To Know a Starry Night 1647790123, 9781647790127

Citation preview

TO KNOW A STARRY NIGHT

White Rim Trail, Canyonlands National Park, Utah

to know a starry night PAUL BOGARD WITH PHOTOGRAPHY BY

BEAU RO GERS

University of Nevada Press | Reno, Nevada 89557 usa www.unpress.nevada.edu Copyright © 2021 by Paul Bogard All rights reserved Photographs © 2021 by Beau Rogers Book and jacket design by Jinni Fontana

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Bogard, Paul, 1966– author. | Rogers, Beau, 1974– photographer. Title: To know a starry night : an exploration of the experience / by Paul Bogard; photography by Beau Rogers. Description: Reno ; Las Vegas : University of Nevada Press, [2021] | Summary: “This book explores the experience of being outside under a natural starry sky—how important it is to human life, and how so many people don’t know this experience. It combines the lyrical writing of Paul Bogard with the night-sky photography of Beau Rogers. There are nine chapters.” — Provided by publisher Identifiers: LCCN 2021008768 | ISBN 9781647790127 (cloth) | ISBN 9781647790134 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Bogard, Paul, 1966– | Light pollution. | Night—Psychological aspects. | Lighting—Psychological aspects. | Lighting—Social aspects. | Sky — Pictorial works. | Night photography. Classification: LCC TD195.L52 B65 2021 | DDC 551.56/6—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021008768 The paper used in this book meets the requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (r2002). First Printing Printed in Canada

PB: For Amalie. May you always know a night worth exploring. BR: For Nancy Rogers.

Grand Tetons National Park, Wyoming

CONTENTS Preface by Karen Trevino

ix

Foreword by Scott Slovic

xv

Introduction

3

Darkness

11

Fear

25

Knowledge

39

Solace

55

Solitude

65

Moonlight

73

Wildness

87

Mystery

99

Afterword by Beau Rogers

111

Acknowledgments

117

About the Author and Photographer

121

Second Beach, Olympic National Park, Washington

PREFACE

A

gainst a backdrop rich with purples, blues, and shades of black, a blaze of stars glittering across a vast sky spurs our curiosity about the past, driving us to ponder the future. For millennia, the night sky has been a collective canvas for our stories, maps, traditions, beliefs, and discoveries. Over the course of time, continents have formed and eroded, sea levels have risen and fallen, the chemistry of our atmosphere has changed, and yet the daily cycle of light to dark has remained pretty much the same . . . until the last one hundred years. As skyglow from outdoor lighting floods through our communities, it disrupts our connection to these light-dark cycles, as well as opportunities for nighttime discovery and intrigue. Light pollution is increasing at a rate that will leave few dark skies in the contiguous United States. Two–thirds of Americans cannot see the Milky Way from their backyard and 99 percent of the population lives in an area that scientists consider polluted with light. Consequently, national parks across the United States often provide the public with the best and most accessible opportunity to immerse themselves in the extraordinary grandeur of stars, planets, and neighboring galaxies—to truly experience natur­ ally dark skies. Not surprisingly, many of the photographs in this book were taken in national parks. Staring at the night sky with the light band of the Milky Way stretching overhead is a quintessential experience for many national park visitors. The magnificent expanse of darkness blanketed with shimmering stars as

ix

far as the eye can see, in the quiet stillness of the night, instills a sense of awe and wonder that is difficult to match. Even national parks near urban areas with less than pristine conditions often serve as night-sky sanctuaries for those who live in our most populated metropolitan areas. A 2006 study at Bryce Canyon National Park and Cedar Breaks National Monument revealed that 99 percent of responding visitors preferred to stargaze in a national park; 90 percent believed that some places need to be preserved especially for nighttime visibility; and 80 percent responded that areas near national parks should lead the way in maintaining dark night skies. Distinguished among other federal land management agencies in its commitment to preserve natural lightscapes through technological and scientific leadership, the National Park Service Natural Sounds and Night Skies Division increases scientific understanding and inspires public appreciation of natural soundscapes and night skies. Recognized worldwide in the development of photic monitoring systems and analytical tools, the NPS Night Skies team provides engineered solutions for reducing light pollution through research, fieldwork, outreach, and education. Preserving natural lightscapes in national parks and surrounding areas includes the use of sustainable outdoor lighting, which has the added benefits of improved energy efficiency, reduced operating and cyclic maintenance costs for parks, reduced carbon footprints, and enhanced opportunities for local economic growth through astronomy-based tourism. Simple yet effective solutions used in national parks like replacing outdoor lighting with more sustainable, cost-effective, and night sky-friendly options are the very same tools that you can use at home to help stem the tide of light pollution. In addition to making possible stellar views of night skies, the quality of

x   Preface

natural darkness affects many other resources in national parks such as wildlife, wilderness character, visitor experience, cultural landscapes, and historic preservation. I was thrilled to see that To Know a Starry Night touches on so many of the resources and values that national parks seek to preserve. I first met Paul Bogard in 2015 at an annual meeting of the International Dark-Sky Association where we both were speakers. I had just finished reading his book The End of Night, which was immensely popular at the time; so it took a lot of restraint to hide the fact that I was practically star-struck. Thankfully, Paul’s warm and easy demeanor was very grounding, and we ended up spending a good amount of time talking and getting to know each other. Like Paul, I was fortunate to have grown up knowing real darkness, spending many summers on the shores of the Great Lakes. Lavender dusks, iridescent fireflies, and breathtaking starry skies that twinkled with the secrets of the universe were the sights and sounds that shaped my earliest memories of natural darkness. Humbled and inspired by the seemingly endless expanse of our portal to the universe, I have been honored to help bring this experience to the American people. I next saw Paul four years later in Lake Tekapo, New Zealand, where we were both keynote speakers at an international conference on astro-tourism. As kindred spirits are wont to do, once again we spent a good deal of time together and with other colleagues over the course of the conference. Many of the ideas for this book were discussed during some of those late-night conversations; so I was honored when Paul asked me if I’d write the preface. To Know a Starry Night weaves history, science, and culture into a modern tapestry that awakens the senses, mind, body, and spirit to understand the true nature of sensory ecology: the sights, sounds, touch, and smells we use to navigate and experience the world around us.

