The End of Night

by Paul Bogard

  Part of the difficulty in any discussion about lighting and safety are the terms we use. What exactly do we mean by “better lighting,” “well-lighted,” and “improved lighting,” for example? Were we to understand these terms to mean lighting that was fully shielded and sensitively designed, that would be one thing. Unfortunately, when it comes to traditional understanding of light and safety, usually these terms simply mean bright or brighter.

  The information on lighting efficiency and per capita electricity consumption in the UK comes from “Seven Centuries of Energy Services: The Price and Use of Light in the United Kingdom (1300–2000),” by R. Fouquet and P. Pearson (The Energy Journal 27 [2006]: 139–77).

  The British Astronomical Association’s Campaign for Dark Skies (CfDS) offers a wealth of information on the benefits of darkness and the perils of bad lighting (http://www.britastro.org/dark-skies). The CfDS has as its goal “to preserve and restore the beauty of the night sky by campaigning against excessive, inefficient, and irresponsible lighting that shines where it is not wanted nor needed.”

  The passage from Ralph Waldo Emerson comes from Nature, published in 1836. The essay has no particular connection to the night sky much beyond this early passage—Emerson’s interest in the stars is primarily symbolic. In the next line he writes, “The stars awaken a certain reverence, because though always present, they are inaccessible; but all natural objects make a kindred impression, when the mind is open to their influence.” One wonders what Emerson might say about the stars and their ability to inspire reverence were he alive to witness their loss from most of our skies.

  For a study of gas station canopy lighting that shows “how a gas station can provide satisfactory light levels… while reducing glare and light trespass,” see http://www.lrc.rpi.edu/programs/transportation/pdf/lightPollution/canopy.pdf.

  The terms “lux” (as in Roger Narboni starting with “400 lux on the fish”) and “footcandles” are the units (“lux” being metric) for the amount of light present at a given surface, or illuminance. We cannot really “see” illuminance, but light meters can measure it. Light we perceive either from surface brightness (reflected light) or a light source is luminance. Neither illuminance nor luminance is to be confused with “lumens,” the measure of the amount of light given off by a source of light.

  Of life as a lighting designer in a society obsessed with equating bright lights and safety, Narboni told me, “And now we have this crazy politics about security in the cities that has totally changed the way we work. We have to fight a lot against the politicians who want to light everything with a high level of light because they think this will solve everything about vandalism and delinquents and everything and this is a crazy idea. So no one wants shadows or darkness—it’s a fight that we lose almost every time. It’s terrible.”

  The Campaign for Dark Skies has an entire page devoted to towns that have chosen to turn down or turn off unnecessary lighting at night: www.britastro.org/dark-skies/lightsoffresponse.html. Information on the city of Bristol can be found at www.thisisbristol.co.uk/Burglars-afraid-dark-Crime-falls-Bristol-street/story-13952633-detail/story.html, and on Rockford, Illinois, at www.npr.org/2011/11/08/142145523/rockford-ill-shuts-off-streetlights-to-save-money. It’s hard to find a better example of a city website that explains the benefits of reducing the amount of light used at night than that of Santa Rosa, CA (http://ci.santa-rosa.ca.us/departments/publicworks/streetlightreduction/Pages/default.aspx).

  One study reporting criminals’ perspectives on lighting can be found at http://www.policypointers.org/Page/View/1238. The final report from the Chicago Alley Lighting Project can be found at http://www.icjia.state.il.us/public/pdf/ResearchReports/Chicago%20Alley%20Lighting%20Project.pdf. The International Dark-Sky Association website has a wealth of position papers and links to studies related to lighting and safety/security (darksky.org). Another useful source is the Royal Astronomy Society of Canada, Calgary Centre (http://calgary.rasc.ca/lp/index.html).

  Find Dr. Barry Clark’s invaluable reviews of the available research on “outdoor lighting and crime” at http://asv.org.au/light-pollution.php. For anyone interested in this issue, Clark’s work is simply required reading. Of the position paper from the Independence Institute, Clark told me, “Its chorus of half-truths takes up so much of the score that it is almost a continuous perversion of scientific method. The authors might now turn their hands to justifying the continuing use of asbestos… and promoting smoking for teenagers.”

