“The fear of loss is a path to the dark side.” — Yoda
Thanks for that bit of wisdom, Star Wars, because we Earthlings could use it: On Sunday, with the exception of Hawaii, Arizona (and, presumably, the 7 most habitable planets of the Force-using orders of the Jedi and Sith), we’ll lose an hour to Daylight Savings Time. Dubbed “Summer Time” if you’re British, this is the less fun one, when we wake up groggy — surprised by how much worse we feel with just 60 fewer minutes of sleep.
On the bright side (hardy har), it also means the dark side of winter is behind us, and Earth itself will be a little happier thanks to this UV jubilee. DST trims the entire country’s electricity usage by a small fraction: 0.5 percent per day, or 1.3 trillion watt-hours in total. That’s enough to power 100,000 households for a year.
It also means that until November, gardeners with day jobs can hit their beds before bed. Or air out their corpse flowers to perfume the neighborhood with rotting flesh.
If you’re looking to breathe yummier air, though, this mind-splintering statistic might make you want to plant some plants pronto:
“In 2019 the world lost the equivalent of 30 soccer fields of forest cover every minute, due to agricultural expansion, logging and fires, according to The Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF).”
Heed the trees!
That math doesn’t include the inferno the West Coast endured in 2020, which is why we’ll need more than a few saplings to reverse global warming. If we want reforestation to sweep away our carbon footprint, nurseries need to double their seedling production to at least three billion a year. Suddenly, those buy-one-get-one-tree deals, in which a company promises to plant a tree for every bottle of beer you buy, start to sound more like a good night out than an environmental solution.
If only we could clone full-size California redwoods. Advanced laser scanning has found that the trees have 30 percent more mass and hold more C02 than we ever imagined. The lasers replaced tape measures, which are painfully analog but still have their place: families in Michigan are using them in a competition to find the biggest tree in the state (a ploy to ward off cabin fever and encourage literal tree hugging).
Size doesn’t matter to ravenous squirrels that will scale the nearest branch to eat pizza in peace.
If the infamous pizza rats of NYC pick up on the trend, the redwoods might end up covered in red sauce.
Slice ‘za not trees,
Aerate