Preface   xi

This is not just a book of stunningly beautiful pictures of the night sky, it is a book about experiencing the night sky. As Albert Einstein said, “the only source of knowledge is experience.” Buoyed by the spectacular photography of Beau Rogers, and the incredibly poignant and evocative personal narrative by Paul Bogard, I invite you to “experience” the splendor of the night sky. —Karen Trevino, Fort Collins, Colorado

xii   Preface

Mount Shasta, California

Old Faithful, Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming

FOREWORD

N

ight—like air, like water, is one of the great equalizers in nature. It is available somehow to all of us, no matter where we live on the planet, no matter what language we speak or what culture shapes our worldview. We experience night with such routineness that—as with daytime—we take it for granted; it recedes into the background of our lives. Thus, “to know a starry night,” to really know and attend to the beauty and meaning of a dark and starry night, is an exceedingly rare experience. Such an experience is available to most of us in the world day after day, and yet it takes a trigger of some kind to guide us to notice and dwell on the exquisite gift of a dark and starfilled sky. Paul Bogard opens his introduction to this book with a strange quotation from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s classic essay “Nature”: “If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years . . .” The epigraph trails off into Bogard’s own reverie about sharing the night sky with his infant daughter, which is, in fact, how I believe we should always read literature and art, as windows to the world and to our own lives. But in the original text, Emerson continues his thinking about the stars by writing, “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” (5). This admonishing smile may be nature’s way of saying, “Wake up! Pay attention! You are missing something at once commonplace and extraordinary!” In fact, a few lines later in the essay,

xv

Emerson quips in a strangely understated way, “Nature never wears a mean appearance.” This last line, often quoted by scholars and enthusiasts of transcendentalism, has often puzzled me. It is a quiet way of saying that nature is always beautiful and worthy of our reverence and attention. No matter where we are or who we are, no matter our status in society, we almost always have some access to the sky. Emerson suggests that the stars inspire reverence “because though always present, they are inaccessible.” I beg to differ. Of course we cannot directly touch the stars as we might place our hand on a tree or shuffle through the foamy surf as it spreads across a beach, but unless we’re visually impaired, we do have access to the sky through our eyes. And we do have access through our imaginations. Ken Lamberton, who has an entire book (Wilderness and Razor Wire) about experiencing the beauties of nature while in prison, writes in an essay titled “How Nature Taught Me to Sing in Lockup” that access to wild beauty “lessen[s] the darkness” of a brutal place, such as the heavy gray walls of a prison. Though not free to wander outside and stargaze, during his years of incarceration Lamberton was able to glimpse the landscape through a narrow window near his upper bunk, where, “On some evenings, coyotes called to me with borderless voices from the desert’s fringe where nighthawks knit the sky with needled wings.” He doesn’t mention stars here per se, but he suggests that the sounds of night and visual emblems other than stars reached him even in his cell. We might also expect visual access to the starry sky to be relatively limited in a city flooded with artificial light. But Toni Morrison writes lyrically of the power of the night sky as glimpsed and imagined by her urban characters in the novel Jazz. She laments the fact that many in the city “when they do not forget the sky completely think of it as a tiny piece of information about

xvi   Foreword

the time of day or night.” In reality, says her narrator, “there is nothing to beat what the City can make of a nightsky. It can empty itself of surface, and more like the ocean than the ocean itself, go deep, starless, . . . booming over a glittering city” (35). When we can’t see the sky itself, we can sometimes glimpse the darting wings of nighthawks, and when the city glare overcomes distant starlight, the blare and crash of an urban soundscape become an astral symphony. •

Although people throughout the world, in one way or another, have access to the beauty and mystery that is the night sky and to the full range of human emotions inspired by the experience of night, there may be something particularly potent about the experience of night in the American West, as in other arid regions where the sky looms large and maintains a strong sensory presence in our lives. I was raised in Oregon’s gray and foggy Willamette Valley, where I’d often go weeks at a time without being able to see the stars at night. Perhaps, with regard to stargazing, a boyhood under cloudy skies is a little bit like being in prison or like living in a glittery city where “thrilling, wasteful street lamps” (34), to use Morrison’s words again, occlude the brilliant reality above that we know is there even though we can’t physically perceive it. When we’re prevented from experiencing the brilliance of the night sky and then are suddenly exposed to the stars, we feel a sense of overwhelming gratitude, or at least this is what I feel. I want to gaze myself into space—to launch myself through my eyes—so I never forget the experience and can summon it no matter how limited my actual view. As a teenager, I sought every opportunity to backpack in the Three Sisters Wilderness east of Eugene, camping out under the stars with high school friends,

Foreword   xvii

Second Beach, Olympic National Park, Washington

stars we could seldom see through the coastal atmosphere at home in Eugene. Since those days, I have experienced night skies in many parts of the world, urban and wild, Nordic and tropical, temperate and arid. I spent a year in the mid-nineties living in the dazzlingly overlit alleyways of the Ikebukuro district, Tokyo, Japan, where the night sky was a distant memory. My nature writing colleagues and I had no hope of glimpsing starlight while running five-kilometer loops around the Imperial Palace or when crisscrossing the city in subterranean trains. But even in Japan, when I traveled to Hokkaido or Aomori for hiking and lecture trips, vast starscapes came into view at night. In recent years, I’ve had the good fortune of teaching occasionally at one of the most remote academic outposts in North America, the University of Idaho’s Taylor Wilderness Research Station, located in the heart of the Frank Church–River of No Return Wilderness, where the midnight sky is a sea of light, utterly unblemished by technological constellations of headlights and illuminated buildings down on Earth. Everywhere I travel—Toulouse or Istanbul, Cape Town or Beijing, Uluru or Guam—I find myself gazing upward, searching for something, probably for glimpses of skyward wonder I remember fleetingly from my boyhood in the cloudy part of Oregon. As an occasional insomniac and a lover of the outdoors, I often find myself outside at odd hours. In Finland, jet-lagged, I routinely go for a run on lamplit, snow-slicked streets in winter or oddly sunlit forest paths at two o’clock in the morning in May, when stars would be visible if I were in the outback of the western United States . . . or in Australia. At home in Idaho in recent years, and now at my new home in Oregon again, when awake at an odd hour, I go outside with my dog, sit on the grass, and gaze up, listening to night sounds, taking in the darkness, and squinting to see bits of the Milky Way. In recent months, while experiencing unprecedented wildfires in the

xx   Foreword

American West, I’ve found myself thinking a lot about not only urban light pollution and naturally cloudy skies, but about the AQI (air quality index), which indicates both the level of harmful particulates in the air and visibility. Through either excessive light or unintended particulates in the atmosphere, we are causing what Robert Michael Pyle has called “the extinction of experience” (Thunder Tree 146). He meant that city kids are now spending less and less time in the woods and fields, in nearby wild places; but our twenty-first-century exposure to unobstructed night skies, in urban and suburban settings and even in rural and wild locations during times of smoke-choked air, has also become increasingly precious as we suffer the extinction of this form of experience. •

“If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years,” writes Emerson. Although the stars and the beauty of deep, dark space are in no danger of disappearing, the reality of our twenty-first-century lives is that most people do not see or think about the starry sky, do not really know it. This is where wonderful writers and visual artists like Paul Bogard and Beau Rogers come in. I have known Paul and Beau for many years, since our time together at the University of Nevada, Reno, where I taught from 1996 to 2012 in the English Department’s Literature and Environment Program and where Paul was a doctoral student and Beau earned his master’s degree. While working on other projects for his PhD, Paul also published the anthology Let There Be Night: Testimony on Behalf of the Dark and laid the groundwork for his first book of nonfiction, The End of Night: Searching for Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light. Beau, meanwhile, began spending much of his spare time roaming the remote corners of the Great Basin Desert and the Sierra Nevadas with

Foreword   xxi

his cameras, composing extraordinary photos, including many night shots, of western American landscapes. As the years passed, it occurred to me that Paul and Beau would make an amazing team if they considered working together on a project to bring together words and images in a call for less light pollution, less air pollution, and more attention to the value of nighttime darkness. So I planted a seed with my two friends. This exquisite book, To Know a Starry Night, is the result of their colla­ boration. The three of us hope this work will bring pleasure to those who read it, of course, but we also hope it will inspire readers to look up from the pages and think about the meaning of dark skies in their own lives. “Nature never wears a mean appearance,” says Emerson. And this is true no matter where we are. But we sometimes need reminders, prompts to pay attention and really think about what we take for granted. That’s the work of books like this one. —Scott Slovic, Eugene, Oregon

