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

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      Then, Narboni echoed the point made by Alan Lewis: “We are mainly driven by contrast. This is the main thing in lighting. So, if you go with a high level of light the contrast will be very poor and you won’t feel comfortable. And if you go with contrast you can feel safe even with darkness.”

      Feeling safe with darkness is difficult when we have become so accustomed to high levels of light. As Bob Mizon, coordinator of the British Astronomical Association’s Campaign for Dark Skies (CfDS), explains, “We’re looking at a whole generation of people—even someone my age, and I’m sixty-plus—who have grown up with lots of lights, and who have grown up with lots of bad lights. So people now think that not only is lighting the norm, but that really glary crap lighting is the norm.”

      Still, a growing number of towns and villages in the United States and Europe have been experimenting with turning off some of their lights, some of the time, in an effort to save energy—that is, to save money. And despite concern about a potential growth in crime, many of these places have experienced the opposite result. In fact, police in Bristol, England, reported a 20 percent reduction in crime, and other English towns have seen crime drop up to 50 percent since lights have been turned off after midnight. When Rockford, Illinois, decided to switch off 15 percent of its streetlights, the police chief assured the city council that no studies show correlation between lighting and crime, and that he believes lighting doesn’t directly affect crime one way or the other. In Santa Rosa, California, which has decided to remove six thousand of the city’s fifteen thousand streetlights and place an additional three thousand on a timer that shuts lights off from midnight to 5:30 a.m., the city hopes to save $400,000 a year. The bottom of the Street Light Reduction Program website reads, “Several academic studies have been published on the correlation between street lighting and crime. None of the studies make a direct correlation between increased street lighting and reduced crime. In fact some of the research indicates just the opposite.”

      Other communities have had mixed success, and not because people are fearful of saving money. After Concord turned off two-thirds of its streetlights, the outcry from the populace was horrendous, Lewis tells me and the town recently voted to turn the streetlights back on, “even though most of it is pretty bad lighting.”

      How does that make sense—choosing bad lighting over saving money?

      “So much of it is people thinking that if there’s light it must be safer. And they don’t know what to look for, and they don’t know what good lighting is, they don’t know what bad lighting is.” (Lewis later tells me, “The nice thing about educating people about bad lighting is that there’s so many examples.”)

      “And so they just think that if you turn the lighting off crime is going to go up, or I’m not going to be as safe. And none of that actually is true, in fact in many cases street lighting makes things worse not better.

      “You read the letters to the editors in the local paper, and that’s what they say: You turned the lights out and now I don’t feel safe walking on the street anymore, so turn the lights back on so I feel safe. Even if, by the way,” Lewis says, “they never walk on the street.”

      I’m struck by the fact that Lewis is talking about Concord, a town with a history of famous Revolutionary War violence, but with no history of pervasive violent crime. If people don’t feel safe in a place like Concord, where will they? We forget that crime tends to be concentrated in only a few places, and most places have no crime at all. This is especially true when it comes to the violent, personal crime that we tend to fear most. In Concord I found a friendly New England town, and not any place where you would expect to be attacked by a violent predator. And yet, here were glaring streetlights that did as much to impair my vision as they did to brighten my way. “They could actually reduce the lighting by about fifty percent in the downtown area,” Lewis tells me, “and still have very, very good lighting.”

      Half a continent away from Concord, in the small northern town of Ashland, Wisconsin (population eight thousand), on Lake Superior’s Chequamegon Bay, you find Green Bay Packer jerseys, Day-Glo orange hunting vests, and camouflage hats or pants or jackets almost always within view, and beer and cheese served at nearly every meal. Once a town bustling with Northwoods logging and mining and railroad activity, it has only a single ore dock remaining, unused since 1965, jutting into the bay like a broken Roman aqueduct. A natural foods co-op, a bakery, and the Black Cat coffeehouse share a single block on a single street, and some residents claim you need never go anywhere else. Except, perhaps, for a late-night drive to Tetzner’s Dairy outside nearby Washburn to grab a chocolate ice cream sandwich from the freezer and leave your cash in the coffee can near the door. From the surrounding woods, on one of the nearby Apostle Islands, or better yet floating in a sailboat on the lake, the nights are still dark enough to welcome the Milky Way in brilliant detail.

      But in town, light abounds. Along the lake on US Route 2 shine rows of “acorn” streetlights, the Victorian fixtures that tend to show up wherever decision makers want a nostalgic look. And in the neighborhoods you find plenty of what are, for residential and commercial buildings, the two most common sources of bright light: the “security light” and the “wallpack.”

      Whether in alleys, barnyards, backyards, front yards, or driveways, the white 175-watt, dusk-to-dawn security light is ubiquitous in the United States. Drive into the country and they are often the only lights you see. I remember as a child traveling south with my parents from Minneapolis to the southern Illinois farm country where my grandparents lived. If we went at Christmas we traveled long hours after dark, and I would press my face to the backseat glass, cup my eyes, and stare at the stars. Somehow, the solitary white lights that dotted the black landscape seemed part of the romance, like bits of starry sky fallen to earth.

      But that romantic view hid the reality: The fact that I could see them hundreds of yards away speaks to the glare these lights cast in all directions, including far beyond the boundaries of the property for which they were meant to provide security.

      During the three years I taught at a small college in Ashland, I lived within walking distance of my office and often would take the alleyway five blocks there and back, passing right under a security light. This light was ostensibly designed to illuminate a driveway and a garage basketball hoop, and I used to imagine the swish and clank and splat of a solitary sharpshooter hitting net, rim, and puddle. But I never saw this person; I only saw, from blocks away, the light casting its shadows and glare into neighboring yards and houses. Approaching the light, I would have to shield my eyes, losing whatever dark adaptation I’d gained. I never did ask the neighbors what they thought of this light. My guess? They were so used to it they no longer noticed.

      That we don’t notice glaring lights anymore has direct ramifications for light pollution, of course, but in terms of safety and security, because we are so used to bright lighting, we won’t notice if anything out of the ordinary is taking place. In fact, we won’t think to look or even want to look. And if no one is looking, lighting will do next to nothing for security.

      For example, think of the many industrial warehouses spread outside every city and small town that stand unattended all weekend, every weekend. With few exceptions they will be ringed with lights, far too often wallpacks—those rectangular-shaped lighting fixtures plastered to the sides of buildings all over the country that blast horizontal light onto parking lots, plazas, courtyards … and far beyond those areas. But without a human presence—without someone watching—those lights do little more than provide illumination a criminal would need. So much so that David Crawford, founder of the International Dark-Sky Association, calls this “criminal-friendly lighting.”

      The joke I heard in London is that criminals actually prefer to work in well-lighted areas because they, too, feel safer. Studies bear this out: Light allows criminals to choose their victims, locate escape routes, and see their surroundings. Asked in one study СКАЧАТЬ