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

  • Paul Bogard
Little, Brown: 2013 9780316182904 | ISBN: 978-0-3161-8290-4

Here is a paradox: the brilliance of the Enlightenment happened by candlepower. Clarity of vision came courtesy of the dark. The enigmatic night sky must have gleamed everywhere as the giants of the post-Copernican revolution stumbled home from their learned societies. In Birmingham in the English Midlands in the late eighteenth century, Matthew Boulton, James Watt, Erasmus Darwin, Joseph Priestley and Benjamin Franklin met by the full Moon, calling themselves the Lunar Society. The astonishing adventure of science has now almost eliminated true darkness. And for that huge and growing portion of humanity living in cities, it has bleached the night sky of all but a handful of stars.

The Milky Way lights up the night sky above the Navajo trail in Bryce Canyon, Utah. Credit: WALLY PACHOLKA/ASTROPICS.COM

As Paul Bogard shows in his hymn to vanished darkness, The End of Night, this electric overdose comes at a high cost. It may be linked to sleep disorders, changes in migratory behaviour in birds and insects, stress and exhaustion in shift workers, and even obesity.

Bogard's book is a literary journey — in the space of a few pages, we walk with Virginia Woolf, Charles Dickens and Rétif de la Bretonne. It is also a pilgrimage to our capitals of light. We visit London, with its 1,600 surviving gas lamps; Paris, where 110,000 4.5-watt bulbs illuminate just one courtyard in theLouvre Museum; and Broadway's 'Great White Way' in New York. Bogard hunts true darkness, too: places far from security lights, where nights are so clear and dark that the stars begin to reveal subtle gem-like colours, and the Milky Way emerges as a sight of depth and structure. He goes beyond the broad splashes of electric brilliance now smeared across continents, seeking places where darkness is conserved and sponsored by bodies such as the International Dark Sky Association in Tucson, Arizona, and the Night Sky Team of the US National Park Service. Bogard dines in Mantua, Italy, with one of the makers of the first world atlas of artificial night sky brightness (see P. Cinzano et al. Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 328, 689–707; 2001). He sets off with amateur astronomers in darkest England and the United States. In Las Vegas, Nevada, where the brightest beam on Earth lights up the sky from the apex of the Luxor casino, he still — just — glimpses Rigel and Betelgeuse in the Orion constellation, and Sirius. He talks to researchers and engineers on two continents about the urban compulsion for brightness. Any evidence that ever brighter security lights equal ever greater security is dismissed as dubious: glare creates shadows in which predators can hide. Bogard and his interlocutors also conclude that we may in any case be surrendering to an ancient fear of the dark. The European Union alone, he reports, is estimated to waste €1.7 billion (US$2.2 billion) a year on needless outdoor lighting.

Bogard visits New York's Museum of Modern Art to contemplate the testimony of Vincent van Gogh's 1889 painting The Starry Night and, as a counterweight,Giacomo Balla's 1909 Street Light (“Let's kill the moonlight!” was a rallying cry for Italian Futurists). Bogard explores the biology of vision, the capacity of eyes to adjust to ever lower levels of light and the concept of 'seeing' — the odd term stargazers use to record the atmospheric turbulence that makes stars twinkle. He tries to experience the darkness celebrated by Henry David Thoreau atWalden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, but is stymied by the glow now emanating from the town.

Bogard becomes a midnight sensualist. He goes into Death Valley in California and Nevada, and, training binoculars on the night sky, suddenly feels “as though I'm falling. I have to pull away to find my balance in the dark. The ground on which I'm standing, the cloth of stars above. The great nebula in Orion's belt, the Pleiades, Jupiter so bright and clear it makes me laugh.” He visits the Mont-Mégantic Starry Sky Reserve in Quebec Province, Canada, where local communities have turned darkness into astro-tourism. (Sadly, the sky is occluded by fog.)

He also considers the victims of 'white nights': prisoners locked in an eternal glare, shift workers trapped in a cycle of sleeplessness, and what you might call electric roadkill. In North America, some 500 species migrate by night and the catalogues of death by electrocution have been enough to trigger a Fatal Light Awareness Programme (FLAP). He cites the murderous night when 50,000 birds followed a beam of light from a Georgia airport straight into the ground and the night when 1,500 migrating grebes in Utah were confused by lights reflected from clouds “and crashed into parking lots they mistook for ponds”.

This is a rich book with a rewarding appendix of notes. The straining for descriptive effect occasionally obtrudes; Bogard teaches creative non-fiction to university students, so he will know Samuel Johnson's advice about striking out the fine writing. The book's ambitious scope also necessarily dictates a sacrifice of depth. But these are small things. The big thing is that, as you read it, you too will want to reclaim the night and perhaps rediscover the heavens of the Enlightenment.