References Bogard, Paul. The End of Night: Searching for Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light. Little, Brown, 2013. ———. Let There Be Night: Testimony on Behalf of the Dark. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2008. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Nature” (1836). In The Complete Essays and Other Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, edited by Brooks Atkinson, 5–42. New York: Modern Library, 1950. Lamberton, Ken. “How Nature Taught Me to Sing in Lockup.” Rain Shadow Review, September 2, 2017. https://rainshadowreview .com/first-blog-post/. ———. Wilderness and Razor Wire: A Naturalist’s Observations from Prison. San Francisco: Mercury House, 2000. Morrison, Toni. Jazz. New York: Penguin, 1992. Pyle, Robert Michael. The Thunder Tree: Lessons from an Urban Wildland. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993.

xxii   Foreword

TO KNOW A STARRY NIGHT

Point Reyes Shipwreck, Inverness, California

introduction If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years. . . —Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature”

O

n my daughter’s first night home, two days after her birth, I took her to see the stars. I wrapped her in fleece, held her close, and stepped out into a late spring night. Just above a neighbor’s roofline I found the setting moon among a handful of bright stars and lifted her toward the sky—a sight that with its steady distant fires will accompany her, no matter the changes, all through her life. That a newborn human can see only inches from their face, and therefore not really the universe, I didn’t yet know. I just knew that I couldn’t wait to share this nighttime world with my daughter. We live in the southern half of a northern city, and while the grounds behind our house are somewhat dark, the sky is clogged with artificial light. Like almost any city anywhere, ours uses light haphazardly, wastefully, sending much of it skyward to disrupt insects, confuse night-migrating birds, and wipe away the stars. So, those stars we saw that first night were far fewer than a father and his child would have seen just decades ago, a remnant from a hundred years past. This chasing away of darkness has happened relatively recently, after night being the same since the beginning of time. Almost anywhere people live in any number shares this truth: we have taken what was one of the most

3

common human experiences—walking out at night and coming face to face with the universe—and made it one of the most rare. And still. Night is half our life and darkness a natural part of what it means to be alive. Beauty dwells here, and calm. I think of the poet Wendell Berry waking in the night “in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be” and finding among night birds “the peace of wild things.” For me, night has always been a time of rest and reflection, of dreams and freedom, of longing and peace. I hope it will be the same for my daughter. I know that especially for women we have too often made it something to fear. But that’s on us, not on darkness. There is nothing inherently evil about the dark. Traditional societies and poets have known this forever, and now modern science tells us the same: life on Earth evolved with bright days and dark nights, and we need both for optimal health—for our body, our mind, our spirit. And there still are places we can experience natural darkness. Places where the Milky Way bends from horizon to horizon, where no artificial lights break the timeless view. I think especially of our national parks and reserves, most created with daytime scenery in mind and not a thought to night. But in an age where we live increasingly immersed in artificial light, these protected places hold some of our best remaining natural darkness. Yes, such darkness still exists over the oceans, over remote lands where few ever go. But in the places where most of us live, we are losing or have lost our view of the stars. These wild protected places can remind us what has been lost or, increasingly, show us what we have never known. I count myself lucky. The year I was born my parents drove me three hours north to a cabin newly built. Here, all my life, on a northern lake in the forest, I have known natural darkness. I have heard wolves along the horizon, owls

4   introduction

Salton Sea, California

Cathedral Rock, Sedona, Arizona

among the pines, loons across still water. I have lain back on the snow-covered frozen lake with binoculars, pouring countless stars into my eyes. In my oldest memory I am five years old and standing on the dock with my father watching satellites cut straight lines through sugary spreads of stars. And I have been lucky to travel to stars—from the Serengeti Plain, to the English Channel “dark sky island” of Sark, to a Moroccan Sahara night so plush with starlight that when I woke and walked outside my first thought was snow. In the American West, I have been fortunate to live close to my country’s darkest star-strewn landscapes and national parks—Great Basin, Death Valley, Grand Canyon, and on. This book emerges from the American West in part because both Beau and I have long loved its geography of night. The wideopen vistas, the basins and mountain ranges, the long rivers and deep lakes— here is where so much of our best darkness remains. Here is where so many Americans and people from all over the world come to see a sky they no longer see where they live. That said, the images and words we share in this book are meant to help preserve night’s natural beauty wherever it may be found. We use night in the American West to celebrate an experience worth knowing wherever we call home. Even in a book full of photographs, it’s worth remembering that it is not just the sight of stars that makes this experience, but all our senses engaged. The summer’s symphony of insects, the drifting scent of autumn’s change, the dry desert air against your bare skin, or a sleeping child held firmly against your chest—I want my daughter to have this experience. I want her to know in the numbers and distances the sensation of having her mind overwhelmed. To feel awe and exhilaration, to ask the questions such an experience naturally brings. Wrote Henry Beston in the 1920s of the Cape Cod night, “When the

introduction   7

Delamar Dry Lake, Nevada

great earth, abandoning day, rolls up the deeps of the heavens and the universe, a new door opens for the human spirit, and there are few so clownish that some awareness of the mystery of being does not touch them as they gaze.” I want the “mystery of being” to be part of her life, something to visit and take in, something to sit with for a while. This is a book about the experience of being outside with a naturally dark night sky. It’s a book about the qualities that together make an experience that humans have known forever but that now, in our time, is fading from our lives. It’s a book about what we have lost and are losing, but also what we can preserve and regain. “If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years,” argued Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1836, “how men would believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown!” Even in an age of artificial light, most of us live where we can at least see a handful of stars, and sometimes—in our darkest places—many times more. But if we are to “preserve for many generations” this experience we have known, now is the time to act. For my child and every child, and for all those to come. Let us bring them to the stars as soon and as often as we can.

introduction   9

Green River Overlook, Canyonlands National Park, Utah

darkness In a dark time, the eye begins to see —Theodore Roethke, “In a Dark Time”

O

n the darkest night I have ever known I said goodbye to a friend and started walking back to my family’s cabin. Between those points lay a hundred yards of dark woods, maybe the darkest they had ever been. It was a cloudy night with no moon or stars, and only a few lights around the lake. Seven years old, I walked slowly—eyes adjusting as they could, dry pine needles beneath my steps—until I made it about halfway, then stopped. I could no longer see the light from my neighbor’s doorway and could not yet see the light from ours. I couldn’t even see my hand before my face. The woods around me were filled with animals beginning to move, to use the cover of darkness to live. In the ground beneath me, in constant dark, were the countless creatures that keep the forest soil alive. Above me, beyond the clouds, were layered blankets of stars. Inside me, amid the dark miracles of blood, muscle, and bone, my heart beat fast. But otherwise, I was alone. In this darkness I felt submerged, the presence pressing from all sides. I looked up past the pines to where, on a clear night, constellations would shine, but tonight a cloudy black wool came down to the treetops. Who knew what else this darkness might hold? When I caught brief sight through the pines of our cabin door’s glow, I took off. I ran down the one-lane road, kicking sandy gravel behind, and didn’t stop

