New York Times’ veteran foreign policy reporter W.J. Hennigan. “Nuclear nations are building up their arsenals, speeding toward the next arms race” with weapons, he says, that are “magnitudes more deadly, than the bombs that destroyed two Japanese cities, killing tens-of-thousands of civilians, in 1945.

Then there is the climate crisis which some of the most eminent scientists in the world began warning was coming more than 60 years ago. Yet many of our political records remained comatose to the threat and now we are suffering through the destruction and gargantuan costs of one record heat wave, flood, hurricane, drought and wildfire after another with all of the attendant threats to our health, to property, to food supplies, to wildlife and so much more that comes with them.

Just this March, majority of our Niagara Regional Councillors said no to a motion that would ask Ontario’s premier to stop subsidizing the construction of more pipelines delivering carbon-emitting fossil fuels to new homes because – even after all these decades of warning – that would be “too sudden” or “moving “too fast.” It might make housing less affordable, some of them said.

Good God, how many more of these record-breaking, climate-related episodes that are wreaking havoc on home insurance premiums and costing us billions upon billions more each year do we have to suffer through before we aren’t moving “too fast” to address this crisis?

So I don’t think it is all that crazy for at least some of us to view this April 8^th solar eclipse as something that is at least a little foreboding – as a sign of possible doom.

Music lover that I am, I often attach certain songs to key events in our lives and for this eclipse I could not help but thing of “Dark Side of the Moon” from Pink Floyd’s classic 1973 album by the same name which, by the way, also includes an equally foreboding song called “Eclipse.”

You can hear the song, which swells up over about  half a minute from complete silence, and watch the dramatic video that goes with it by clicking on the screen below –

But enough with the doom and gloom.

There are also many of us who are are greeting this solar eclipse as chance for all of us to finally gather together – after all the lonely and isolated times we went through the with pandemic – and and experience something that awesome and excitement and might make us think a lot more about how miraculous, precious and fragile our earth is in a universe with a sun more than 149 million kilometers away.

Tyler  Nordgren, a professional astronomer and artist, put it this way in an excellent column titled “What our souls can see in an eclipse’s Darkness, that ran this past April 6^th in The Globe and Mail newspaper – “When we open ourselves to the experiences that generate awe, be it the first time standing on the rim at Niagara Falls, or in the shadow of the moon, or on April 8, both simultaneously, we open ourselves to one another on an emotional level that is the first step in being better neighbours, better global citizens and, perhaps, better stewards of this world we share together.”

As we experience this once-in-a-lifetime wonder unfolding  in the skies above Niagara, let us all hope that the good astronomer is right.

• Doug Draper, Niagara At Large

A Quick P.S.- Here is another song that came to my mind for the occasion. It is a strange little tune that was a big hit for a British singer named Jonathan King in the mid-1960s. It is called “Everyone’s Gone to the Moon” and although I never quite understood what all the words meant, they always intrigued me. To watch it, click on the screen immediately below –

 

Here is Tyler Nordgren’s whole Globe and Mail column – https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-what-our-souls-can-see-in-an-eclipses-darkness/

To watch a short NASA youtube presentation on the solar eclipse, click on – 2024 Total Solar Eclipse: Through the Eyes of NASA (Official Trailer) (youtube.com)

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