The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light. Paul Bogard

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       7

       Light That Blinds, Fear That Enlightens

       After thousands of years we’re still strangers to darkness, fearful aliens in an enemy camp with our arms crossed over our chests.

      —ANNIE DILLARD (1974)

      Rolling hills, gnarly old trees, a creek running through—when I return at Christmas to the suburban Minneapolis neighborhood where I grew up I wait until just before midnight, then head with my dog Luna two blocks south, slip through a tear in the chain link fence, and take a golf course walk. On account of liability fears we’re not supposed to be here. But we are, and it’s a pleasure, walking in what passes for dark. The city-lit sky and snow-swamped land combine—darker than day, but lighter than night ought to be. The leafless limbs of oaks and maples and the nests of birds and squirrels high in the branches, against the glowing winter sky, are like x-ray images of various animals, of vascular systems and hearts. Some years, solitary owls perch in silhouetted trees, watching me until I notice, then swooping away. Other years, deer crossing a fairway in the distance, or the circular squeal-yipping-bark of coyotes by the railroad tracks. And once, looking back, the weightless drifting prance of a fox crossing the snowy sloping hillside we’d just tread.

      To the east the city rises in golds trimmed in royal blues and sparkling reds, silvers, and whites, steam twisting street-level to sky. Sky glow colors the entire eastern horizon hazy orange—and with the south, west, and northern horizons all gray-white, any low-hanging star has been wiped away. Only overhead are maybe four dozen, no more—Orion; the Pleiades; Sirius, the Dog Star. It seems like night here but it’s not, at least not as it would be without all this light.

      Slipping back through the fence, walking home, we are bathed by corner streetlights and the 100-watt bulbs in “brass and glass” front-door fixtures. The combination of house lights and streetlights and city-supplied sky glow illuminates the four blocks to the street’s end, each house defined. It’s a scene repeated in every direction and, with rare exception, over the suburb as a whole. It’s the kind of suburb in which tens of millions of Americans have grown up learning what “dark” is, the kind of suburb in which one hundred million Americans live. You would never see the Milky Way here, or meteors, or anything close to Van Gogh’s wild night, and on Bortle’s scale, on its darkest nights, this suburb would be lucky to rank a 7. And still, a few years ago, the people on this street asked for more light.

      In the forty years my parents have lived here, there has never been any trouble with crime. That is, the type of crime we fear—the stranger snooping outside the window, sneaking in the back door, doing us harm. Even so, the neighborhood petitioned the city government, and soon five straight metallic poles topped by yellow carriage fixtures had been stitched into the street at fifty-yard intervals. From one night to the next, gone was what had been left of the street my mother had chosen because it reminded her of the dark country roads in Ohio where she’d grown up in the 1950s. “I was against it,” she says of more streetlights, “but I was outvoted.”

      Why? I ask.

      “Oh,” my father says. “Safety and security.”

      Sooner or later, when talking about artificial lights and darkness, you come to questions of safety and security. Usually, it’s sooner. In fact, the first question at any presentation about light pollution is bound to be something like, “Yes, so it’s great to see the night sky and everything, but we need lights for safety.” This isn’t actually a question, I realize, and usually the speaker isn’t really asking but rather stating what we have all been taught is fact. But often that statement has a subtext, too, something like what I found on a Colorado website: “less street lighting means more rapes, more assaults, more robberies, and more murders. It is wonderful to be able to see the details of the Crab Nebula from your back yard. It is also wonderful to be able to walk down the street without being attacked by a violent predator.”

      You don’t have to look far to find the idea that darkness and danger go together, as do security and light. In Oakland, a city with thirty-seven thousand streetlights, an assistant police chief claims increased lighting levels could help reduce crime because “most of these crooks, when they commit a crime, want to do it in darkness.” In Boston, with sixty-seven thousand streetlights of its own, a Northeastern University criminology professor argues that lights act as “natural surveillance” and can reduce crime by 20 percent. In Los Angeles, home to more than two hundred forty thousand streetlights, the city attributes a 17 percent drop in violent gang-related crimes in the areas surrounding parks to those parks’ having received new lights. And here in Minneapolis the police advise, “Protect your family, property, and neighborhood by turning on your front door and yard lights,” and “Remember: Criminals like the dark, so make sure your yard has lots of light!”

      Clearly, plenty of us have been receiving similar advice—we live in a world that is brighter than ever before, and growing brighter every year. Part of that growth comes from an ever-increasing human population, especially in urban areas. But the amount of light we are using per person is growing as well. In the UK, for example, lighting efficiency has doubled over the past fifty years—but the per capita electricity consumption for lighting increased fourfold over that time. We are choosing to light up more things, and we are lighting those things more brightly.

      There’s no doubt light at night can make us safer, from a lighthouse beam guiding ships from rocky coasts to simply enough sidewalk light to keep us from tripping on cracked cement. But increasing numbers of lighting engineers and lighting designers, astronomers and dark sky activists, physicians and lawyers and police now say that often the amount of light we’re using—and how we’re using it—goes far beyond true requirements for safety, and that when it comes to lighting, darkness, and security we tend to assume as common sense ideas that, in truth, are not so black and white.

      Foremost among these assumptions is that because some light improves our safety, more light will improve our safety more. It’s an assumption I will hear challenged again and again. As one lighting professional explained, “Too much light would have a negative effect, because if you look into a light, you can’t see anything, you can’t see beyond it.” Gazing from behind his desk, he paused, “You know, a bright enough light in between us and we can’t see each other—and we’re sitting across from each other!”

      The sky over Concord, Massachusetts, this famous town of sixteen thousand about twenty miles west of Boston, reminds me of the sky above my parents’ house near Minneapolis—washed out. (Alan Lewis, whom I have come here to meet, calls it “the great yellow sky.”) Of course, this wasn’t always so. In 1836, for example, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote of the stars here:

      Seen in the streets of cities, how great they are! If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.

      This is almost like reading ancient history—stars, СКАЧАТЬ