11

Death Valley National Park, California

Downtown Los Angeles, California

Downtown Los Angeles, California

until I reached the light. I raced across the front yard—the same yard where for a lifetime I have stood in awe beneath the Milky Way—and didn’t pause in leaving the dark behind. I think of that darkness now, so many years later. Peppered with stars, washed by moonlight, the same natural darkness every night for all of time before that moment. I feel grateful to have known it as a child, to have such darkness a part of me that won’t ever leave. •

I want my daughter to know darkness like this. But the darkest place I have ever been, the darkness of my childhood, no longer exists. We are lucky: the place we have known—the lake (though not as clear) and woods (though splotched with more houses)—still more or less exists. But the darkness I knew then has faded. The ever-larger small towns to the northwest and south have made sure of that. There simply is more light on the horizon and overhead. And so, the night sky I knew as a child is gone, because the darkness that held that sky is gone. The term “shifting environmental baseline” describes how each new genera­ tion marks as reality the world as they experience it and the reality against which they will judge any change. But if that reality has been steadily diminished through the years, each new generation knows a living world less abundant and diverse than did those who came before. It’s the idea that my two-yearold will never know the darkness I knew in these woods four decades ago, but when we walk down that same gravel road in summers to come, she will think it very dark, maybe the darkest place she has ever been. And it is still dark at our lake cabin, just not as dark as it used to be. In that sense, it is the same as most anywhere people live. The places that are still primitively dark, such as the oceans, the Outback, the Amazon, are places

darkness   15

Hollywood Bowl Overlook, Los Angeles, California

most of us will never even visit—let alone inhabit. Their level of darkness is no longer our experience of night. In the urban areas where increasing numbers of us live—by 2050 some two-thirds of the world’s human population—there is more and more artificial light, less and less natural darkness. A good illustration of this new reality is that for most people living in cities around the world, our eyes seldom adjust from daylight to dark. Normally, as the world darkens, our eyes would shift to scotopic or “night-vision,” moving from favoring “cones,” which show us the world in color, to favoring “rods,” which detect fainter light but not color. In natural conditions this happens over time—thirty minutes is good, a couple hours better. But in a modern city flooded with artificial light, this rarely happens at all. This is why a gas lamp in a modern city seems ridiculously dim. But to a nineteenth-century city dweller, eyes adjusted to darkness, these lamps would have seemed impressively bright. We live our nights swamped in a darkness diluted with artificial light. As a result, we mostly have no idea what we are missing, what we are losing. We have no idea what it’s like to be out in a naturally dark night. •

About twenty years ago, an amateur astronomer named John Bortle decided to make this clear. He had grown used to other astronomers—younger ones, especially—urging him to visit some stargazing spot they described as “so dark!” only to find there what he had found everywhere, that this new location was not nearly as dark as his companions believed. In 2001, he published the Bortle Dark-Sky Scale, which named nine “classes” of darkness. The scale begins at 9 (our brightest places—any of the world’s cities, with rare exceptions) and progresses down to 1 (our darkest places, with no evidence of artificial light).

darkness   17

Ever since learning of Bortle’s scale, I have been fascinated by the concept. But when I asked a National Park Service friend where I could experience “Bortle Class 1,” he laughed and suggested Australia. What about here in the United States? Depending on whom you asked, he said, there were few if any places left in the lower forty-eight with that kind of darkness. When later I spent a night in Death Valley National Park with another Park Service friend, he told me that he had ranked the level of darkness in more than two hundred NPS locations and named only three as Bortle Class 1. Two of these he told me—“The Racetrack” in Death Valley and a spot along the Green River in southern Utah—and the third he kept a secret. •

Think of this. Bortle Class 1 is natural darkness, night without artificial light— none on the horizon, none in the sky. It is night’s darkness as it would have been for all of time before gas and then, especially, electric lighting. Which, for many rural places in the United States means until just a few decades ago. We have taken the natural state of things and—over the entire country—diminished it. We have introduced the artificial into the natural, and our experience of night is not what it was. We no longer experience the darkness that our ancestors— even, for many, our own grandparents—experienced. Consider this too: on that scale of darkness, where 9 represents our lit-up cities and 1 this natural darkness, most Americans and Europeans and city dwellers worldwide live in Class 5 and above. That is, we rarely or never experience a night any darker than midway on the scale. So, our nights are not just a bit brighter than the nights of those who came before us knew, but a lot brighter. Perhaps this makes sense in a city where we live immersed in artificial

18   darkness

Map of North America’s artificial sky brightness, from “The New World Atlas of Artificial Night Sky Brightness.” Courtesy of Fabio Falchi.

World map of artificial sky brightness, from “The New World Atlas of Artificial Night Sky Brightness.” Courtesy of Fabio Falchi.

light. (Indeed, once you start seeing the lights, you see them all around.) But once we get away from urban areas? In satellite images the white city splotches seem surrounded by expanses of darkness. It looks as though once we get outside the cities we get back into the dark. Unfortunately, that’s not the whole story. In 2001, a group of Italian and American astronomers produced “The World Atlas of the Artificial Night Sky Brightness.” Using computer-generated color-coded images, they created a map of the world’s light pollution. The United States east of the Mississippi, northern Europe, Japan—wealthy, highly populated areas of the Atlas—bloomed with bright yellows, oranges, and reds bordered by fluorescent greens and blues, with cities around the world spotted white. Even into black oceans and seas did a gray buffer move from illuminated shores. As impressive as these images were, when the Atlas was updated in 2016 the spread of light had gotten worse. Almost everywhere is growing brighter, the new map seemed to say, and almost nowhere is growing darker. While the Bortle Dark-Sky Scale gives us a way to talk about darkness in specific locations, the Atlas gives us an overview of natural darkness around the world and just how rare it has become. On this map, nowhere in western Europe remains naturally dark. You would have to venture out into the seas to find that kind of darkness. The same is true of the lower forty-eight US states, where the map shows natural darkness only in scraps and patches, and none east of the Great Plains. These and other tools offer us ways to talk about light pollution’s spread, but most of all they help us grasp something intangible: the diminishing darkness in our everyday experience of life. Darkness is the essential quality of night. With its diminishing, all the other qualities that make our experience of a starry night—such as solitude, wildness, and mystery—are diminished as well.

