Dec 14

Dec 14 Searching for Darkness (Paul Bogard)

Image: Squiver , from video for The End of Night, Little, Brown & Co. Publishing. The following is excerpted from the book, The End of Night, by permission of the author.

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

Chapter 4 “Know Darkness”
(p. 172-176) Kindle Edition

I first met David Saetre when I moved to the northern Wisconsin town of Ashland to teach at the small college where he is campus minister and professor of religion…I know him as a deeply joyful, conscientious man, and I knew I wanted to talk with him especially about metaphorical darkness and light.

“I grew up on the edge of a small town, and there was a kind of freedom to rural small community childhood that I think we have lost, by and large,” he tells me. “I can remember from a very early age playing in the dark and being allowed to roam until bedtime in the dark. It seems to me that very few parents would allow children to do that kind of thing today. Not only was there a freedom to that, but there was a kind of acquaintance. I tell the same story if someone asks me about care and concern for the earth. Real care is a form of intimacy, and you have to cultivate that intimacy somehow. I was lucky to have grown up with it literally—in the woods, in the soil, in the earth. The same is true with the dark.”

…If we never have the chance to know literal darkness as a child—to play in that darkness—it would make sense that we would grow into adulthood without appreciation for either the literal darkness of our nights or the figurative darkness of our lives. As Saetre says, “We are not taught that not knowing is okay.”

…“In so much biblical narrative,” Saetre says, “night and the experience of dark is not the place of evil and sin but rather the place where humans encounter the deep mystery of being. There’s something about the deprivation of light that allows the characters in these narratives to experience reality in its most profound and holy form.”

…Maybe the best example from Christianity of nights being a time of significant experience comes in the literature of the sixteenth-century Spanish monk St. John of the Cross, from whom we have the phrase “dark night of the soul.” His first poem, “On a dark night,” is his most famous. St. John described this sensual poem as the product of divine inspiration.

Saetre loves St. John’s work. “In his poem, St. John wrote that his experience took place ‘on a dark night,’ with ‘my house, at last, grown still.’ The house of our lives is mostly experienced in daytime, and the daytime here is the life of obligation, obligation, and the life of obligation is so overbearing that it becomes oppressive. In order to experience the liberation of transformation—being loved this deeply transforms him, or, as St. John says, ‘Lover transformed in Beloved!’—we need the dark of night, because the daytime is so filled with the burdens of responsibility. The light throws us back into all the stereotype false selves that we put on, all the masks that we wear in order to fulfill obligations.”

Saetre smiles. “And we all have to do this—you can’t live all the time in the night. But our daylight selves are not our full selves.”

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From Chapter 5, “The Ecology of Darkness”
(pp. 129-133) Kindle Edition

Thoreau’s writings are a font of memorable sayings, perhaps none better known than “In Wildness is the Preservation of the World,” from his essay “Walking.” The aphorism is often mistakenly repeated with “wilderness” in place of “wildness” … But “wildness” makes the phrase infinitely more powerful. While we usually think of wilderness as a particular place or type of place, wildness is a quality we can find anywhere (as indeed Thoreau found it—or found it lacking—in certain books, animals, and people). It makes sense we would find wildness in wilderness, for example, but we could also find it in cities, in our thoughts and choices, in our daily domestic lives. The history of Western civilization is full of attempts to stamp out wildness—the unknown, the mysterious, the creative, the feminine, the animal, the dark. Thoreau saw an American society hell-bent on fencing in, wiping out, using up, trampling down, or blocking every trace of wildness, and declared it antithetical to sustainable life.

But if wildness preserves the world, what preserves wildness? In his chapter from Walden titled “Solitude,” Thoreau hinted toward a possible answer.

Though it is now dark, the wind still blows and roars in the wood, the waves still dash, and some creatures lull the rest with their notes. The repose is never complete. The wildest animals do not repose, but seek their prey now; the fox, and skunk, and rabbit, now roam the fields and woods without fear. They are Nature’s watchmen,—links which connect the days of animated life.

Across the country from Walden and more than one hundred fifty years after Thoreau, Travis Longcore and Catherine Rich have created the Urban Wildlands Group in Los Angeles. Dedicated to “the conservation of species, habitats, and ecological processes in urban and urbanizing areas,” Urban Wildlands ranks light at night high on its list of concerns.

…With at least 30 percent of all vertebrates and more than 60 percent of all invertebrates worldwide nocturnal, and with many of the rest crepuscular, those implications are enormous. While most of us are inside and asleep, outside the night world is wide awake with matings, migrations, pollinations, and feeding—in short, the basic happenings that keep world biodiversity alive. Light pollution threatens this biodiversity by forcing sudden change on habits and patterns that have evolved to depend on light in the day and darkness at night. (In just one example, circadian photoreceptors—those same ones on which we humans rely—have been present in the vertebrate retina for at least five hundred million years.) Aside from crazy-looking ancient fish and their bottom-of-the-ocean ecosystems (and those of caves or soil), every creature on this planet has evolved in bright days and dark nights. None has had the evolutionary time to adapt to the blitzkrieg of artificial light.

Significantly, Longcore and Rich make a distinction between “astronomical light pollution” and “ecological light pollution.” They define the latter as “artificial light that alters the natural patterns of light and dark in ecosystems.” Longcore says, “We had to do that, because the idea of ‘light pollution’ is very much an astronomy/astronomer focus. You could have a dark sky–compliant light—pointed down—and still do a lot of damage.”

Light at night impacts wildlife in five primary areas: orientation, predation, competition, reproduction, and circadian rhythms. If we have heard anything about light at night and wildlife, we’ve probably heard about orientation. This is the problem of insects drawn to streetlights, of migrating birds being attracted to lit-up city buildings or communication tower lights, or of beach-born sea turtles heading the wrong way—toward streetlights and hotel signs—and ending up crushed by truck tires or plucked easily by predators.

Introduce artificial light to a dark environment several billion years in the making and suddenly some species find themselves exposed to increased predation—and so reduce their foraging time. Introduced light means new pressures of competition between species, some of which adapt better than others. Artificial lights confuse reproduction cycles—the flashing attraction signs of fireflies, for example—or the internal circadian rhythms that synchronize the internal processes of birds, fish, insects, and plants, just as they do for humans. Beyond individual species, these light/dark rhythms also shape seasonal changes such as migration. Entire ecosystems shift as the length of light changes through spring, summer, fall, and winter…

Some may ask why any of this matters for humans. But when we talk about ecological light pollution, we talk about the health of ecosystems, and no matter who we are or where we live, we live as part of one. Our ecological knowledge is really knowledge of our own health.

Paul Bogard is also the author of the new children’s book What if Night?, from Keystone Canyon Press. What if Night? celebrates the joy of the nighttime world in this early introduction to environmental science. See more at Paul-Bogard.com.