The End of Night

by Paul Bogard

  Here’s the full passage of Thoreau fishing at night, from Walden: “Sometimes, after staying in a village parlor till the family had all retired, I have returned to the woods, and, partly with a view to the next day’s dinner, spent the hours of midnight fishing from a boat by moonlight, serenaded by owls and foxes, and hearing, from time to time, the creaking note of some unknown bird close at hand. These experiences were very memorable and valuable to me,—anchored in forty feet of water, and twenty or thirty rods from the shore, surrounded sometimes by thousands of small perch and shiners, dimpling the surface with their tails in the moonlight, and communicating by a long flaxen line with mysterious nocturnal fishes which had their dwelling forty feet below, or something dragging sixty feet of line about the pond as I drifted in the gentle night breeze, now and then feeling a slight vibration along it, indicative of some life prowling about its extremity, of dull uncertain blundering purpose there, and slow to make up its mind. At length you slowly raise, pulling hand over hand, some horned pout squeaking and squirming to the upper air. It was very queer, especially on dark nights, when your thoughts had wandered to vast and cosmogonal themes in other spheres, to feel this faint jerk, which came to interrupt your dreams and link you to Nature again. It seemed as if I might next cast my line upward into the air, as well as downward into this element, which was scarcely more dense. Thus I caught two fishes as it were with one hook.”

  5: The Ecology of Darkness

  Anyone who lived two years, two months, and two days in the Massachusetts woods during the mid-nineteenth century would have known well the primitive darkness of natural night. Reading Walden with this in mind, it is clear that for Henry David Thoreau this was the case. First published in 1854, by Ticknor and Fields in Boston, with the seldom-used full title Walden; or, Life in the Woods, the book features chapters titled “Sounds,” “Solitude,” and “The Village,” in which we find direct reference to darkness John Bortle would have ranked at 1 (at the pond) or 2 (in Concord). In a later essay, “Night and Moonlight,” Thoreau’s connection to the dark is clear. How ironic, then, that Walden Pond State Reservation closes at sunset and Thoreau’s cabin remains unvisited every night of the year. Of course, that the site remains preserved at all is worth celebrating—as recently as 1990 it took the rock-and-roll star Don Henley creating the Walden Woods Project to keep development from radically altering the area. While Thoreau’s cabin has long been gone—as has the darkness he knew—the nearby Concord Museum has an excellent collection of his artifacts, and the pond remains a wonderful place to visit and to remember a writer whose reflections on our way of life seem to grow more applicable by the year.

  Thoreau’s “Night and Moonlight” was published in the Atlantic Monthly Magazine in November of 1863, some six months after his death. “Chancing to take a memorable walk by moonlight some years ago,” he begins, “I resolved to take more such walks, and make acquaintance with another side of Nature. I have done so.” He seems to have understood late in his very short life (he was only forty-four when he died) how rich the world of night and moonlight could be for his thinking and writing. He asks, “What if one moon has come and gone, with its world of poetry, its weird teachings, its oracular suggestions,—so divine a creature freighted with hints for me, and I have not used her,—one moon gone by unnoticed?” One wonders, as with Emerson, what he would say about our light-washed world today.

  Hearing the Walden frogs brings to mind “From Silent Spring to Silent Night,” the compelling work put forward by UC–Berkeley’s Dr. Tyrone Hayes linking the use of the pesticide atrazine with the decline in frog numbers, and what this loss means, among other things, for the soundscapes of our nights.

  For a detailed discussion of the distinction between “wilderness” and “wildness,” see William Cronon’s “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” from his book Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (New York: Norton, 1996).

  In addition to gathering the scattered research on wildlife and darkness, one of the features that makes Ecological Consequences of Artificial Night Lighting (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2006), edited by Catherine Rich and Travis Longcore, unique is its attempt to combine scientific work with creative literature. The book’s epigraph comes from Thoreau’s “Night and Moonlight,” and each section begins with a short selection of creative work by such authors as Bernd Heinrich and Carl Safina. As with so many issues related to the natural world, the information gathered by scientists about the impact of artificial lighting on wildlife (let alone on humans) will only be as powerful as the stories used to present it. While Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, for example, was full of scientific research, her book would not have been as powerful without her metaphoric title or her opening “Fable for Tomorrow.” Rich and Longcore deserve credit for their efforts to bring attention to the “wasted, ecologically disruptive light” now filling our nights, and for their argument that this light is “itself the end product of extractive and consumptive processes that are themselves environmentally damaging.”

