The End of Night

by Paul Bogard

  Legris now lives and works as an engineer in nearby Sherbrooke, at more than one hundred fifty thousand people the largest city close to the park, and she can see the results of her work in the lighting fixtures around her. To hear her say it, however, the credit for “her work” really goes to others. When I ask her what she is most proud of, she says, “the engagement of the people behind this. Partnering with me. There was so much support in the community, with so many people. And I’m proud of these people for being proactive, and deciding to go forward. I couldn’t have done this by myself. So really it’s a community success. Whenever I had a chance to give a presentation and explain to them about the situation, most people were like, ‘What do we do?’

  “I found the job very inspiring,” she says. “It wasn’t just building a bridge, it was protecting the ability to see the universe.”

  As education director for Mont-Mégantic National Park and scientific coordinator for the ASTROLab, Sébastien Giguère describes his job as communicating to the public the mission of the Starry Sky Reserve. “They’re doing the science,” he says of the scientific observatory, “and we’re sharing science. And science isn’t only about equations and white coats, it’s about the mystery of our presence in the universe and why are we here and why this is so fabulous.” Giguère has a pleasant nature and conveys a sense that he’s committed, serious, and sincere. “And I have a strong wonderment muscle,” he laughs. “I don’t know if we can say that in English, but I like to say that to guides here. We’re not here to make a college course, we’re here to make people amazed about nature, so we have to see it in your eyes, and you have to be expressing this sense of wonder about everything. I like to cite Einstein, ‘He who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.’ ”

  Giguère tells me that he and a number of the guides traveled to New York City to visit the Hayden Planetarium, which they enjoyed (and wished for “a fraction of their budget”), but that “one thing that struck everybody here was that they have so much technology but nobody there to share the amazement, the wonder, no one to talk with about this. And that’s not just in New York; in the Montreal Science Centre it’s the same. I like what Stephen Jay Gould said: ‘We will not fight to save what we do not love.’ I always remember that our link to nature is not just cerebral, it’s also emotional.”

  What impresses me most about Giguère—and this reflects so much of what I’ve learned at Mont-Mégantic—is that while committed to the scientific mission of the observatory, his dedication to darkness goes beyond simply protecting the view of the sky for astronomers.

  “The first mission of the project—what is now the Starry Sky Reserve—was to save the scientific viability of the project here. But I like to say that maybe in a few decades what we will realize is that the most important heritage of this project is to have preserved the possibility of the fundamental experience of the night sky.

  “A lot of people come from the cities, and they are amazed, they don’t believe it, they don’t remember how starry a sky can be. People just sit down, outside here, because they have vertigo. Compare that to how one of my colleagues came back from China and told us that in a lot of places there is so much pollution in the air that only one percent of sunlight reaches the ground. And so, you know, I am crying because we are not seeing the stars at night, but there you can’t even see our own star in the daytime. What is happening to humanity when children grow up without seeing the sun?”

  Giguère seems like someone for whom Leopold’s statement about the consequences of gaining “an ecological education” would make sense.

  “That’s a great question, how to be positive without being naïve. I feel a kind of natural amazement toward the world, and even if I’m depressed witnessing what is happening right now, it just can’t kill this amazement. I also feel lucky working in a place where nature is everywhere, and I have so many opportunities to be amazed and love nature, because with the starry skies, with the mountains, with the lakes, birds, and animals, I would find it hard to go back into big cities. I’m not used to them anymore, being stuck in the traffic and all the pollution, and all the stores and streets and pavement everywhere.

  “So I try to do my part, doing some talks, but I still feel that it’s not enough. My girlfriend tells me not to put too much on my shoulders. But when we know what is at stake, that it’s the first time in history our impact is so wide. And then, that a lot of people don’t notice…,” he says quietly.

  “I like to think the fact the stars are disappearing from the sky comes back to our relation with nature, and our way to inhabit the earth. And so closing our only window to the universe appears to me like a great symbol of how we are separating ourselves from nature. It’s like how people don’t go out of the cities and so they don’t know; they are just stuck in their bubble.

  “We can’t see the universe anymore—it’s not the most dangerous thing that we are doing right now but it’s a powerful symbol.”

  Giguère admits with a laugh that he talks so much about the importance of wonder that people recognize him as the “wonder-keeper,” because he is also the goaltender on the local hockey team. “This feeling isn’t only directed toward nature but toward humanity as well. Some people think astronomy is not that important, compared to ecology, because of what’s at stake. But I think the more you are aware of this incredible cosmic evolution story, the more you are aware of the miracle of life. When you know about the vastness and emptiness of space and then you look at this little pale blue dot, you can really develop a feeling of responsibility because you know how rare and miraculous and beautiful it is. Almost every astronaut coming back from space has said that the most important thing he has lived there is just looking at the earth and realizing how precious it is and how our borders are all relative. William Anders, the astronaut who took the famous photo of earthrise, said, ‘We came all this way to explore the Moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.’ ”

  As I drive down the mountain from the observatory, it’s after midnight. My headlights can barely show the road ahead, the fog is so thick. I drive slowly on the steep, curving roadway. I came all this way and this is not what I was hoping to see at Mont-Mégantic. I was hoping for a starry night, to see how the darkness here compares with Sark, or Cape Cod, or the lake in northern Minnesota where I feel at home. But I also didn’t expect to find what I have—a group of people so committed to making Mont-Mégantic what it is. And each—Malenfant, Legris, Giguère, several young guides, scientists, and upper-level administrators—plays a vital role. With the people at Mont-Mégantic I felt a kinship, and in that kinship I found at least one antidote to the sadness in Leopold’s quote about living alone in a world of wounds. I found a community of people who are choosing to do everything they can to help the community around them become aware of its riches.