22   darkness

“In a dark time,” wrote poet Theodore Roethke, “the eye begins to see.” He was focused on the figurative, but his words ring true of the literal as well. Only from our darkest places do we see the night’s faintest lights. •

The darkest place I have ever been still exists. It exists in my memory, and it exists behind all the lights. Anywhere we find ourselves, if we turn off, shield, or lower our lights, darkness will be there waiting. Whenever I reach the small house near the northern lake, I walk to the end of the dock. I want to see if any new lights shine along the shore, and I want to see the sky. I live most of my time in Bortle Class 8, in plenty of light. Even when stars are present, the city darkness holds only a few dozen, not the individual thousands (or, the Milky Way’s gathered billions) we ought to see. From the dock I walk into the woods to reacquaint myself with darkness. Sometimes, I wander the gravel road about halfway to our neighbors where, so many years ago, I paused, then sprinted home. Since her birth in spring two years ago, I have taken my daughter with me each summer. I want her to grow up feeling safe in the dark. I want her to feel at home, understanding that in such darkness hides light we otherwise never see, insight we might otherwise never have.

darkness   23

Canyonlands National Park, Utah

fear It must be poor life that achieves freedom from fear. —Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac

T

he year after graduating from college I drove thirteen hundred miles from Minneapolis to Moab in a small white Subaru with no cruise control. After pressing the accelerator for eighteen hours, I reached the southern Utah desert long after midnight and pulled into a campground by the Colorado River. Shimmering stars stretched overhead, but the horizon around me loomed solidly black—no stars, no streetlights, nothing. My mind couldn’t make sense of it, but I was too tired to care. At first light, I found I had reached a world where red-rock walls come down to the river in the morning and stars rise from cliff edge at night. I had traveled west to mountain bike the area’s slickrock and to see some of my country’s best starry skies. And I had come alone, hoping to overcome my fear of the dark. After a few days among the relative crowds around Moab, I drove south to the Needles section of Canyonlands National Park. No open sites remained in the campground, but if I wanted, I could grab a permit and camp in the backcountry. I felt a quick wave of nerves but figured that yes, this was exactly why I was here. I drove a few miles before parking, stomped out into the wilderness, set up my tent, and waited for night to arrive. I was young and thought I was

25

Landscape Arch, Arches National Park, Utah

dumb to fear the dark. I wanted to be able to hike into the middle of nowhere and savor the time without worry. That night, I hardly slept. I didn’t know how far from anyone else I really was, but I felt very alone, a feeling that only increased with the darkness. Once I crawled into my tent, I felt trapped, and every little sound sent my adrenaline surging. I spent much of the night lying alert in my sleeping bag. A lizard or mouse (or, something!) skittering over my tent in the wee hours had me sitting up suddenly, heart pounding. What exactly I feared I couldn’t say. But the feeling was primal—I’d felt it all my life—and forcing myself to confront it did nothing to clear it away. Yet, something else happened that has stayed with me since: I began to realize my fear of “the dark” was natural and understandable, and maybe even something to value. •

See, for a long while that evening, things were wonderful. Sitting on sandstone, savoring a picnic dinner, watching red taillights bounce along a distant local road, I witnessed the great shadow of night rise and move across the sky, a life-giving blanket for the desert. I knew at night the bright and heat of day would fade, and the desert’s animal residents would feel comfortable enough to move, and I liked being in the midst of this timeless world that goes on with or (usually) without us. It felt good to have gotten into that wilderness, awake and aware, taking in the changing landscape and sky. It felt good to have hiked out to meet the night. This was a feeling I would often have years later when researching The End of Night. Going out into the darkness when it seemed everyone else was

28   fear

headed back to the light. Wanting to get to a spot where I could watch a show so few of us watch anymore, the coming of night. We used to watch—throughout history and even long into the twentieth century, before the spread of electric light. We used to be far more acquainted with sunset and dusk, with growing twilight. We used to come together, maybe on a porch or lawn or beach, to watch the night arrive and the ancient stars emerge. My father used to tell me of going to northern Minnesota as a boy in the 1940s with his brother and parents, to Lake Pokegama, the four of them lying on their backs together to watch the summer sky. Electric light changed all that, paving the way for us to continue whatever we were doing during daylight hours straight into the night. It no longer matters that sunlight is fading and that darkness—whatever washed-out version we know—is gathering outside. We turn on a light and continue our day. And how wonderful that we can. Few of us would wish a return to a time when even European kings ate their winter dinners in the late afternoon before darkness overwhelmed their candlelight. There are countless reasons to be grateful for the ways that gas, then electric, and now electronic light have unlocked the hours after sunset and changed our lives. Yet, we use far more light at night than we need to, and we use it recklessly, cutting ourselves off from half the planet’s life. As Henry Beston wrote in The Outermost House, “Our fantastic civilization has fallen out of touch with many aspects of nature, and with none more completely than with night.” Why? Writing in the 1920s, Beston suggested the answer: “Are modern folk, perhaps, afraid of night? Do they fear that vast serenity, the mystery of infinite space, the austerity of stars? Having made themselves at home in a civilization

fear   29

Delicate Arch, Arches National Park, Utah

Bryce Canyon National Park, Utah

obsessed with power, which explains its whole world in terms of energy, do they fear at night for their dull acquiescence and the pattern of their beliefs?” Passed down from our ancestors and fed by our sensationalist society, a fear of the dark permeates Western culture. We used to fear predatory animals, and now we fear each other. Sometimes we have reason to fear dark places. In certain areas of every city, for example, there may be good reason to be vigilant and smart. And for most men, it may be impossible to know the vulnerability many women feel at night. When I wrote The End of Night, the two most challenging chapters were “Body, Sleep, and Dreams,” because I wanted to get the science correct, and the chapter about safety and security, because I recognized that my fear of the dark wasn’t the same as the fear felt by so many female friends. But if we are being clear, it’s not darkness we fear but what we imagine darkness hides. We can acknowledge that while some dark places truly are dangerous, most are not. And we can understand the costs of our fear: that we allow the overlighting of our nights with all its consequences, and that by avoiding darkness we miss what has always been a vital part of human life. •

This doesn’t mean we should fight our fear of the dark. As my night in Canyonlands helped me realize, fear of the dark—maybe any fear—is probably not something to overcome so much as something with which to live. In fact, I want to say that fear of the dark is something to value. If we are afraid of our fear—if we choose to deal with a natural emotion by avoiding it—then we lose whatever value it might have. Fear can keep you alive. But even more, fear—and in this case fear of the dark—is a signal of something important. The answer is not to ignore that signal but to respond.

fear   33

Take Beston’s words. Implied in his asking what we fear of the night (“vast serenity, the mystery of infinite space . . .”) is an argument for the value of these qualities. Beston is saying that these things we fear are actually counterpoints to living a life of “dull acquiescence.” We can use the experience of night’s natural darkness to gain perspective on our life. Face to face with the incomprehensible, we naturally feel a kind of fear as we realize we are not the center of the universe. It’s a little like looking in a mirror and seeing we are not the person we thought we were. But better to engage with that fear than to live a life, as Thoreau wrote, of “quiet desperation.” These days, there are so many real problems we would be right to fear. Ironically, we tend to fear what we needn’t—like a stranger attacking us in our house at night—and not what we would be wise to fear, like the ever-increasing destruction caused by a disrupted climate. The question isn’t whether to be afraid or not, but to respect our fear and to recognize its role in alerting us to act on behalf of those people and places we love. It seems fair to say that if you are not afraid of where we may be headed as a species, you probably aren’t paying attention. Not all the time—no one wants to live in fear. But sometimes it makes sense—a natural and understandable response to being aware of the world. •

Engaging with our fears is also a more interesting way to live our “one wild and precious life,” as the poet Mary Oliver wrote. This is what Aldo Leopold was getting at in his classic book A Sand County Almanac when he said he was grateful to have lived when grizzly bears still roamed the desert Southwest and lamented that young people “today” (he was writing in the 1940s, but it’s still true) did not.

