the abbreviated reign of “neon” leon spinks

OOPS 36
caused by natural climate variations. With luck and continued vigilance,
the planet’s self-infl icted wound may be healed a century from now. But
things may get worse before they get better.
“In the first 25 years of the ultraviolet century [1970–2070], perhaps
1 to 2 million excess cases of skin cancer derived from stratospheric
ozone loss,” wrote McNeill in Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental
History of the 20th Century. “That translated into about 10,000 to
20,000 early deaths, mainly among fair-skinned people in sunny lands
such as Australia. . . . No one knows the full effect of excess UV radiation
on immune response, so the real impacts of CFCs’ erosion of the ozone
layer on human health (let alone the rest of the biosphere) remain entirely
unclear. But stratospheric ozone depletion—another combination of bad
luck and Midgley’s ingenuity—will surely kill many thousands more before
the close of the ultraviolet century.”
Midgley’s own death came at age fi fty-five, after a long, diffi cult
struggle with polio. His inventiveness was apparent even during that ordeal
when he devised a complex pulley- and-harness lifting mechanism to help
himself get into and out of bed without assistance. Sadly, Midgley’s wife
found her husband’s lifeless body tangled in that device on November 2,
1944. “The newspapers reported Midgley’s demise as a freakish accident,
but the friends and family who had witnessed his recent suffering knew better,”
wrote Cagin and Dray in Between Earth and Sky. “Columbus cemetery
rec ords list ‘Suicide by strangulation’ as the official cause of death.”
At Midgley’s funeral service, the minister noted that we all enter
and leave this world with nothing. Kettering later told a colleague that
he’d wanted to interrupt the minister to say, “In Midge’s case, it would
have been so appropriate to have added, ‘But we can leave a lot behind for
the good of the world.’ ” Indeed, the Detroit section of the American
Chemical Society has, since 1965, bestowed the Thomas Midgley Award
to honor “outstanding research contributions in the field of chemistry related
to the automotive industry.” But Midgley’s most enduring legacy
may be a better understanding that the planet’s ecosystem is far more