  The quotes on fear of the dark from E. Roger Ekirch come from the first few pages of At Day’s Close. It’s significant that in this 350-page history Ekirch begins this way, an acknowledgment that our fear of the dark—whether subconscious or not—absolutely colors our relationship with night. A 2010 History Channel documentary titled Afraid of the Dark featured Ekirch extensively as it detailed the reasons for our fear, including “belief in ghosts,” “the supernatural,” “Satan,” “wild animals,” and “deadly terrain.” Sitting bathed in TV glow in our well-lit houses in our well-lit suburbs or cities, we might chuckle at these primitive fears, but place us in a truly dark night without electric light and we might feel differently.

  For another excellent take on fear of the dark, see “The Dark at the Top of the Stairs,” from A. Alvarez’s Night: Night Life, Night Language, Sleep, and Dreams (New York: Norton, 1995). Alvarez writes, “Fear of the dark is essentially unspecific; like darkness itself, it is formless, engulfing, full of menace, full of death.” Because of this, “in horror movies, no matter how brilliant the special effects, the moment when the monster is finally revealed is invariably a disappointment.”

  Katie Roiphe’s comments about the blue-light system on college campuses can be found in The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism (Boston: Back Bay, 1993). In fewer than two decades, these blue lights atop silver poles have swept across the landscape of college and university campuses in the United States. Rare is the institution that has not spent many thousands of dollars to purchase, install, and maintain the lights. Rarer still is any research proving their effectiveness at actually making anyone safer rather than simply making us “feel” safer.

  The report on “The Sexual Victimization of College Women” can be found at https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/182369.pdf. The article by Jennifer K. Wesely and Emily Gaarder titled “The Gendered ‘Nature’ of the Urban Outdoors: Women Negotiating Fear of Violence” comes from Gender and Society 18, no. 5 (October 2004).

  It’s not until page 233 of her 291-page book Wanderlust: A History of Walking (New York: Penguin, 2000) that Rebecca Solnit writes, “Throughout the history of walking I have been tracing, the principal figures… have been men, and it is time to look at why women were not out walking too.” She then enters perhaps the most compelling section of her fascinating book, explaining how she was nineteen before she “first felt the full force of this lack of freedom” that being a woman entailed. “I was advised to stay indoors at night,” she writes, and the messages she received asserted that it was her responsibility “to control my own and men’s behavior rather than society’s to enforce my freedom” to walk after dark.

  Brianna Denison, a nineteen-year-old student visiting a friend at the University of Nevada in Reno, was abducted in January of 2008. Her body was found in mid-February. Her assailant was caught and sentenced to death. Twenty-two-year-old Eve Marie Carson was murdered March 5, 2008, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Her twenty-one- and seventeen-year-old assailants were also caught and sentenced to life without parole.

  Motor vehicle deaths in the United States reached their zenith in 1972, when more than 54,000 Americans were killed. Due especially to improvements in automobile safety features, motor vehicle deaths in this country have been falling gradually since. In 2010, with the country’s population having increased by nearly 100 million from four decades before, the death toll was 32,708.

  According to author Barry Lopez, our identification of evil with nocturnal animals comes f
rom deep within us. In his Of Wolves and Men (New York: Scribner, 1978), he writes, “Killing wolves has to do with murder. Historically, the most visible motive, and the one that best explains the excess of killing, is a type of fear: theriophobia. Fear of the beast. Fear of the beast as an irrational, violent, insatiable creature.… In its headiest manifestations theriophobia is projected onto a single animal, the animal becomes a scapegoat and it is annihilated.” It is estimated that, from the time of the arrival of the first European colonists in North America, the wolf population fell from more than 250,000 to fewer than 1,000, its range reduced to perhaps 3 percent of its historic limits. Other sources say that one to two million were killed in the latter half of the nineteenth century alone. As of 2012, the wolf population in the Lower 48 has climbed back above 5,000.