34   fear

In the chapter “Escudilla,” Leopold reflected on what was lost when a government trapper killed the last grizzly on Escudilla Mountain. When I was living in Albuquerque some years ago, a friend and I drove down to southern Arizona to hike Escudilla. Knowing that chapter well, we hiked amid the absence of bears, rather than their presence, and it wasn’t the same experience. When Leopold writes that “it must be poor life that achieves freedom from fear,” I don’t take him to mean the fear of being attacked by a stranger in a parking deck. There is a kind of fear that makes life richer, a fear that comes from the presence of something greater than yourself. •

When I was a child, I loved planetariums. I’d spend the time tilted back on the soft seat with my mouth in open awe. As an adult I’m excited whenever I have that chance again to take in the night sky, exposed and explained, the faraway brought close. And there’s no doubt that planetariums have great value, especially for people whose circumstances keep them citybound, who otherwise wouldn’t see anything like a real night sky. So too, photographs—like the ones in this book—can show us what we are missing. But I know Beau would echo what I’m about to say: no planetarium screen or photographic image can capture the true experience of being out under the stars. For that you need the sounds of the surrounding night, the feel of the (often freezing) air, the scent of ponderosa pine or ocean surf or sunbaked desert sand. And you need a bit of this primal fear of darkness. As my daughter grows, I will take her to planetariums, and I will show her amazing images of the sky. But most of all, I will take her out to see night arrive. We will find a good spot to watch the sun set and the twilight shift through its hues. I want her to know the feeling of losing your balance on Earth as the

fear   35

Capitol Reef National Park, Utah

day’s ceiling rolls back to reveal night’s vault of stars. I want her to feel the natural fear that arises as our usual experience of life fades away. I want her to be smart when she’s out at night, but I don’t want her to be afraid of “the dark.” Outside at night there is a good fear, a knowing you don’t have control, a respect for what you can’t see—as well as for what you can. Your focus draws upward. And inward, if you allow it—to your thoughts, memories, and emotions. A fear that’s more like exhilaration? That’s part of a starry night.

fear   37

Black Rock Desert, Nevada

knowledge What did the scientists know about what I had done? How could they explain what had happened to me and the strange sensations I had known? –Sigurd Olson, “Northern Lights”

I

had always loved the night sky—growing up spending weeks at the lake every summer ensured I would—but I knew next to nothing about it. When it came to constellations, I knew Orion because of the iconic three-star “belt,” and I knew the “Big Dipper.” But that almost didn’t count, I was soon to learn, because it wasn’t actually a constellation but rather an “asterism,” a grouping of stars without that official designation. Recently into my thirties, living in a city surrounded by some of the darkest geography left in the United States, I decided to finally learn the stars. Back then that did not involve staring at a computer screen. Instead, I began to pull books from local shelves. More than once, I spent a Friday evening sitting on a bookstore floor with astronomy books spread around me. Phones that show what you should see when you hold them toward the sky? Those did not exist. Instead, there were star maps on the printed page. This time reminds me of the moments I first met lifelong friends. The friend you talked with last weekend and have known for twenty-five years—there was a time when the two of you had never met. Or, your partner? A few marry their

39

kindergarten pal, but most of us live decades without knowing the person with whom we will share our life. For me, it was like this with a handful of constellations. (And I mean here the classical Greek sky, knowing that Indigenous cultures around the world have long had their own constellations too.) I especially liked Scorpius and Sagittarius, which for North American viewers lie close to summer’s southwestern horizon. Scorpius, the Scorpion with the red star Antares as its eye, and Sagittarius, the Archer with the Milky Way steaming from its “teapot” spout. These were easily recognizable shapes, but for me they meant something more. The fact they were low on the horizon when I went out before bed made them feel closer. They became the constellations that linked my two homes. I could see them while standing behind my Albuquerque house and imagine being back on the dock at the lake, where the two constellations rose just above the black silhouettes of shoreline pines. These were graduate school years when I was driving from New Mexico to Minnesota for summers and for winter breaks. A good twentyfour hours of driving between the city where I worked and studied and the lake where I went to see my family and write. Looking for love, living on next to nothing—whenever I see those two constellations, I think of that time, and I probably always will. One constellation I had never seen, though I must have looked at it countless times, was Cygnus, the Swan. The shape of Cygnus, with its wings, neck, and tail feathers outlined by stars, is one of those relatively few constellations that immediately make sense. Ever since I recognized it, I’ve liked the thought that this beautiful bird will be flying above me at night forever. In summer, Cygnus flies straight overhead at the lake, and its main star, Deneb, combined with Vega (in the constellation Lyra, the Lyre) and Altair (in the constellation

40   knowledge

Fort Churchill State Historic Park, Nevada

Aquila, the Eagle) make up what we know as the Summer Triangle. Like the Big Dipper, the Summer Triangle is an asterism rather than a constellation, and a shape that once recognized is easily found again. Knowing some constellations began to connect me with the night sky. I was no longer looking up at an indecipherable mess of stars. I could see some patterns, and that drew me closer. But I never really learned the constellations in the way I had imagined I would. I’d had visions of being the guy who—when called on by a gathered group or by a date-who-was-ready-to-be-impressed— could unlock the mysteries of the nighttime sky. Aside from these few familiar shapes, I never achieved that goal. Instead, what I learned almost immediately about the constellations is that when I went outside, I could not see them. For one thing, no matter how creatively my astronomy books showed me the shapes, when I got out under the stars, I just could not see such constellations as Monoceros, the Unicorn, or Ophiuchus, the Serpent Bearer. It may simply be that our modern lack of engagement with such creatures or livelihoods makes it difficult to envision them in the sky. While some of the Southern Hemisphere constellations named in the nineteenth century might seem amusing to us now—Microscopium (the Microscope), Circinus (the Compass)—more familiar shapes would likely be easier to find. But the biggest reason I could not see the constellations twenty years ago is the same reason so many of us can’t see them today: light pollution. •

In a way, learning about light pollution was like learning the constellations in that both were something I had looked at all my life but had never really seen. Though “all my life” is not entirely true. When I was a child in the 1970s, the

42   knowledge

Joshua Tree National Park, California

Fort Churchill State Historic Park, Nevada

Las Vegas, Nevada

light pollution in northern Minnesota was almost nonexistent. On the Bortle Dark-Sky Scale those skies would have been Class 2. When Fabio Falchi and his colleagues created their original “World Atlas of the Artificial Night Sky Brightness,” they estimated back in time to show the US night sky in 1970 and 1950. The 1950 sky, a time when the country held only 100 million people, is long gone. It is the sky of grandparents and great-grandparents growing up on farms. So often in my presentations I hear stories from this generation about the sky they knew as children. I won’t forget one elderly woman telling me how she would take her horse into the night meadow and, while it grazed, lie on its back to watch the Milky Way spill overhead. While researching The End of Night, the estimate I found most troubling is that eight out of ten children born in the United States today will never live where they can see the Milky Way. On Falchi’s Atlas the sky from 1970—the first sky I would have seen, the area where our lake lies—is black. As a child I would have known a sky that few children know in the United States now. And that’s because of light pollution. Light pollution is something that once you see it, you see it everywhere. There’s an old saying that no one knows who discovered water but that it probably wasn’t a fish. Something similar could be said of light pollution. Most of us live so immersed in the sea of artificial light created by our cities and suburbs that we can’t imagine night being any different. In fact, almost anyone younger than about forty who has grown up in Western countries or in cities around the world has probably never known a night without light pollution. And so, I had set out to learn the constellations and instead learned why I could not see them. I learned terms such as skyglow (the diffuse spread of light over any city) and light trespass (light shining from one property onto another)

