by Paul Bogard
This place gives me hope. On a weekend summer morning a constant stream of people come and go, volunteers directing traffic, rangers offering talks and advice. This place—this national park—gives me hope because of where it lies. Here in the east, not six hours from Boston, a place where for millions of people each year, the beauty and mystery of night can be brought within reach.
“Not a lot of people think to look up at night,” says Sonya Berger, an Acadia ranger. “They run around from one lit place to another lit place, flipping on artificial daytime whenever it gets dark. And then when you walk outside, usually there’s going to be a streetlight or you’re just going to walk to your car and flip your headlights on. It’s kind of like living in Phoenix where you hop from one air-conditioned place to another, and you never feel the heat—you never realize that it’s a really crazy place to live in during the summer. I think that for a lot of people that’s what happens with the night sky, too.”
In response, Berger and her fellow rangers offer a series of different programs geared to get park visitors to pay attention to the night, including Stars over Sand Beach, which on summer nights often has two hundred attendees or more. Knowing the Night, a night walk focused on sensory experiences, invites people to walk in the dark, testing their natural adaptations. It’s not something many visitors have done before, the rangers find. Berger says, “We tell them it’s okay, come with us.”
It’s a message Acadia National Park has been offering for decades, and a message the NPS as a whole is beginning to offer more and more. More than sixty national parks and monuments offer some form of night sky program, and the number continues to grow. In addition, the NPS as a whole has begun to take the conservation of darkness more seriously, adopting in 2006 a policy that seeks to “preserve, to the greatest extent possible, the natural lightscapes of parks, which are natural resources and values that exist in the absence of human-caused light.” The policy also directs individual parks to “minimize light that emanates from park facilities, and also seek the cooperation of park visitors, neighbors, and local government agencies to prevent or minimize the intrusion of artificial light into the night scene of the ecosystems of parks.” Since the policy change, several parks and monuments have taken the initiative to change their lighting—replacing old fixtures with more energy-efficient ones, shielding lights—and to begin encouraging an increased appreciation among visitors of the importance of night and darkness.
While the new policy has been embraced by some parks more than others, its message seems very much in line with the Park Service’s original mission from 1916: “to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.”
There is no doubt that when light pollution erases the stars over a park, or interferes with the natural cycles of wildlife, or blights the view of mountains, waterfalls, or mesas, it impairs a park. Without action, the problem will only get worse.
America’s national parks—and national parks around the world—represent an excellent opportunity for the preservation of darkness, and—I would suggest—the preservation of darkness represents a valuable opportunity for the parks. Any serious plan to protect and restore darkness, such as the Starlight Reserves or the IDA’s designations, relies on a core dark area working with a buffer of surrounding communities. National parks already play this role in a number of issues, and would be well suited to serving as core areas for dark sky reserves. At the same time, if the parks themselves become hemmed in by a civilization insatiable for resources of every kind, eventually park boundaries will give way. Because darkness is affected by light from hundreds of miles away, it will always be one of the first natural resources to show signs of impairment by encroaching civilization. I remember Pierre Brunet arguing in Paris that the presence of an astronomer was the sign of a healthy ecosystem; that when the sky grows too bright for astronomy and the astronomers go away, you know you have a polluted sky, and whatever has polluted that sky will eventually pollute other resources, given time.
What makes Acadia such an important example for the national parks and darkness is the fact that it’s a park with more than two million visitors every year, nestled next to several bustling communities. The park’s dedication to darkness presents both opportunities to reach large numbers of Americans and challenges to protecting its dark skies. So far, it seems to be doing well on both fronts. In 2008, Bar Harbor citizens voted to enact a light ordinance that recognizes the importance of dark skies for the park and for the community, and in 2009 the park organized its first annual Night Sky Festival. Local businesses have joined in both efforts, recognizing that darker skies will mean more visitors to town. Berger says the park has received steady support from the community and believes local businesses are quickly realizing that the night sky as a natural resource is a tourist draw. “Because we’re on the East Coast, and definitely in higher population areas, that relationship and the need for cooperation between the park and its partners is even more critical to achieve the park’s preservation goals,” she says. She believes those goals are important to the community as a whole. “Acadia National Park is almost a hundred years old,” she explains, “and there’s a long tradition of this being a place where people could go and enjoy the night sky.”
“I had no idea about their sky,” says astronomer Tyler Nordgren, author of Stars Above, Earth Below: A Guide to Astronomy in the National Parks. “I just figured it was like any other place on the East Coast, where you’ll see a smattering of stars in the sky, but that’s it. Acadia is so beautifully isolated. You’re up there on the Gulf of Maine. To go up to the top of Cadillac Mountain, or to drive the park road that winds along the coast, and to see the stars reflected in the ocean beside you—I was unprepared for it.”