  Among Ken Lamberton’s fine books are Beyond Desert Walls: Essays from Prison (2005), Dry River: Stories of Life, Death, and Redemption on the Santa Cruz (2011), and Wilderness and Razor Wire (1999), which won the 2002 John Burroughs Award for nature writing—all published by the University of Arizona Press in Tucson. His essay “Night Time” can be found in Paul Bogard’s Let There Be Night: Testimony on Behalf of the Dark (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2008).

  The subject of prison lighting is one that not many people think about—except perhaps for the prisoners themselves and those who work in prisons, all of whom spend long hours in poorly lit environments. Michaele Wynn-Jones has worked for more than fifteen years on this problem and claims, among other consequences, that poor prison lighting—both the type of lighting and its near-constant presence—has significantly contributed to incidences of depression and suicide among those who work and live in prison. “Imagine living up to twenty-three hours a day in a confined space the size of the average bathroom… under a humming fluorescent tube that is your only available light source,” she writes (“Life under Fluorescent Light Is Harming Prisoners and Staff Alike,” in the Guardian, September 26, 2002).

  On a more positive note, some prisons in California have begun to install “eco-friendly” lighting in an effort to save energy, a significant cost consideration in facilities where lighting systems run twenty-four hours a day, every day of the year.

  Aldo Leopold’s story of Escudilla Mountain in southern Arizona can be found in A Sand County Almanac (New York: Oxford University Press, 1949). In 1984, Congress declared 5,200 acres of the mountain and surrounding Apache National Forest as official wilderness. September and October, when the mountain’s many aspen trees are changing, is a wonderful time to visit. There are no grizzly bears to worry about, or to miss.

  6: Body, Sleep, and Dreams

  The World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) listed shift work involving circadian disruption a “probable human carcinogen” in 2007. For a summary of what might have led it to do so, see “Considerations of Circadian Impact for Defining ‘Shift Work’ in Cancer Studies: IARC Working Group Report” (Occupational Environmental Medicine 68 [2011]: 154–62).

  In 2009, the American Medical Association voiced its unanimous support for “light pollution control efforts and glare reduction for both public safety and energy safety,” declaring, in part: “Whereas, Our AMA has long advocated for policies that are scientifically sound and that positively influence public health policy; and… Whereas, Light trespass has been implicated in disruption of the human circadian rhythm, and strongly suspected as an etiology of suppressed melatonin production, depressed immune systems, and increase in cancer rates.… Therefore be it Resolved, That our AMA support light pollution reduction efforts and glare reduction efforts at both the national and state levels.” In 2012, the AMA went further, adopting new policy “recognizing that exposure to excessive light at night can disrupt sleep, exacerbate sleep disorders and cause unsafe driving conditions.”

  An excellent summary of the connections between light at night and health can be found in “Missing the Dark: Health Effects of Light Pollution” by Ron Chepesiuk (Environmental Health Perspectives 117 [2009]: A20–A27). The Campaign for Dark Skies has a helpful page on the connections between light at night and human health: http://www.britastro.org/dark-skies/health.html.

  The comments from Eva Schernhammer about the risks from working at night come from “Light at Night and Health: The Perils of Rotating Shift Work” (Occupational and Environmental Medicine, October 4, 2010). The comments from Chuck the locomotive engineer come from “Working the Graveyard Shift, Fighting the Sandman,” from NPR’s Talk of the Nation, April 26, 2011.

  For information on who works at night, including the high percentage of African Americans and the number of women who report higher work-family conflict, see the Bureau of Labor Statistics as reported in “Opportunities for Policy Leadership on Shift Work,” from the Sloan Work and Family Research Network (http://workfamily.sas.upenn.edu/sites/workfamily.sas.upenn.edu/files/imported/pdfs/policy_makers6.pdf).

  For a highly readable article detailing the potential connections between light at night and cancer, see Richard G. Stevens’s “Light-at-Night, Circadian Disruption and Breast Cancer: Assessment of Existing Evidence” (International Journal of Epidemiology 38 [2009]: 963–70). At the very least, Stevens concludes, “increasing numbers of people must do shift work in modern societies, and few people will give up electric lighting at home. An understanding of what particular characteristics of wavelength, intensity, timing, and duration most disrupt circadian rhythms would permit a minimization of any potential health risks.”