knowledge   47

Shiprock, New Mexico

and glare (blinding light). And I learned to see these types of light pollution all over the place. I had long remembered with fondness those winter nights in my boyhood Minneapolis when after a big snowfall the sky would be a push-pop orange and the whole night illuminated. You could play outside and see clearly in the weirdly bright night. It felt adventurous to pull on boots and coat and mittens and head out into the unplowed city’s glow. But now I realized that warm glow had been caused by light pollution—the pink-orange light from highpressure sodium streetlights reflecting off the clouds and snow. I suddenly saw how many billboards featured lights shining either straight into the sky or bouncing off their intended target and from there into the sky. And I realized how much glaring light shone straight into our eyes, our bedrooms, our backyards. This knowledge didn’t add to my experience of a starry night, except maybe for this: it helped me to realize what I was missing. The sky I saw over Albuquerque was nothing like the starry night I could be seeing. It’s remarkable to think that few of us anymore really know what the sky overhead looks like— or would look like if not for all our lights. A stunning image from 2003 shows the usual nighttime sky over the photo­ grapher’s suburban home side by side with the sky as it looked one night when a power outage darkened eastern North America. In the how-it-always-looks view, a cloud of skyglow blocks every star. In the power-outage-for-a-night view, the Milky Way hangs behind the house like a glittering curtain. Whenever I see this image, I remember Emerson’s words from the early nineteenth century about how people would react “if the stars came one night in a thousand years.” It’s revealing that in Emerson’s age, the stars were so numerous, so everyday, so—probably to teenagers of the era—boring, that he used them to make his point about humanity taking nature for granted. In the twenty-first century,

50   knowledge

most of us have never seen a sky that would have been common in his time. That experience—the heavens made visible—would simply have been part of daily life. But knowing what I am missing has made me grateful for those times I do see an unpolluted sky. I know what I’m seeing is rare, that not many people in the modern world share such a sight. And with the ever-growing number of people in cities, so many will never know it. And by “know” I mean experience firsthand. Because we can “know” the night sky by looking at a computer screen, by staring at our phones, even by looking at books. But that way of knowing has limits. In his essay “Northern Lights,” published in 1956, Sigurd Olson reflected on the knowledge that comes from firsthand experience. A popular writer during his lifetime, Olson penned straightforward essays about his experiences in the Boundary Waters between Minnesota and Ontario. In “Northern Lights,” Olson told the story of ice skating on a clear lake at night. He wrote this at a time when Americans were increasingly seeing scientific advancements in medicine, space exploration, consumer goods, and on. Olson acknowledged that the northern lights can be understood through scientific explanation. But, he explained, this isn’t the only way to know these lights. Myth and story and poetry are ways to know them as well. And no textbook could explain the northern lights better than could an experience of skating with them on a frozen northern lake. We now have more scientific knowledge of the night sky than ever before. I have always felt this kind of knowledge adds to my experience of the world. Because these facts and figures are so often utterly amazing, often unfathomable, knowing them adds to my awe. We can bring this knowledge with us when we step outside. But go outside we must, if we really want to know a starry night.

knowledge   51

White Sands National Park, New Mexico

While my daughter doesn’t “know” light pollution, artificial lights already shape her experience of the night. I am grateful I know what a natural starry night looks like, for I will want to bring her there as soon as I can. I want her to know the constellations, to know the numbers and facts, to see the deepspace photographs on her computer screen. But the knowledge I want most for her comes from standing under a truly dark sky, as her ancestors have all through time.

knowledge   53

Bonsai Rock, Lake Tahoe, Nevada

solace But in prison, where I was hardly even a number, the stars made me feel differently. They helped me to understand that I was part of a greater thing, not the greater thing itself. —Ken Lamberton, “Night Time”

I

was being interviewed on the radio, talking about the value of a starry night. A man called to say that when he was a teenager, there had been a lot of fighting and yelling at home, and being in the house he felt trapped. So, he would hop into his pickup and drive out to the countryside, climb onto the hood, and watch the night sky. He said being alone under the sky helped put things into perspective, gave him a chance to escape the hard times back home, made him feel there were other possibilities in the world. When I think of this story, I think of the word “solace.” That sense of comfort and consolation in times of distress. Surely, people have found solace in a starry night since the beginning of time. As hard as things might be on Earth, you could look up and feel some other reality existed. Maybe it’s the timelessness of stars, how they have always been there. Maybe it’s knowing they are so far away, and so many, and how that can make our problems feel smaller. It’s having the perspective to see beyond our immediate concerns. It’s what Charlie Chaplin once said: “Life is a tragedy when seen close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.”

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•

In his essay “Night Time,” Ken Lamberton writes about being in prison and how most nights he couldn’t see the stars. Either he was locked inside, or glare filled the prison yard. But every so often—maybe during a power outage or while being moved from one location to another—he would glimpse a starry sky. He describes the freedom he felt seeing the stars he had loved before prison, the sky he couldn’t wait to see once he was released. He tells how stunned he was that most people choose to lock themselves inside away from the stars, while he who desperately wanted to see them could not. For prisoners, slaves, soldiers, victims of violence, even someone simply lovesick or heartbroken—the night sky has always been a source of solace. For all of us, and for free. But now, with our overuse and misuse of artificial light at night, we have taken this comfort from most Americans, from most Europeans, from city dwellers around the world. What solace can we take from a sky that offers only a hazy gray-dark canvas with maybe a few drips of light? No longer spectacular, no longer awe-inspiring. No longer something you would want to lie back with your family to watch. No longer something to spark contemplation, reflection, perspective. No longer a source of solace at a time when we could really use some. When I think of the world my daughter will know, I often feel distress. She will never know the natural world that I have known, because much of that world no longer exists. In the five decades since I was born, for example, the world has lost some two-thirds of its wildlife. In that same time period, three billion birds have disappeared from North America alone. In sub-Saharan Africa the

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Coronado Island, San Diego, California

Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado

Comet NEOWISE, Lake Mead National Recreation Area, Utah

populations of storybook animals like elephants and lions and giraffes have suffered steep decline. How much more will we lose by the time she reaches my age? Wherever we live, if we are paying attention, we sense the changes. The seasons have shifted, the weather has grown strange, fewer of the old birds and animals share our world. Scientists have been warning of these changes for years, and the future they predict describes a planet with more loss and turmoil, not less. For many, even amid the tremendous beauty that remains, the way the world is changing brings a deep sense of loss. The Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht has coined a word to match this feeling. Solastalgia describes the pain we feel when we lose the solace of the natural world we have always known. Albrecht describes it as “the homesickness you feel while still at home,” as opposed to nostalgia’s looking back to a time that has passed or a place you used to be. The term reflects how I often feel, as do many others—all around the world people are sharing their solastalgia. But though these feelings are painful, I see them as positive. They are a natural response to realizing the world is being radically altered by forces often beyond our control, and they call us to protect what we love. My friend Fabio Falchi has described the challenge of light pollution as being that it grows “very fast—in just a few decades—but also slow enough that people don’t notice.” Even at the lake in northern Minnesota where I know the stars best, it’s difficult to tell from year to year what has been lost because that loss has been gradual. But if I could go back to that night as a five-year-old standing on the dock with my dad, I would see a night sky that no longer exists. For me, the loss of solace from the natural world is all the more reason to preserve our experience of a starry night. If we truly love the world, we will feel the pain of seeing it diminished in beauty and diversity, and we will know

solace   61

Castle Lake, Ruby Mountains, Nevada

the sadness of seeing the seasons disrupted and the lives that depend on those steady seasons confused, and too often lost. Many of us will try to take action on behalf of the life and lives we love, and it will be hard. We will ask how are we to live with joy while working to preserve a disappearing world? We are going to need places to find solace. We are going to need experiences that can give us perspective and restore our belief in awe. The experience of a starry night is only going to grow more valuable with each passing year.

