The End of Night

by Paul Bogard

  I wonder if the same could be said about light and quiet.

  The sounds of city traffic fall away as we walk into the Louvre courtyard called the Cour Carrée, a small square with a circular fountain in the middle, and on the three stories of sandstone and windows the golden light of some 110,000 small (4.5-watt) lamps (“the same number as all the other lamps in Paris,” Jousse explains). “It’s very beautiful,” he says, this time more serious. “C’est magique.” The effect created is that rather than the lights shining on the building, the building seems to be emitting the light. “The picture is fantastic. The maintenance is also fantastic.” He laughs. The energy for this one courtyard alone costs one million euros per year.

  We leave and cross the busy street to a bridge, Le Pont des Arts. “Et voilà,” Jousse says. “Another magic area of Paris.” Yes, this one a romantic pedestrian overpass made of iron and wood. Jousse says the challenge here was that on this slim bridge there were no good places to put light projectors. “It’s a very poetic place,” he says, “and if people have projectors in their eyes it’s not good. But the city says to me, ‘All bridges must be illuminated.’ So, I say okay.” He chuckles. Jousse solved the problem by placing his projectors under the bridge facing the river, and illuminated the bridge from the light reflecting off the moving water, thus creating a shimmering, beautiful effect.

  What does it mean, I ask, to include values of beauty and poetry and love when you’re working with light? “It’s hard for me to answer,” he says, “I’m an engineer, not a poet. But as far as love goes, I would say that’s true. Oui, c’est vrai. I’m in love with Paris.” He laughs. “If you work on lighting without having any love for what you’re lighting…,” he trails off, as though there’s nothing more to be said. Then: “The love of Paris comes first, the lighting of Paris is secondary.”

  For our last stop we take the métro up to Montmartre and look down onto the city, the softly lit white curves of the Sacré-Cœur church behind us (another of his lighting designs? Oui). The Eiffel Tower stands over the dark city, lit from within by three hundred fifty sodium vapor lights designed to mimic the amber glow of the gas lamps that once lined the interior of the structure. Only three decades ago, just one side of the tower was lit, all the lighting from spotlights stationed by the Trocadéro Palace. Jousse tells me that the energy consumption was huge, and because of the tower’s brown paint you couldn’t see any details. Then came the idea to light the tower from within. Since then, except for each top of the hour, when twenty thousand white lights sparkle the tower for ten minutes, or on rare occasions (briefly all in red for a visit from the Chinese premier, all in blue to honor the European Union), the lighting hasn’t changed for twenty-five years. “And for us it’s very conservative, it’s classical. It’s beautiful like a jewel, but it doesn’t change. But it could be worse; it could be a wedding cake. So, sometimes classical is good.”

  When I share my appreciation for the role lighting plays in the story Paris tells, he says, “If you feel that way, then I am very happy.” With this, Jousse bids me farewell.

  I turn and look out over Paris. From Montmartre, you see the pollution from the suburbs at the edges of the city, their butterscotch orange lights running unleashed into the sky. But the old Paris looks dark, the view a direct result of the rules that light fixtures be directed downward and the lights themselves not be placed any higher than they are. The effect is that of an old city in pre-industrial darkness, though under that canopy you know there lives and breathes a city of light.

  When I turn back toward Sacré-Cœur, François Jousse is rounding a corner of the church, his head lowered, his boots returning him to the shadows.

  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 criminolo
gy 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, seen from the streets of cities? In this passage from Nature, Emerson looked for a way to make the point that we take nature for granted—we take life for granted—by finding an example of something so commonplace we don’t even see it anymore. What better example than the brilliant starry night over a nineteenth-century Concord lit by oil lamps?

  I didn’t have to visit Concord to know that its sky holds many fewer of Emerson’s “envoys of beauty.” But I wanted to talk with Lewis, to learn more about how too much light could actually act in a negative way. A longtime optometrist and former president of the Illuminating Engineering Society of North America (IESNA), the lighting professionals who have much to say about how we light our world, Alan Lewis has spent the last forty years helping to “educate lighting people about how the visual system operates.”

  For example, Lewis says, most streetlights are actually designed in a way that often causes more problems than they solve.

  “Badly designed street lighting, which is probably eighty percent of street lighting, are glare sources,” he explains. “That is, they actually reduce the contrast of things you’re trying to see rather than increase it, because of this disability glare problem that occurs due to scatter in the eye.”

  Disability glare from poorly designed streetlights—picture the traditional cobrahead drop-lens fixtures used on most American streets—is the main reason drivers, especially older drivers, have a tough time at night. As we age, proteins in the lens of our eye begin to accumulate, and we lose the transparency we had when we were younger. In the same way that a brand-new windshield is crystal clear but ages over time with accumulated minuscule chips and dings, these proteins reduce the eye’s transparency as they scatter the light coming into the eye. The effect is that instead of going to the retina and focusing, the light is distributed across the retina, casting what Lewis calls “a veiling luminance” that significantly reduces contrast.

