The End of Night

by Paul Bogard

  In a letter from 1903 collected with others and published in 1934 after his death, Rilke urged his reader in Letters to a Young Poet to “love the questions,” and so urged millions more who have found inspiration and guidance in his words. “I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves,” he wrote, “like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue.”

  For an excellent translation of St. John of the Cross’s Dark Night of the Soul, see the version by Mirabai Starr (New York: Riverhead, 2002). For two contemporary works inspired by St. John’s Dark Night, see Gerald May’s The Dark Night of the Soul: A Psychiatrist Explores the Connection Between Darkness and Spiritual Growth (New York: HarperCollins, 2004) and Thomas Moore’s Dark Nights of the Soul: A Guide to Finding Your Way Through Life’s Ordeals (New York: Penguin, 2004). Writes Moore, “A dark night of the soul is not extraordinary or rare.… To be sad, grieving, struggling, lost, or hopeless is part of natural human life.”

  Find out more about UNESCO World Heritage Sites at http://whc.unesco.org/en/list. These sites, designed to protect cultural and natural heritage from destruction, span the globe. But so far, the designation has had little to do with saving the natural night that has always been an integral part of these sites.

  In the initial draft of his book (1947), Aldo Leopold originally placed his paragraph about “the penalties of an ecological education” in his introduction. He had lived long enough to see land that he loved ruined or damaged by his fellow humans and had suffered the anxiety, depression, and sadness that went along with such an experience. “I do not imply that this philosophy of land was always clear to me,” he wrote. “It is rather the end-result of a life-journey, in the course of which I have felt sorrow, anger, puzzlement, or confusion over the inability of conservation to halt the juggernaut of land-abuse” (see A Companion to A Sand County Almanac: Interpretive & Critical Essays, edited by J. Baird Callicott [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987]). But, perhaps fearing such honesty would scare off otherwise sympathetic readers, he changed his mind and placed it instead in his essay “Round River,” which appears on page 197 in most versions of the book.

  Among his many accomplishments, Leopold was the driving force behind the creation of the world’s first Federal Wilderness Area, the Gila, in New Mexico in 1924. While he was a writer all his life, his best-known work can be found in A Sand County Almanac, especially “Thinking Like a Mountain” and “The Land Ethic.”

  Roderick Nash’s Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1967) is a detailed history of American attitudes toward our wild lands. Reading his account of the debates over such issues as the creation of our national parks or the establishment of the Endangered Species Act, one understands that contemporary debates—and especially attitudes and arguments that value the natural world as little more than a resource for monetary and material gain—have well-established historical precedents.

  As Pierre Brunet of the Association Nationale pour la Protection du Ciel et l’Environnement Nocturnes told me: “I am pessimistic but I keep fighting. That is all. Why? I have to do that, it’s my conscience. It’s my duty to save the night environment. I appreciate stars, astronomy. There are many fighting for the environment. The night environment is a valuable fight. Nobody is fighting for that, so why not us?” Find out more about ANPCEN at www.anpcen.fr.

  For more on solastalgia and Glenn Albrecht, the Australian philosopher who coined the term in 2004, see “Is There an Ecological Unconsciousness?,” by Daniel B. Smith (New York Times, January 27, 2010). Looking for a term to describe the homesickness one feels while still at home, Albrecht created a word that has since found use around the world. “The growing influence of solastalgia is bittersweet for me,” he told an interviewer in 2012. “As a philosopher you want your ideas and concepts to be influential and used and I’m pleased that people have found solastalgia to be inspirational, in the arts and in academia.… But equally, the concept in itself is depressing and it’s unfortunate that people are all too familiar with the negative feelings it describes” (http://www.physorg.com/news/2012-02-solastalgia-bittersweet-success.html).