  Funded by Germany’s Federal Ministry of Education and Research, the ongoing study called Verlust der Nacht is the most promising work addressing ecological light pollution. Researchers involved note that while attention to the economic costs of lighting and light pollution are important, knowledge is urgently needed for “light pollution policies that go beyond energy efficiency to include human well-being (and) the structure and functioning of ecosystems.” In an early paper titled “The Dark Side of Light,” participants in Verlust der Nacht warn that “unless managing darkness becomes an integral part of future conservation and lighting policies, modern society may run into a global self-experiment with unpredictable outcomes.”

  Perhaps the most comprehensive book on ecology and night is Nightwatch: The Natural World from Dusk to Dawn (London: Roxby & Lindsey Press, 1983). Featuring text by seven different writers and stunning photographs by Jane Burton and Kim Taylor, Nightwatch offers an exhaustive accounting of the value of darkness for the wild world. From sleep and tides and biological clocks to chapters on woodlands and freshwater and the sea at night, this book is a prescient look at a world under threat from human overuse of artificial light. That there has been no comparable book in the thirty years since, even while light pollution has grown by leaps and bounds, says much about our inattention to the wild world at night and to the negative effects of artificial light on that world.

  One of the most dramatic images from Verlyn Klinkenborg’s wonderful National Geographic article “Our Vanishing Night” (November 2008) is the back-to-back photographs of Los Angeles taken from Mt. Wilson, first in 1908 and then one hundred years later. In the 1908 photograph, the city of three hundred fifty thousand sits surrounded by dark countryside, while in the image from 2008 the city of five million fills the entire frame with a shimmering swath of electric light. As one result of this change, the observatory at Mt. Wilson was rendered useless for optical astronomy and essentially abandoned by its previous owner, the Carnegie Institution, to the Mount Wilson Observatory Association for just $1.

  Though obviously not the result solely of incidents occurring at night, the roadkill numbers in the United States are staggering: at least one million vertebrates per day (birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians). Even in locations ostensibly designed to be safe havens for wildlife, there seems to be no escape. From 1989 to 2003 in Yellowstone National Park, for example, some 1,559 animals were killed by cars, including 556 elk, 192 bison, 135 coyotes, 112 moose, 24 antelope, and 3 bobcats (U.S. Department of Transportation). The good news is that thoughtfully designed fences, culverts, crosswalks, overpasses, etc., can significantly reduce vehicle-animal collisions.

  For more information on Civil Twilight and their idea for “lunar-resonant streetlights,” see http://www.metropolismag.com/story/20070518/lunar-light. One member of Civil Twilight, Christina Seeley, is a wonderful photographer. Her series titled lux documents sky glow in the Unite
d States, western Europe, and Japan. See her work at www.christinaseely.com.

  Saying that we “simmer in our own electronic bouillabaisse” of light, James Attlee sets out to reestablish “a lost connection with the moon” in Nocturne: A Journey in Search of Moonlight (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).

  Few have done as much as author and illustrator John Himmelman to draw our attention to the beauty and value of moths, crickets, and other insects that do so much to make our nights (and our world) come alive. Cricket Radio: Tuning in the Night-Singing Insects (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011) is his latest contribution, and Discovering Moths: Nighttime Jewels in Your Own Backyard (Camden, ME: Down East Books, 2002) is especially rich. His words about the luna moth appear on pages 81–82.