In writing his book, Nordgren spent every clear night he could outside at a national park looking at the sky, he says, trying to photograph it and write about astronomy in a way that would reach more people than just astronomers. In addition, he’s been an artist since he was a child, a hobby he’s increasingly embraced in his role as a teacher of science. “When you go out and you see a starry sky overhead, your first thought isn’t for all the numbers and facts that go along with it. Your first thought is just how beautiful it is.” He said he asked himself, “How can I show people in an evocative way, in an emotional way, just how wondrous it is to be out there? And you just can’t help but do that through word and picture and art.”
By art, Nordgren refers to the series of posters he’s drawn advertising the night sky at Acadia and other parks, modeled after the Works Progress Administration (WPA) art of the 1930s. “I’d always loved those old WPA posters from the parks,” he says. “And so I thought, Let’s find a way to incorporate new posters of the night sky and parks and planets.” His WPA-style posters are evocative, with small human figures standing in awe of a wondrous night sky. In a poster advertising “SEE THE MILKY WAY in America’s National Parks,” a man and a woman stand atop an outcropping of pale blue rocks, the Milky Way rising lava-lamp-like before them, the surrounding sky filled with white circles for stars. It is a scene of the sublime, of the small human figure facing the immensity of the universe. Seeing the poster, I think of author Bill Fox talking about the Black Rock Desert. “You know,” Fox told me, “we think because of television, the Internet, or jet travel we see a lot of the planet. But the only chance we really have to retain our sense of the scale in the real universe is by looking at the night sky. And, to really see the night sky, it’s like, ‘Oh, my, it’s a really, really, big universe out there.’ ”
An example of astronomer and artist Tyler Nordgren’s WPA-style posters on behalf of the night sky. (Tyler Nordgren)
“Thanks to art,” Nordgren says, “I am able to do my science so much better than I ever thought I would.” While obviously quite knowledgeable about his fie
ld, he is anything but “the learn’d astronomer” from Walt Whitman’s nineteenth-century verse:
When I heard the learn’d astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
Nordgren cringes when I mention Whitman’s lines—the idea of an astronomer making someone “tired and sick” makes his stomach turn—but he acknowledges that reducing the night sky to dry numbers will often do the trick. He knows it isn’t “the proofs, the figures” that will move his audience but the opportunity for each person to see for him- or herself, to wander off “in the mystical moist night-air” and look at the stars. It’s the opportunity to do this that the national park system is so well-situated to offer to millions of visitors each year.
“When you’re there at the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, and you’re there on one of those smoggy days, and you don’t have the pristine view of that canyon sweeping before you, anyone, even the least knowledgeable person, knows that they’re missing something, that they’re being robbed of something,” he explains.
But, he says, when it comes to the night sky, most people don’t know what they’re missing.
“Everyone’s grown up in cities. We have no idea that it can be any other way. People no longer realize that you should be seeing thousands of stars. You should have stars from the zenith to the horizon. People see that orange glow, the color of the sky back home, and think, Okay, well, maybe that’s just the way the sky is.”
At dozens of parks and monuments, dedicated rangers are doing everything they can to convince visitors that the sky they know back home is definitely not just the way the sky is. Through interpretive programs, astronomy festivals, full moon hikes, campfire presentations, and individual chats, NPS rangers talk about the practical dangers of artificial light and the steps visitors can take. But along with such practical advice, NPS rangers are sharing an idea as well.
In a 2007 documentary, filmmaker Ken Burns called the national parks “America’s Best Idea,” arguing that they protect not only scenic landscapes, funky oddities, and wildlife but also the intangible qualities that have made us who we are and who we might still be. As burgeoning human populations bring change to wild areas everywhere, the parks represent something that lasts. Though they may change in infrastructure or priorities, their core mission remains: to protect for Americans the opportunity to have an experience similar to what they—or other Americans before them—had in the past. In protecting their physical geography, the parks protect their intangible geographies as well. Preserving what NPS policy calls “lightscapes” goes right along with that idea. Increasingly, our national parks may represent our best chance at knowing, protecting, and restoring real darkness.
“We’re at a delicate time now,” says Tyler Nordgren, “where we still have some people that know what they’re missing. But if we wait too much longer, everyone will have lost this. No one will realize it anymore. And it won’t occur to anyone to want to preserve it.
“If we let another generation or two go away, we will have largely lost that generation that said, ‘I used to be able to see the Milky Way.’ And then, once you’ve lost it, you’ve lost the major drive behind preserving it. Because there will be no one around anymore to want to make things go back to the way they were.
“So, now’s the time.”
In the Lower 48, nowhere east of the Mississippi is as dark as places west. Once you come across the great river, you can find geographies of darkness in western Nebraska and eastern Montana, in northeastern New Mexico and east-central Oregon. But for the most part a visitor to these remote areas would be on his or her own, without guidance or accommodation, and while that type of solitude has an undeniable appeal, it won’t encourage large numbers of people to savor dark skies. More importantly, these areas are only dark by chance—the lights of civilization just haven’t reached them yet. Especially because they are remote and rarely visited, their darkness is almost certainly doomed, as it will have few defenders when its inevitable enemies arrive. It’s true with any other intangible resource: If few people care about the darkness that remains, eventually that darkness will disappear.