  3: Come Together

  The most recent addition to IDA’s International Dark Sky Parks is Emmet County’s Headlands property in Michigan, a six-hundred-acre stretch of forest on Lake Michigan just west of Mackinaw City. When I spoke with Dark Sky Park Program Director Mary Stewart Adams, she told me that the ultimate goal is a twenty-two-thousand-acre “dark sky coast” along the great lake. “Our ability to no longer see the night sky isn’t just because of light pollution,” Adams says. “We are losing our ability to dream and imagine.” In response, Adams fills her programs with stories and myths, fairy tales and folktales from around the world, doing all she can to rekindle in her modern American audience an awareness about the night sky. She likes to ask, “If it’s dark, then what?” As she explains, “every culture before ours has built temples and cathedrals and art, all of it asking, What is my relationship to the ‘then what’? I’m hoping to inspire engagement with that question. I’m hoping to inspire the imagination.”

  One more story about Steve Owens and building community: Owens has designed a planetarium show for the blind. After working for several years at the Science Center in Glasgow, he came up with the idea of constructing a tactile hemisphere that would allow for blind people to “see” the night sky. Working with a colleague from the Design School in Glasgow, Owens placed pins in the patterns of constellations and then vacuum-sealed plastic over them to create a tactile night sky. Perhaps most ingenious was his and his partner’s idea to simulate the Milky Way by using sawdust to evoke the countless spread of stars in the arms of our galaxy. Owens says that after months of testing he invited the press as well as four volunteers from the local charity for the blind and conducted a run-through of a half-hour planetarium show. “While I was doing it,” he says, “I wasn’t getting feedback from them, because obviously they were concentrating quite hard, and at the end, I said, ‘So, was that okay?’ and they just all said, ‘That was amazing.’ There was a woman there who was blind since birth, and she and her husband and kids go out to holiday cottages in the middle of nowhere and the kids are always talking about Orion and she said, ‘Now I know what they’re talking about. I could tell them how to find Orion. I could tell you what shape it is.’ ”

  Owens says he and a friend, Adrian, recently conducted a meteor watch on Twitter. “I was in Glasgow, and Adrian lives down in Berkshire. I was having a barbeque; he was getting drunk, fiddling with his telescope. So we thought, ‘Let’s try to get a thousand people.’ We got forty thousand the first night. It became the worldwide, top-trending topic on Twitter. The Telegraph had a headline, ‘Perseids “Meteor Watch” Knocks Disney Star Miley Cyrus Off Twitter Top Spot.’ The second night we were even busier, probably fifty thousand involved. Adrian and I were hosting it on Twitter. We had our laptops and were responding to questions. Almost everybody who was doing it was not astronomy-oriented in any way. People were saying, ‘Is it safe to go outside? I’m not going to get hit by one?’ So it’s starting to be the case that even people who don’t have an interest in science and astronomy are starting to hear about things. It’s starting to soak into the public consciousness.”

  William Anders’s photograph Earthrise has been called “the most influential environmental photograph ever taken.” Of it, Anders has said, “There are basically two messages that came to me. One of them is that the planet is quite fragile. It reminded me of a Christmas tree ornament. But the other message to me, and I don’t think this one has really sunk in yet, is that the Earth is really small. We’re not the center of the universe; we’re way out in left field on a tiny dust mote, but it is our home and we need to take care of it.”

  The time-lapse video of the Canary Islands everyone told me about is by Norwegian landscape photograph
er Terje Sørgjerd. It is entitled The Mountain: http://www.livescience.com/13739-mountain.html.

  First constructed in 1671, the Paris Observatory (Observatoire de Paris) once sat outside the city under naturally dark skies. It now lies completely engulfed by the modern metropolis, no longer able to serve as an optical observatory but still quite a beautiful building. Even if you can’t get in (it’s not normally open to the public), simply wandering around imagining the lovely gray-white building set alone in a field, its astronomers observing the starry sky above, makes it well worth a visit. For an image of what it may have looked like, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Paris_Observatory_XVIII_century.png.