  “I love my sky. This is my problem.”

  Cipriano Marin and I are sharing lunch when he says this, sharing papas arrugadas with mojo picón and mojo verde and glasses of red wine in Teide National Park in Spain’s Canary Islands. It’s a sentence I know I won’t forget, a sentence I have heard from so many others in so many different ways. To love a sky—to love anything—is only a problem if you know that love is in danger.

  Cipriano knows. A native of the Canary Islands, which lie southwest of the Spanish mainland off the coast of Morocco, he grew up with a clear, dark sky. Now in his late fifties, with salt-and-pepper hair, he has seen that dark sky gradually fade, due especially to the city lights of Las Palmas and Santa Cruz de Tenerife. He feels the loss especially hard, he says, because he grew up on the islands. “The sky for the islander is very important,” he says. “We have only two natural resources, the sky and the sea. On an island, the sky is part of the landscape, part of the identity of the island.” Luckily for the rest of the world, Cipriano’s activism on behalf of dark skies has reached far beyond the islands he loves. For twent
y years, he has worked with UNESCO, and in 2007 he helped to organize an international conference in the Canaries that resulted in a declaration “in Defence of the Night Sky and the Right to Starlight,” and an innovative program called Starlight Reserves.

  And so I have traveled to the Canaries to meet Cipriano, and to eat “wrinkled potatoes” with red and green salsas and to talk about protecting darkness. But I have also come here to see a world-famous night sky.

  I’m talking about a night sky that leaves you breathless, that makes you want to study the stars, or write poetry, or dance. In the months just before I traveled here, taking the two-hour flight from Madrid with a plane full of European tourists on holiday, a photographer had assembled a series of time-lapse images of the sky over the Canaries, set it to music, and put it on the Web. I knew about this because just about everyone who knew about my writing this book sent me the link to these photographs, often with a note saying, essentially, You should go here!!!!! For a number of reasons it isn’t fair to compare a photograph of the night sky with what you can see with your own eyes—a camera’s ability to keep its lens open for long periods of time gathering light and to focus every pixel in the frame rather than just the center of the view, for example. But I still hoped that the sky I would see in the Canaries would be pretty close to these photos.

  I’m not alone. The Canaries are home to the world’s newest major telescope, which also happens to be the world’s largest single-aperture optical telescope: the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC). The GTC sits on the edge of a volcano, along with several other telescopes at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on the island of La Palma, and attracts astronomers from all over the world. It isn’t only having an incredibly large telescope that makes the Canaries special, though. The Canary Islands are one of a handful of sites in the world extremely well situated for viewing the night sky.

  Urban growth and sprawl—with its attendant light pollution—has rendered observatories in and near cities obsolete. So while there are observatories in places like Paris, Los Angeles, and London, few people use them. For example, the Paris observatory is a great place to visit if you appreciate history and enjoy imagining the world as it used to be—an elegant building set in fields outside town where silk-stockinged, wig-wearing viewers took in the sky—but it now lies surrounded by the concrete fields and blooms of electric light that fill the French capital.

  These days an absence of light pollution is only one requirement for an excellent observatory site, and only a few locations in the world work. Especially important for optical telescopes like the GTC is turbulence (or lack thereof) in the earth’s atmosphere. Because turbulence makes holding a steady image difficult, the best locations in the world are those in the earth’s mid-latitudes, especially on the west coast of a continent or island, where the dominant west-to-east flow of air moves smoothly in from the sea. Good weather—few clouds and little rain—is also key, and so deserts are often excellent locations. Accessibility, stable ground (no active volcanoes), moderate altitude—when you add up the different requirements, only a handful of spots around the globe stand out, including the Canaries, the Hawaiian Islands, Baja California, northern Chile, and South Africa. Together, the modern observatories in these locations create a network of telescopes, “an ensemble of windows open to the universe” (as Cipriano says), that provide the best views of space we have from our home here on Earth.

  Unless you have been raised by diplomats, you probably have not spent much time with someone like Cipriano Marin. Without it seeming corny or naïve, he talks in language that seems made for “declarations” written “in defense” of certain rights. In fact, he makes the idea that the ability to see a starry sky is a basic human right, like clean water and voting, seem wholly justified. My sense is that in the United States, a country known for thinking it has the last word on rights, most of us have never considered a view of a starry sky as a “right.” But the UNESCO declaration does: “An unpolluted night sky that allows the enjoyment and contemplation of the firmament should be considered an inalienable right of humankind equivalent to all other environmental, social, and cultural rights.” Cipriano admits that such a right is difficult to uphold—that while it’s not hard to find philosophical support for the idea, legislative support is tougher to secure. Because, I ask, then somebody would have to do something about it?