  Bat Conservation International (BCI), started by Merlin Tuttle, continues to work on behalf of bats around the world. Their website (batcon.org) has a wealth of information on the importance of bats and the threats they face. Among this information is everything you need to know about the bats living under Congress Avenue Bridge in Austin, Texas, including emergence times from March through October. Bat tourism is big business in Austin, with millions of dollars generated by an estimated one hundred thousand people every year who watch the bats spiral out from under the bridge and swirl off into the surrounding countryside. BatCon members are invited to witness the even more dramatic emergence of millions of bats at the BCI-owned Bracken Bat Cave, on the edge of San Antonio. Though somewhat dated, the BCI-produced DVD The Secret World of Bats offers forty-eight minutes’ worth of video designed to debunk myths and encourage admiration. The slow-motion video of bats pollinating cactus flowers is especially impressive.

  When I asked Merlin Tuttle about bats attacking humans, he told me that even rabid bats are rarely aggressive. “In more than fifty years of studying bats, often in caves with millions, I have never been attacked, nor have any of the millions of tourists who have closely observed bats at the Congress Avenue Bridge in Austin over the past thirty years. The odds of being harmed by a bat,” he emphasized, “are exceedingly remote for anyone who simply doesn’t attempt to handle them.”

  The study showing the economic benefits brought to humans by bats, “Economic Importance of Bats in Agriculture,” can be found at http://www.sciencemag.org/content/332/6025/41. At the other end of the spectrum from the estimated $54 billion benefit bats provide us is the very small amount we spend to protect them (only $2.4 million in 2010).

  Knowing that communication towers continue to rise in ever more remote locations, and wanting to “provide a scientific basis for regulation of tower construction and operation,” Travis Longcore, Catherine Rich, and Sidney Gauthreaux have found that steady-burning lights combined with ever-higher structures and heavy use of guy-wires to support the towers prove a lethal combination for birds flying at night. “The towers that are killing big numbers of birds have steady-burning lights on them,” Longcore says, because the steady-burning lights hold the birds’ attention, drawing them off course and “trapping” them. The good news is that lights that alternate from on to off “release” the birds from their pull, and as a result “you can reduce mortality by 60 to 80 percent just by switching the lighting type.” Longcore, Rich, and Gauthreaux write that “avian mortality would be reduced by restricting the height of towers, avoiding guy-wires, using only red or white strobe-type lights as obstruction lighting, and avoiding ridgelines for tower sites.”

  Find out more about FLAP and its efforts on behalf of migrating birds at www.flap.org. One recent victory for FLAP and others concerned with birds is the adoption by the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) of the “bird collision issue” into its rating system. “Pilot Credit 55: Bird Collision Prevention” will require making a building visible as a physical barrier to birds during the day and eliminating light trespass at night. Some one billion birds die every year in the United States due to collision with human-made objects, the vast majority of them flying into glass buildings.

  David Gessner’s essay “Trespassing on Night” appears in Let There Be Night: Testimony on Behalf of the Dark (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2008). Find out more about his work at davidgessner.com.

  Henry Beston’s The Outermost House: A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod, first published in 1928, has been available since 1992 from Henry Holt, New York. Of his chapter “Night on the Great Beach,” Beston wrote to his future wife, Elizabeth Coatsworth, during his time at the house he designed and named the Fo’castle, “My last chapter was on ‘Night on the Great Beach’ and I let myself go, for there’s a soupçon of the noctambule in me; or—the noctamorist, I love night.”

  4: Know Darkness

  Rainer Maria Rilke’s “You, Darkness” comes from his Book of Hours (Das Stundenbuch), written from 1899 to 1903. For a fascinating look at this poem translated six different ways, see http://www.beyond-the-pale.co.uk/rilke.htm. The themes of darkness and night, literal and metaphorical, flow through the German poet’s work. Two especially relevant poems are both titled “Night,” the first from 1906 (“The lamps keep swaying, fully unaware: / is our light lying?/ Is night the only reality / that has endured through thousands of years?”) and the next from 1924:

  Night, full of newly created stars that leave

  trails of fire streaming from their seams

  as they soar in inaudible adventure

  through interstellar space:

  how, overshadowed by your all-embracing vastness,

  I appear minute!——

  Yet, being one with the ever more darkening earth,

  I dare to be in you.