  For a view of the Korean peninsula at night, search “Korea at night from space.” The stark demarcation between the light-saturated South and the primitively dark North could hardly be more dramatic. Likewise, searching “world at night from space” will yield a selection of satellite photos showing not only the spread of electric lighting but also those places on Earth that remain primitively dark—primarily, places that either are economically undeveloped or without human inhabitants. So far, without exception, anywhere humans and economic development have moved, light pollution has followed.

  Find the Museo Galileo online at www.museogalileo.it/en/visit.html. Find it in Florence housed in a typically beautiful Florentine brick building on the Arno River. In addition to its wealth of artifacts, the museum is also wonderfully uncrowded—there are moments when you can find yourself in the room alone with Galileo’s telescopes, or surrounded only by four-hundred-year-old globo celestes. For an excellent recent article on Galileo, see “Galileo’s Vision,” by Davi Zax (Smithsonian, August 2009, 59–63), in which Zax accurately details the significance and drama of Galileo’s story. See also Galileo’s Daughter, by the always entertaining Dava Sobel (New York: Walker, 1999). After turning his homemade telescope toward the sky in 1609, Galileo wrote, “I give infinite thanks to God… who has been pleased to make me the first observer of marvelous things.”

  As is often the case with such topics, the question of who invented the telescope remains somewhat open to debate. Hans Lippershey, a German spectacle maker, is generally given the distinction as a result of his patent application from September 25, 1608. But others claimed to have come up with the idea before that. What is clear is that while Galileo did not invent the telescope, he built his own after hearing about the new creation and was the first (as far as we know) to use a telescope for astronomy.

  Perhaps no one has done more to promote darkness in Europe than the indefatigable Friedel Pas. As the IDA’s European representative, Pas has promoted dark sky efforts across the continent, and perhaps nowhere more effectively than in his home country of Belgium. Its annual Night of Darkness has grown to include two-thirds of the municipalities in the country, with some twenty-five thousand people directly involved. Pas points to the Night of Darkness as having an enormous impact on raising awareness about darkness, citing as a direct result the Flemish Parliament’s having passed a unanimous resolution against light pollution just two months after the first Night. For anyone interested in combating light pollution, two things are key, Pas told me. First, “without awareness, you lose.” And second, you must know more about the problem than anyone. You must, he says, be “weaponed with knowledge.”

  2: The Maps of Possibility

  In the summer of 1898, forty-two-year-old John C. Van Dyke, accompanied by a fox terrier named Cappy, rode into the desert near what is today San Bernardino. Over the next three years this art historian roamed the deserts of California, Arizona, and Mexico, and The Desert (1901; reprint, Layton, UT: Gibbs-Smith, 1980) is the result. His book is filled with highly attuned attention to desert detail, to colors and shapes and “the long overlooked commonplace things of nature,” and to the feelings the desert’s beauty brings. But an elegiac undertone runs throughout—Van Dyke knew that “every bird and beast and creeping thing” feared the arrival of humans because “they know his civilization means their destruction.” We read his account from just over a century ago knowing he was right. “The fact that most of the beauty he described no longer exists,” writes Richard Shelton in his 1980 introduction, “is too obvious to be dwelt upon.”

  Taking place originally on a beach near San Francisco in the late 1980s with a crowd of dozens, the Burning Man festival soon moved to Nevada’s Black Rock Desert and now hosts crowds of forty-five thousand that come to revel in freedom and creativity for a few days at the end of every summer. The festivities culminate in a final burning of “the Man”—a wooden structure several dozen feet high on the festival’s final night. Afterward, every trace of the festival—save for tire tracks etched into the flat playa—is erased. For more information, see burningman.com.

  After landing on the moon, Buzz Aldrin said to a worldwide radio audience, “I’d like to take this opportunity to ask every person listening in, whoever and wherever they may be, to pause for a moment and contemplate the events of the past few hours, and to give thanks in his or her own way.” He then ended radio communication and gave himself Communion, using a small kit given to him by his pastor. Aldrin has described his experience many times, including in a Life magazine interview (August 1969), and in his books Return to Earth (1973) and Magnificent Desolation (2009).