  “Sí.”

  Still, Cipriano has done impressive work to raise the issue of dark skies to international consciousness. The report from the 2007 conference includes statements of support from the Spanish minister of the environment, the vice president of the European Parliament, and a long list of directors, presidents, and secretaries-general, followed by four hundred pages in support of a right to starlight in essays written by scientists, artists, organizers—people like Travis Longcore and Chloé Legris. Together they argue that “a view of the starlight has been and is an inspiration for all humankind, that its observation has represented an essential element in the development of all cultures and civilizations, and that throughout history, the contemplation of the firmament has sustained many of the scientific and technical developments that define progress.” Cipriano calls the night sky “an essential element of our civilization and culture that we are losing at a fast pace, and whose loss would affect all countries in the world.”

  Maybe that’s the most impressive thing, that this man from a small island in the Atlantic is doing everything he can to rally the world. It would be so easy for him to simply stay on his island and not bother. Cipriano’s passion comes from his knowing that there is nowhere to run, nowhere to escape, nowhere to drive to get away from light pollution. In this, he is much like citizens of other island nations who feel the effects of rising sea levels from climate change. For most Americans, the need to address such problems seems decades away. “For the islanders the universe is very closed,” he tells me. “And that is a problem but also an advantage.”

  Cipriano sets his wineglass on the table. “Rafael Arozarena, a writer from my homeland, an islander from the middle of the ocean, synthesized the whole spirit of the declaration in a beautiful, short poem:

  My inheritance was a handful of earth

  But of sky

  All the universe.

  One of the most meaningful things about the Starlight Reserve concept is how detailed are its dimensions, categories, criteria, and recommendations. Cipriano and the more than one hundred international experts working alongside him have put forward in a compelling and novel way their reasons for the need for Starlight Reserves and their vision of what those reserves would be. Rather than simply assume that all protected areas are protected for the same reasons, the different Starlight Reserves imagine several types of these areas: Starlight Natural Sites safeguard nocturnal habitats; Starlight Astronomy Sites protect our view of the stars; Starlight Heritage Sites preserve “archaeological and cultural sites or monuments created by man as an expression of its relationship with the firmament.” Starlight Landscapes preserve “natural and cultural landscapes related to starlight where natural manifestations or human works beautifully blend with the view of the firmament.” And, finally, Starlight Oases/Human Habitats are dedicated to the protection of darkness in areas that include rural communities and small villages.

  Cipriano believes Starlight Reserves have great, as yet untapped, potential for tourism. He names especially those World Heritage Sites all over the world, most now closed at night, that could be developed for night tourism to the benefit of local communities. “The night is missing in the tourist destinations, especially the ecotourism destinations,” he explains. “It’s important to offer the night.” Through such night tourism he believes these Starlight Reserves present opportunities for communities around the world to develop in ways that protect darkness but allow people to enjoy modern notions of progress. “We need to relate the idea of seeing the stars to the advance of modernity,” he tells me. That is, those who care about darkness should look for w
ays to protect the night through supporting economic development, rather than simply hoping there will always be undeveloped areas to serve as refuges of real night. “If you see the satellite image of North Korea, it’s dark,” he explains, “but that’s not a good solution.”

  The Korean image is one of the most dramatic nighttime views we have of the earth from space. On the Korean peninsula, South Korea blazes away like any developed country, and Seoul like any major city. But just north of that enormous city, a sudden line of darkness marks the DMZ and begins the expanse of darkness rising north the length of the peninsula. This is long-suffering North Korea. The view of such sudden darkness back-to-back with that of light-tattered South Korea is dramatic and, in some ways, appealing, but no one would wish the lives North Koreans endure on anyone. Of course, when you look at satellite photos of the world at night, there are many other areas of the world with large human populations that are still dark at night—great swaths of sub-Saharan Africa, for example, as well as large patches of Asia and South America. While it would be wrong to deny people in these parts of the globe the gift of artificial light at night (and fascinating programs are already bringing solar lanterns to far-flung populations, for example), Cipriano and many others hope that light can spread without the associated costs we in the West now suffer. The hope is for a different style of progress, with the benefits of the modern world reaching more and more of its citizens but with the map of the world at night growing darker and darker.

  The Korean peninsula at night showing the bright developed South and the dark undeveloped North. (NASA, DMSP)

  You definitely should not eat a huge breakfast before driving up the winding road to the GTC observatory. I have found this out too late, and I am remembering when I was thirteen and traveled a similar road outside Mexico City with my traveling baseball team in a bus with large Plexiglas windows that opened only at the top, a bus that would not stop for sick American boys. Luckily, today my discomfort doesn’t develop into needing Cipriano to stop his old Mercedes, and finally we emerge from the lush forest of lower elevations into the higher volcanic landscape that is home to the observatory.