by Paul Bogard
Regarding Chris Luginbuhl’s comments about how dimming the lights of a city like Chicago would have profound effects on the skies in surrounding suburbs and towns, Fabio Falchi told me something similar in Italy: “Because inside cities of course you cannot have a big improvement; the big improvement will be outside cities. Inside cities you can have an improvement in the comfort of the night, of not having light inside windows, in having lamps with colors that are not harmful for our health, so there are advantages also inside cities. But of the sky inside cities you cannot have a huge improvement. But outside, you can improve it a lot.”
We are so used to the sky over our major cities being washed-out and void of all but the brightest stars that it can be nearly impossible to imagine what it would look like naturally, without all that light. The French writer Amédée Guillemin (1826–1893) created a series of small books on popular astronomy in which he included illustrations of the sky over Paris before electric light. His views of the Milky Way over the French capital (Paris: Le Ciel, 1866) are some of the most beautiful nocturnal scenes I know. See http://www.atlascoelestis.com/guil%2025.htm. Also impressive are the views of the night sky over London in 1869 by Edwin Dunkin from his book The Midnight Sky: Notes on the Stars and Planets. See http://www.atlascoelestis.com/22.htm. His book is available from Cambridge University Press (2010).
1: The Darkest Places
First published in 1968, Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness (1968; reprint, New York: Touchstone, 1990) remains the cantankerous and entertaining writer’s most beloved work. Abbey would have enjoyed wonderful darkness during his time in Arches National Monument, just outside Moab, Utah. In the four-plus decades since Abbey’s time in Arches, the National Monument has become a national park, but the town’s light pollution has erased a significant portion of what Abbey would have seen.
Dan Duriscoe has been instrumental in the National Park Service’s proposal for a “dark sky cooperative” covering the Colorado Plateau area in Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, and Nevada. The cooperative would attempt to preserve darkness in parks and communities in an area bordered roughly by I-40 to the south and I-15 to the west and north. The NPS will celebrate its one-hundred-year anniversary in 2016, and National Park Service director Jonathan Jarvis included the dark sky cooperative idea when outlining the NPS’s ambitious goals for their next century of service. For Duriscoe, the Colorado Plateau idea flows naturally from a lifetime of advocacy for dark skies. Writing for The George Wright Forum (vol. 18, no. 4 [2001]), Duriscoe argued, in “Preserving Pristine Night Skies in National Parks and the Wilderness Ethic,” that “the intent of the Wilderness Act of 1964 was to provide all Americans access to ‘primitive and unconfined’ recreation and opportunities for the spiritual enlightenment and personal development such experiences provide.” If artificial light “compromises or interferes with the view of the night sky from a wilderness preserve,” Duriscoe reasoned, “that light is in violation of one of the basic premises of the wilderness ethic.”
On the clearest, darkest nights—no moon, no clouds—the human eye can still see, thanks to the night’s natural light. While starlight contributes to this light to a small degree, it comes primarily from airglow, a weak glow caused by Earth’s atmosphere that casts a uniform luminosity over the planet.
“The problem is that people don’t recognize that there’s a problem,” says psychologist Peter Kahn, explaining “environmental generational amnesia.” He argues that this concept “helps explain why we degrade and destroy the nature that we depend on for our physical and psychological well-being.” This is certainly true when it comes to darkness and natural night skies—because most of us have no idea what we have lost, it doesn’t occur to us what we are missing. A similar concept can be found in “diminishing baselines,” the idea that each generation sees the world they inherit as normal, the baseline from which to judge change, even as that world is much diminished in natural beauty and wealth from the one their parents and grandparents knew. Hear Peter Kahn speak at http://histories.naturalhistorynetwork.org/conversations/environmental-generational-amnesia.
Thoreau’s passage about contact (!) with the natural world comes from The Maine Woods, originally published in 1848. In his description of hiking Mt. Katahdin in Maine, he wrote, “Talk of mysteries!—Think of our life in nature,—daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it,—rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! The common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we?”
John Muir’s words about our need for “beauty as well as bread” come from his book The Yosemite, originally published in 1912. A founder of the Sierra Club, Muir worked tirelessly on behalf of his beloved Sierra Nevada and was instrumental in gaining federal protection for Yosemite Valley. For a wonderful example of his exuberant writing style, see My First Summer in the Sierra, originally published in 1911.
The quote from Sigurd F. Olson about the value of “places where we can always sense the mystery of the unknown” comes from his Reflections from the North Country (New York: Knopf, 1976). Written near the end of his long life, this book is an excellent introduction to the longtime conservationist’s thinking.