  Isaac Azimov’s short story “Nightfall” was inspired by Emerson’s famous quote, “If the stars should come out one night in a thousand years how men would believe and adore,” after Azimov’s editor at Astounding Science Fiction countered, “I believe they would go mad.”

  Even if you can’t read Italian, www.cielobuio.org is worth a visit for the photographs and simply to see evidence of all that this small group of volunteers is doing on behalf of darkness in northern Italy.

  See the photo of Pisa, Italy, during Earth Hour at http://www.repubblica.it/ambiente/2011/03/28/foto/l_ora_della_terra_buio_sulla_torre_di_pisa-14176168/1.

  Light-emitting diodes are leading the way in the transformation of lighting technology from electric lighting to electronic solid-state lighting. Far more efficient than electric light, highly programmable, and inherently directional (they only shine straight, rather than in all directions), LEDs offer the chance for us to address many of the challenges presented by too much electric light. Because of the heavy amount of blue light they cast, however, LEDs have raised concerns about human and environmental health, and manufacturers have yet to develop alternatives. Still, says the IDA’s Bob Parks, “LED lighting has the potential to revolutionize outdoor lighting in a profoundly positive way.”

  In a sign that the French government is serious about cutting lighting at night in Paris to save energy (and money), a ban on lighting in and outside shops, offices, and public buildings between the hours of 1 a.m. and 7 a.m. will go into effect in July 2013.

  Of the arguments on behalf of darkness, few have greater potential to effect change than the economic one—the fact that we waste so much money on lighting. Consider that “only 4% of the energy used to run a typical incandescent bulb produces light,” writes Michael Grunwald in “Wasting Our Watts” (Time, January 12, 2009). “[T]he rest is frittered away as heat at the plant, over transmission lines or in the bulb itself, which is why you burn your fingers when you touch it.” Grunwald builds a powerful case for efficiency as our greatest new source of energy, and argues one key change that must take place is for utilities to be able to save money through conservation and efficiency. In most states, utilities make more money by selling more power, and so have no incentive to do otherwise. Only six states have decoupled electricity profits from sales volume, Grunwald reports, but where they have, the results are impressive. In California and the Pacific Northwest, where utilities have actively promoted efficiency and conservation, “per-capita electricity use has been stable for three decades—while soaring 50% in the rest of the country.”

  While the lighting ordinances in Flagstaff and Tucson are the country’s most well known, over the past t
en years more than three hundred communities in the United States have adopted ordinances to control artificial light. Many are small towns, suburbs, or rural areas wanting to preserve the unique character of their community. In Florida, lighting ordinances have been used to protect sea turtles that nest on the beaches. For thousands of years, hatchlings have followed the light of the night sky to find the ocean, but hotels and streetlights have confused the turtles and drawn them inland toward their death. More than twenty-seven counties and fifty-eight municipalities have lighting ordinances to help. Elsewhere, the IDA and IESNA have teamed up to create the Model Lighting Ordinance (MLO), designed to make it easy for any community to adopt a lighting ordinance to control the use of light in their area. See www.darksky.org/MLO for more information.

  Let There Be Night: Testimony on Behalf of the Dark (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2008) features essays from twenty-nine writers, poets, and scientists, all of whom responded to a call to “speak a word for darkness” modeled on Thoreau’s desire to “speak a word for nature” in his essay “Walking” (1863).

  According to IDA’s Pete Strasser, big box stores and other national retailers are often more eager to conform to a community’s request for dimmer lights than are local contractors. “You know what Walmart and Home Depot do in Tucson? We tell them, ‘We like these telescope-friendly dark skies; how about low-pressure sodium?’ So the Walmarts here give us low pressure. Target has low-pressure sodium. They want to fit into the community. They don’t have a standard. What holds us back is that the contractor putting in metal halide lights wants to sell a lot of poles, and wants to have a really juicy maintenance contract to replace those metal halide lights that burn out all the time. But if the municipality says, ‘Hi, Walmart, will you please do this?,’ they go, ‘Sure.’ ”