If we are ever going to protect the darkest places we have left, they will have to be dark places we actually know and visit, love and respect. As I reach the end of my journey, what makes most sense to me is to name not one single darkest place but a certain darkest geography, one blessed with dark locations to which people from all over the world already love to come. For me, the American Southwest, and especially our national parks and monuments there, represents the geography of night I’ve been looking for. There certainly are places in the world that are even darker, but no geography combines the darkest areas we have left with specific places we already love and have promised to protect. For my money, the national parks represent the best opportunity we have to experience, protect, and restore darkness.
What are some of these specific locations? For a while now, since the NPS Night Sky Team began making its readings, the darkest places have been these: Natural Bridges National Monument, Capital Reef National Park, and Bryce Canyon National Park, all in southern Utah. More recently, Big Bend National Park in southern Texas has joined the mix. After his months traveling the park system, Tyler Nordgren ranked the top five darkest parks he visited as Big Bend, Bryce Canyon, Natural Bridges, Grand Canyon, and Chaco Culture National Historical Park. But his rankings, he cautions, “reflect what I happened to see on those nights I happened to be there. They are by no means definitive.” So many qualities go into making one location darker than the next, qualities that can change from night to night—among the most important are weather, season, and phase of the moon. A particular location may be the darkest one night, second darkest the next, third the night after that. And, in ten years, who knows what the list might look like?
Chad Moore explains. “Each year, they come up with what’s the mean population center of the U.S., and it’s always some town in Kansas, and it’s kind of an artificial computer geographic operation. Similarly, we could say the darkest spot in the forty-eight states is right there in eastern Oregon or northern Nevada or some random place, but that doesn’t carry the same sort of charisma. I think the point is not to find the light equivalent of ‘one square inch of silence,’ ” he says. “I think what we need to do is to find these charismatic places that we already love where the night sky is woven into the fabric of that park, of that place, and then say, ‘This is one of the darkest places—we need to defend this, we need to cherish this—and not worry about splitting hairs.’ ”
Here are two of those places.
In Bryce Canyon National Park, Ranger Kevin Poe stands with his back to the salmon-pink hoodoo columns of weathered rock that gave the park its fame, waving his hand toward the horizon. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he says to a group of park visitors, “on behalf of the National Park Service, I present to you… the full moon.” Moments later, the moon climbs into the sky. The knowing people smile, but to the casual observer who might not know that astronomers can gauge the moonrise (and moonset, as well as sunrise and sunset) to the exact minute, and centuries in advance, Poe’s timing must almost seem magic. For Poe, a big man with a long ponytail and huge love for the night, the event simply marks the start of another full moon hike at Bryce, another chance to help visitors fall in love with the dark.
As he leads the group of twenty-five visitors (many of whom, Poe says, have never heard the words “light” and “pollution” in the same sentence before), he mixes constant good humor int
o a wide-ranging presentation that includes the sounds of night, the importance of bats, and the threats from “the reckless addition of more and more light to the sky.” At the bottom of the trail, where the tour turns around, he and I wait, then bring up the rear. “It’s all part of helping them understand that Bryce Canyon does not disappear at dusk,” he explains. Not only does it not disappear, but in many ways it’s after dark that Bryce best shines. On these ever-popular full moon hikes—the tickets become available at 6:30 a.m. and are gone within an hour—rangers lead visitors through a park that is one of the darkest in the nation. “We used to say we’re a one in the wintertime and a two in the summer,” Poe explains, referring to the Bortle scale. “But the winter is frustrating now because we have a lot of jet contrails”; the winter sky, while still exceedingly dark here, is no longer as clear.
As we climb back up the wide graded trail, past a soft breeze in the pine-tops, trunks and needles radiating moonlight, I tell Poe about what I’ve been looking for—dark places, but not so remote that no one can get there. “We’re not pristine anymore,” he says, “and Chad will be the first person to say that probably no longer exists. But we’re pretty close, and I think it’s fair to say we’re as close as you can drive to.”
Poe stops to point out a flower blooming in the moonlight. “The bronze evening primrose,” he says. “Pollinated at night by sphinx moths.” On my hands and knees I lean in to inhale the wonderful scent, a scent that lingers as we continue up the trail. “My secret best dark location is—” (It is a secret I cannot repeat.) “My boys and I do these marathon canoe trips to get there. It’s one of those places where nobody’s going to be able to drive to but it’s very Class One-ish, and, boy, it’s an extraordinary place.” When I tell him that I’m headed next to Natural Bridges, he smiles. “Well, Natural Bridges is in that same spot when you look at one of these NASA images, and that’s one you can drive to.”