  The possible connections between breast cancer and the blue light of computers and televisions are detailed in “The Light-Cancer Connection” by Catherine Guthrie (Prevention 58, no. 1 [January 2006]).

  Read more from Steven Lockley about the consequences of not getting enough sleep in Sleep: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), cowritten with Russell G. Foster, and in the International Dark-Sky Association’s Fighting Light Pollution: Smart Lighting Solutions for Individuals and Communities (2012).

  Statistics on how many of us are not getting enough sleep are readily available. For example, see the Centers for Disease Control’s “Insufficient Sleep Is a Public Health Epidemic” (http://www.cdc.gov/features/dsSleep). What isn’t readily available are statistics on the relation of long light to short sleep, and on the potentially huge cost of electric lighting to our health and economy.

  Many of the night-shift nurses whom I asked said that in order to sleep during the day they must use blackout curtains on their bedroom windows. As Michelle in St. Paul told me, “Personally, I would have trouble sleeping in a bright room,” a seemingly obvious statement until one thinks about how many of us try to sleep at night with bright sources of light coming through our windows. The trade-off, at least for nurses in the United States working the night shift, almost always includes such perks as a few extra dollars per hour in salary, extra vacation hours, and free parking.

  In a valiant effort to highlight the decline of the afternoon siesta tradition, Spain’s National Association of Friends of the Siesta organized, in October 2010, the country’s first siesta championship, with contestants ranked for loudest snore, most original sleep positions, and duration of sleep. The winner took home a prize of 1,000 euros.

  The connection between light at night and obesity emerged through a study on mice led by Laura Fonken of Ohio State University. Fonken and her team of researchers divided mice into three groups: one group lived with a natural light-dark cycle, a second group endured constant light, and the third group had the darkness of their light-dark cycle replaced with a dim glow. The researchers found that the mice in the second and third groups gained almost 50 percent more weight than the mice in the first group. The members of the two groups also gained more fat than those in the first group and showed a reduced tolerance for glucose.

  Vaughn McCall tells his patients to divorce themselves from the clock. “A common problem I see in insomniacs is that even if they hav
e the rest of the room pitch-black dark, they have a clock,” he told me. “And the clock becomes their master. They become slave to it and they start fretting over, ‘My God, I’ve been awake ten minutes. What if I’m awake fifteen minutes? How long has it been now? Oh, soon it’s going to be twenty minutes.’ And I tell them, ‘Actually, you will be more comfortable with being awake if you get rid of the clock or at least just turn the thing around. There’s nothing that the clock is going to tell you in the middle of the night that’s going to make you feel any better about yourself.’ ”

  Rubin Naiman’s book Healing Night: The Science and Spirit of Sleeping, Dreaming, and Awakening (Minneapolis: Syren Book Co., 2006) deserves a wider audience than it has received. Arguing that traditional sleep medicine “makes absolutely no allowance for the spiritual dimensions of night, sleep, or dreams,” and decrying our society’s “undeclared war against dusk and darkness,” Naiman makes a persuasive case for a more holistic approach to our experience of night, sleep, and darkness. We are still afraid of the dark, he argues, and “our disturbed relationship with night is ultimately rooted in our discomfort with and denial of the dark side of our own selves.”

  Naiman told me that one of his favorite books is Dr. Seuss’s Sleep Book (New York: Random House, 1962), which includes a character named the Chippendale Mupp, who has an unbelievably long tail. “When it goes to bed at night, it gathers the tail—it takes some time—and finally, after a while, when it gets the end of the tail, it chomps down on its own tail really hard, and then it goes to sleep,” Naiman explained. “Because the tail is so long, it takes precisely eight hours for that nip, as he calls it, that pain impulse to come back to the Mupp’s brain. I’d read this many times and I finally realized, ‘Oh, my God! He’s teaching kids the truth about an alarm clock!’ ”