Musings: Don't fool Mother Nature with clock shifts

It's the perennial question: What to do about the twice-yearly changing of the clocks. Eight days ago, at 2 a.m., we "fell back" from daylight saving time — DST — as standard time once again resumed.

For most of us, it meant the ritual of changing the oven and microwave clocks, but in a small number of locales it did not. I never paid much attention to the exceptions, but they certainly are curious. Why shouldn't everyone have to mess around with their non-high-tech timepieces twice a year?

If you happen to be a resident of Arizona (except the Navajo Nation), Hawaii or U.S. territories, you were exempt from the time change ritual. Where did this practice of changing the clocks come from, anyway?

Some history links the notion back to the ancient Romans. It has also been reported that Benjamin Franklin thought of the idea. In 1784, Franklin supposedly wrote a letter to the Journal of Paris suggesting Parisians rise earlier to save candles, but he likely meant it lightly.

Laws were passed to save energy in both world wars: the Standard Time Act of 1918 and the War Time Act of 1942. After World War II, a patchwork of approaches to standard time and DST occurred across the country, including variations within states. The Uniform Time Act of 1966 regulated conditions across the country.

A 1974 experiment with full-time DST was repealed that October after reports of injuries and even deaths as children waited for buses or walked to school in the early-morning dark.

A 2005 law set the second Sunday in March for springing ahead and the first Sunday in November for falling back.

Seasonal time changes have real effects on how we engage in work and leisure, and they may have profound consequences for our overall health. Science has played a major role in analyzing the impacts of the clock changes. Many of those effects have to do with the disruption of our internal biological clocks, our circadian rhythms. These findings are alarming, to say the least. They include links to increases in cardiovascular disease, depression, obesity and some cancers.

Among the institutions that have studied conditions associated with the disruption of our regular biological rhythms are Stanford Medicine, Johns Hopkins University and the National Institutes of Health.

The Sunshine Protection Act, which would make DST permanent, passed the House in July but has stalled in the Senate. But much of the evidence leads to the conclusion that permanent standard time would be more beneficial to humanity.

In an old television commercial, we were cautioned, with an accompanying clap of thunder, "It's not nice to fool Mother Nature!" Maybe it's high time to heed that warning.

Victor Caliman, Kings Park