  For more on Chaco Canyon (Chaco Culture National Historical Park), see http://www.nps.gov/chcu/index.htm. There is no shortage of books featuring Chaco Canyon. See especially Craig Childs’s House of Rain: Tracking a Vanished Civilization Across the American Southwest (New York: Little, Brown, 2007), and Anna Sofaer’s Chaco Astronomy: An Ancient American Cosmology (Santa Fe: Ocean Tree Books, 2007). Her PBS documentaries The Sun Dagger (1982) and The Mystery of Chaco Canyon (2000), both narrated by Robert Redford, did much to hype the intrigue surrounding the canyon.

  The kivas found at Chaco Canyon are thought to be forerunners of the subterranean kivas used by modern Pueblo peoples for religious rites and rituals.

  Published in 1933, Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows is still readily available (Sedgwick, ME: Leete’s Island Books, 1977). While the genre of elegy is prominent in nature writing (or environmental writing)—so much so that poet Alison Deming asked in a 2000 essay that we might move “beyond elegy” (“Getting Beyond Elegy,” Georgia Review 54, no. 2 [Summer 2000]: 259–71), I know of no other works (save perhaps Beston’s Outermost House) that are so directly elegiac in their attention to darkness. Writing at roughly the same time as Beston, though half a world away, Tanizaki saw a bright future and mourned what was being lost. “So benumbed are we nowadays by electric lights that we have become utterly insensitive to the evils of excessive illumination,” he argued. “I have written all this because I have thought that… I would call back at least for literature this world of shadows we are losing.”

  While I knew Joseph Bruchac’s name from other books, I did not know of his interest in the night until I found Keepers of the Night: Native American Stories and Nocturnal Activities for Children (Golden, CO: Fulcrum, 1994). For more on Native American views of the night sky, see They Dance in the Sky: Native American Star Myths, by Jean Guard Monroe and Ray A. Williamson (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1987). For more on specifically Southwest Native American views, see Sharing the Skies: Navajo Astronomy, by Nancy C. Maryboy and David Begay (Tucson: Rio Nuevo, 2010).

  Eric Wilson’s books include Against Happiness (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008), The Mercy of Eternity: A Memoir of Depression and Grace (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2010), and, most recently, Everyone Loves a Good Train Wreck: Why We Can�
�t Look Away (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2012). Regarding his titles, I am reminded of his description of Jesus Christ as “a man of sorrows whose melancholy suffering was inseparable from his illumination.” Find the Carolina Chocolate Drops at www.carolinachocolatedrops.com.

  Anyone wishing to understand the absolute anguish that is depression can do no better than read William Styron’s Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (New York: Vintage, 1990), which emerged from his spellbinding essay for Vanity Fair: http://www.vanityfair.com/magazine/archive/1989/12/styron198912. Whether a sufferer oneself wishing for empathy from another, or a family member, friend, or stranger wishing to understand, Styron’s book offers a beautifully written firsthand account of a horrific experience.

  James Galvin’s The Meadow (New York: Holt, 1993) tells a hundred-year history of his neighbors’ lives on the Wyoming/Colorado border. A nonfiction work that reads like a novel, The Meadow is beautifully, truthfully, imaginatively written, such that if a character says he can hear the stars on the coldest winter nights, the reader believes in and wonders at the sound.

  The sounds of night, the quiet of night, the noise of night—so much of our experience of darkness has to do with senses other than sight, and especially with what we hear. In his quietly heartbreaking book The Great Animal Orchestra: Finding the Origins of Music in the World’s Wild Places (New York: Little, Brown, 2012), Bernie Krause tells of his lifelong quest to record the wild sounds of the earth. “As a seasoned listener, I especially love the sounds produced by creatures that have evolved to vocalize at night,” he writes. “The nighttime imparts the sense of a resplendent echoey theater—a beneficial effect for nocturnal terrestrial creatures whose voices need to carry over great distances.”

  The arguments made by Richard Louv in his best-selling Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin, 2005) could easily be applied to our children’s experience of night and darkness. It bears repeating that estimates suggest that nine of ten American children born today will never live where they can see the Milky Way. A “deficit” signifies our not having enough of something. This is exactly what we allow our children (and ourselves) of darkness: too small an experience, not nearly enough.