  To optimize vision, Lewis says, the key is to maximize the contrast—the brightness difference between what you’re trying to see and the background—while minimizing the amount of light going directly from the light source into the eye, because when light goes directly into the eye the greater portion of it is scattered. “You don’t want bright lights coming in from anywhere but the target you’re trying to see,” he says. “I mean any additional source of light out there, like a streetlight shining in your eye or a headlight coming at you or glare sources on a building just makes things harder to see.”

  The second major factor in our seeing well at night (or not) is adaptation, the way our eyes adapt as we move from brighter areas to darker areas. Because of the way our streetlights are usually placed, our eyes constantly have to go back and forth. “If you’re in a place that’s relatively uniformly illuminated by streetlights, then your adaptation remains fairly constant and that’s okay,” Lewis explains. “But what happens is streetlights tend to get dispersed somewhat willy-nilly and so you leave this bright spot and drive into this dark spot but you’re not adapted, and so visibility is actually worse than if you hadn’t had the streetlight there to begin with.” Lewis compares this situation to walking into a movie theater: the way it takes a few moments for your eyes to adapt. “So, as you move from lighted areas to nonlighted areas visibility can actually get worse. In many cases, an equal level of darkness is better than a sporadic light-dark, light-dark area.”

  It isn’t only streetlights that cause this problem. The worst offenders, he says, are intensely lit places like gas stations and parking lots. About twenty years ago in America, gas stations began to increase the level of lighting, not for any real safety concerns but for marketing purposes. (“People like light, they’re attracted to it. There’s no question about it,” he says.) “You go in and you fill up under a canopy that was highly lit from a marketing standpoint to attract you, rather than a need for vision,” explains Lewis. “And then you drive out into a dark road and it may be a minute or two before you can readapt to the darkness, which can be very dangerous.”

  “Because you might get hit?”

  “Generally you’re okay,” he laughs, “you’re in the car. It’s the other folks who have to worry.”

  In other words, it’s for marketing purposes (to get you to stop and buy stuff) that gas stations, shopping malls, and car dealerships are lit so brightly—not, as we might think, primarily for safety. If safety were the primary goal for these establishments, Lewis and others told me, they would be lit much more dimly so that the adaptation and glare problems would be reduced. The problem is that if one business raises its lighting level, the others will feel compelled to as well because by contrast, their establishment will seem dim and therefore less attractive—even closed.

  The same scenario holds true for our society in general. As our surroundings grow brighter, we grow used to that level of brightness, and so anything dimmer seems extraordinarily dim, even dark. This is exactly what happened as artificial lighting developed through the ages. The once glorious oil lamps became dim and disgusting with the advent of wonderful gas lighting, which then became smelly and awful and unbearably dim the moment we saw electric light. In other words, once our eyes get used to seeing brighter lights, we must have brighter l
ights.

  Roger Narboni, a lighting designer in Paris, explained this concept to me by telling of how he’d been hired to renew the lighting in a very large, very old fish market near Paris, where the business took place between 1:00 and 3:00 a.m.

  “The plan was 400 lux on the fish. But when the people selling the fish saw it, they said, This is dull, we can’t see the fish. They were used to having big halogen lamps—which were hot lamps that were terrible for the fish, but they were used to them. With the new lights the atmosphere was totally different, and for them it was no good. So they said, Can you raise the level a little? And we said, Sure. And they said, Can we have double? And we said, Wow, double, okay.” He laughed. So, Narboni said, they raised the level of lighting to 800 lux, but when the fishmongers came to work they asked if the lights had even been changed. “I took out my light meter and showed them: 800 lux. And they said, Are you sure it’s working? Can we go higher? So we went to 1,200, then 1,600, 1,800, and they were never pleased. They kept saying, It’s dull, we want more. And finally I said, Okay, forget it, because we’re not going to go to 3,000 lux or 5,000 lux or to daytime. This is insane; I don’t want to do that. So I quit. And I told them, Your eyes are not able to understand what’s going on. And even if we put more, you cannot compare it, and you will ask for more and more and more, and it’s like addicts. And they never understood that.”

  But a fish market in the middle of the night is one thing, I said. What about in the city itself?

  “It’s the same for the urban city. If you put more lights for safety, very often and very quickly people will say, Oh, we don’t see enough, it’s not working, people are still being attacked, and we have problems and so we should put more light. And we’re going to go up and up and up. There is no limit, because the vision gets accustomed to that and we need more.”