Despite the recent attention given by the National Park Service to preserving darkness, there is still much work to be done, admits Kevin Poe. “One of the things that’s kind of frustrating is, even within the national park service community, this is not an issue that’s on a lot of people’s radars,” he says. Thanks in large part to Poe, Bryce Canyon National Park offers more than 140 astronomy presentations a year, reaching more than thirty thousand visitors. But, by and large, whether an individual park pays attention to darkness hinges on the wishes of its superintendent. “The big goal would be to have darkness listed as a critical resource issue,” Poe explains, “which would place it on a checklist for superintendents to address on a yearly basis. As it is now, in a lot of ways Chad [Moore], Dan [Duriscoe], myself, the team here, we’re still these interesting characters crying in the wilderness.”
In its “act to establish a National Park Service” in 1916, the U.S. Congress wrote, “The service thus established shall promote and regulate the use of the Federal areas known as national parks, monuments, and reservations hereinafter specified by such means and measures as conform to the fundamental purpose of the said parks, monuments, and reservations, which purpose is to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.” It is especially the goal of conserving the scenery and leaving it “unimpaired” for future generations to which dark sky advocates point. That the act also directs that the new secretary of the National Park Service receive an annual salary of $4,500, with an assistant director earning $2,500, one “chief clerk” at $2,000, one draftsman at $1,800, and “one messenger, at $600,” has less contemporary interest.
That the boundaries of our protected natural areas are only as strong as we choose to keep them is a fact easily forgotten. All it takes for those boundaries to be breached is a severe enough economic downturn. Witness the state of Ohio’s 2011 decision to allow natural gas drilling within its parks.
In addition to the work being done in national parks in the United States, parks in other parts of the world—most notably in the UK (http://www.nationalparks.gov.uk)—have been working to protect dark skies as well. Hortobágy National Park and Zselic National Landscape Protection Area in Hungary, Izera Dark Sky Park in Poland, and Pic du Midi in France are just a few. For information on the UK efforts, see http://www.darkskiesawareness.org/dark-skies-uk.php. For information on the rest of Europe, start with the European office of the IDA: [email protected], or visit darksky.org.
Tyler Nordgren’s Stars Above, Earth Below: A Guide to Astronomy in the National Parks (New York: Springer, 2010) blends astronomy and adventure as Nordgren spends a year travelin
g from park to park, sleeping outside as often as possible. A skilled photographer, artist, and writer, his book shares his love for the night sky and his valiant attempt to counter the fact that, “[s]adly, there are very few today who remember what the sky is supposed to look like at night, and those who do remember have grown used to the idea that it’s just the way things are now.” Nordgren’s artwork on behalf of the U.S. national parks draws inspiration from the style depicted on posters produced for the parks between 1938 and 1941 as part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) Federal Art Project. Initially funded in 1935 and lasting eight years, the WPA helped put millions of Americans to work during the Great Depression.
Like many other nineteenth-century American writers, Walt Whitman showed an intimate attention to darkness and night in his work. His famous Leaves of Grass (from which “The Learn’d Astronomer” [1900] comes) is full of night imagery, and poems such as “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” feature the poet experiencing firsthand the world after dark. One reads his exhilarating work and wonders if a contemporary poet would ever think to rhapsodize about darkness in a similar way.
Actually, according to the 2010 census, the mean population center of the United States is Texas County, Missouri, but Chad Moore is close.
In One Square Inch of Silence (New York: Free Press, 2008), Gordon Hempton goes looking for and finds exactly that in Washington’s Olympic National Park.
William Fox’s books include The Void, the Grid & the Sign: Traversing the Great Basin (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2005) and Mapping the Empty: Eight Artists and Nevada (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1999). He is director of the Center for Art and Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno. James Terrell’s Roden Crater sits at the western edge of the Painted Desert in the San Francisco Peaks volcanic field outside Flagstaff, Arizona. It has yet to open to the public.
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Welcome
Dedication
Epigraph
Introduction: To Know the Dark
9. From a Starry Night to a Streetlight
8. Tales from Two Cities
7. Light That Blinds, Fear That Enlightens
6. Body, Sleep, and Dreams
5. The Ecology of Darkness
4. Know Darkness
3. Come Together
2. The Maps of Possibility
1. The Darkest Places
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Notes
Newsletters
Copyright
Copyright
Copyright © 2013 by Paul Bogard
Cover design by Lindsey Andrews
Cover illustration by Tyler Nordgren
Cover copyright © 2013 Hachette Book Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
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First ebook edition: July 2013
Excerpt from “To Know the Dark” copyright © 1998 by Wendell Berry from The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry. Reprinted by permission of Counterpoint.
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ISBN 978-0-316-22879-4