The End of Night: Searching For Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light
by Paul Bogard (4th Estate, £16.99)
Go out tonight and look at the sky. How many stars can you see? If you were somewhere without light pollution, you might quickly lose count. On a clear night there are some 2,500 stars visible to the naked eye. And in a truly dark place, you would see the Milky Way, our galaxy, made up of billions of stars. It’s an unforgettable, deeply moving sight.
But, says Paul Bogard, it’s estimated that eight out of 10 children born in America (and other developed nations) will never know a night dark enough to see the Milky Way. “What was once a most common human experience has become most rare,” he laments.
“In the night skies under which the vast majority of us live, we can often count the stars we see on two hands (in the cities) or four (suburbs).” In the course of researching this book, Bogard came to London and went on to Waterloo Bridge at 2.45am in the morning on a freezing December night and counted just 24 stars.
When you go out into real darkness, your eyes adapt to it quickly. But, says Bogard, “modern Londoners live amid such a wash of electric light that their eyes never transition to scotopic, or night, vision”. For “London now ranks as one of the brightest cities in the world — a white-hot splat on the World Atlas of the Artificial Night Sky Brightness.”
Does it matter? It’s impossible to read this thorough and engaging survey of the subject (how much more professionally American writers approach non-fiction) and not be convinced that it does. Light at night (LAN) affects us all for the worse, Bogard argues. It is a completely unnatural experience and, having changed our night skies so recently and so drastically, we are conducting an enormous ongoing experiment on ourselves. Sleep disorders could actually turn out to be one of the most serious of all health risks, he warns.
He interviews experts and campaigners; he visits the Galileo Museum in Florence and travels to Sark, the world’s first International Dark Sky Island, where “the blackness is like velvet”. In London he goes out with the six-man British Gas team who maintain the 1,600 gas lamps we still have, casting so much softer a light in places such as Carlton House Terrace and Dean’s Yard in Westminster Abbey.
In Paris he talks to François Jousse, who has designed the lighting of the city’s monuments so sensitively; in Wimborne in Dorset he meets Bob Mizon of the British Astronomical Association’s Campaign for Dark Skies, who, observing that at least councils now understand what the term “light pollution” means, admits: “The thing that gives me most hope is the energy crisis.”
The starry nights known through all human history, in cities as well as the countryside, until so recently, may never return but there’s still room for improvement.
“Bright lights have long been seen as progress rather than as light pollution, but that can change. To prefer the stars doesn’t mean to relegate yourself to living in the Stone Age at night. Good lighting is effective lighting is subtle lighting, and good lighting prefers the stars,” says Bogard, optimistically.
On Monday a new law is coming into effect in France, ordering that all unoccupied shop, office and public building lights must be extinguished between 1am and 7am. Business leaders, keen on the 24-hour economy, have furiously protested that it’s a retrograde step from François Hollande’s minister for energy and environment. But maybe it will let a little darkness back — and could even be copied here too?
Go to standard.co.uk/booksdirect to buy this book for £13.99, or phone 0843 060 0029, free UK p&pReuse content