solace   63

Lake Tahoe, California

solitude Sometimes when night grows late . . . I switch off the light. The dark wood collects around me. I stand for a long time beneath night clouds, looking into the inscrutable distance. Life flows and flows past me, like a river, until it finally lifts me in its insurgence and delivers me to the edge of a luscious and telling obscurity.

—Janisse Ray, “Against Eternal Day”

T

hen I had a dog, and this changed my relation to night. I won’t forget bringing her home, the car winding its way down into Santa Fe from the Los Alamos house where she had been born. It was November, and we drove in the dark with snowflakes floating to earth around us. On the passenger seat my puppy lay curled in the blue plastic laundry basket I had brought along to keep her contained on the ninety-minute drive. When I stopped in Santa Fe to dash into a grocery store for some dinner, I left the motor running with the hope she wouldn’t wake. This was the first night in a fifteen-year relationship that would shape my life. I was living in Albuquerque, working as a waiter and going to graduate school. I had read that a dog’s basic needs are “attention and exercise,” and luckily for her I had plenty of time for both. First thing every morning we took a long walk together and then most evenings another. And all her life, almost every night, the last thing we did before bed was to go for one more.

65

Santa Fe, New Mexico

I was living near Old Town, the plaza where in 1706 the city took root surrounded by single- and two-story adobe buildings. The modern downtown eventually rose a mile away, and Old Town was now mostly for tourists and the stores that catered to them. At night, the place was deserted, and in the hour before midnight we seldom saw another soul. I would hop on my mountain bike and Luna would race alongside. We would cross over Rio Grande Boulevard and cut into Old Town, where she would blast into alleys and leap over low adobe courtyard walls. A little chapel tucked behind an art gallery was left unlocked, a sanctuary where people lit votives and left personal messages in crayon and pen to particular saints. So much history had passed here—the narrow one-way streets and walkways were filled with friendly ghosts, quiet, and relative dark. All day long, I would look forward to Old Town with Luna at night. Just east of the plaza lay a small neighborhood park without lights. I would sometimes steer us there and stop to watch Orion rise above where the city’s butterscotch streetlights ended at the base of the Sandia Mountains, the winter sky growing more familiar each time. I began to understand how unusual it was to be out enjoying the night, especially alone. Simply put, it seemed no one else was around. I don’t mean out on the town, enjoying food and drink. I mean outside enjoying the darkness, the stars, the sounds and scents of the natural night. Roasting green chiles infused the autumn air, as did in most months smoke from fires fueled with piñon pine. I began to treasure the sensation of how the world felt slowed in speed and reduced in size, how I could breathe and relax. I came to savor the solitude of being out alone at night. At the lake in Minnesota, I mostly watched the sky alone as well, standing on the dock or paddling the canoe. And in the years that would follow my

solitude   67

time in Albuquerque—especially when I was working on The End of Night— I often found myself alone in the darkness. It was true in Maine when I drove up Cadillac Mountain to watch the sun set and the night arrive and had the distinct impression that everyone else was driving down off the mountain. It was true on the Grand Canyon’s North Rim when I lay on the ancient rocks and felt as though floating amid a sea of stars. It was true in southern Utah’s Natural Bridges National Monument, the parking areas empty, the trails deserted, the Bortle Class 2 skies all mine. In Old Town, at the lake, in these other places and since, I felt a heightened alertness and attention to my surroundings—that feeling of being wonderfully in the moment, the intimacy of only being where I am. Some of this is circumstance—I haven’t had a lifetime of being told I should be frightened at night, as have some of my friends. I have never had to endure unwanted advances, or deal with an ever-present potential of being attacked. I have lived where there has been little threat of real danger—a luxury that too many people around the world don’t share. But still, the good solitude of which I am speaking can be found in different ways. A friend in Mexico City who keeps his child from the neighborhood park for fear of violence lets her instead climb onto their building’s roof at night to see the stars. Sometimes the solitude of a starry night is literal, but other times it comes in the company of a friend, a group of strangers at a star party, at the edges of a presentation in a national park. Either way, a starry night offers an opportunity to know, too, the solitude of every human life. We all are alone, on some level—no one can inhabit our body, no one can live our life, no one can die our death. With its numbers and distances that bend our brain, a starry night raises questions like “Who am I?” “What will

68   solitude

Outhouse, Bodie State Historic Park, Wyoming

Casino Borealis, Reno, Nevada

my life be?” “Have I lived my time wisely?” and offers the chance to answer such questions for ourself rather than have them answered for us. In this way, under the stars in our solitude, we join with everyone else. •

When I finished my degree in Albuquerque, I moved to Nevada and bought a small white house with sky blue trim in Reno’s Old Southwest neighborhood. Luna and I shared a wonderful four years there, in part because it’s so easy to get out of the city. A seven-minute drive brought us to the foothills for an hourlong hike. But we kept our habit of walking our neighborhood before bed, too. We would walk four blocks to a local park, past the pale blue glow of televisions behind window curtains. Once, on a snowy night, we walked past a man in his garage cleaning shot quail, and he gave Luna a wing that she proudly carried away, her pawprints warm blooms in the sidewalk snow. But usually, just as in Old Town, if we waited late enough, we walked alone. We would travel those blocks seeing no one, and we would have the park to ourselves. Being out at night like that, even under a sky missing most of its stars, the solitude was like a secret I’d been told, one I savored and held close. The solitude of night feels like a gift. A chance to not feel so surrounded by people with their cars and trucks and buildings, their speed and noise and light. During the day, I am too often part of all that. How can we not be? But at night, if we are lucky, we can still know the possibilities solitude brings.

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Eastern Sierra moonrise, Lone Pine, California

moonlight Suppose you attend to the suggestions which the moon makes for one month. . . . 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? —Henry David Thoreau, “Night and Moonlight”

I

love being surprised by the moon. I’ll be driving at dusk and suddenly it will appear above the horizon, glowing and huge, as though lit from within, set afloat, and lifted by flames. Other times, after what seems like weeks, I’ll catch sight of its wisp of curved light in the low western sky. But while I have always loved the moon, when I read Thoreau’s essay from 1850, I realized that I had never really “attended” to it. I took as a challenge his words, “Suppose you attend to the suggestions which the moon makes for one month?” and decided that for thirty nights—from “new” to last waning crescent—I would be out beneath the moon. I decided this during summer, a time when night’s warmth would make my quest more likely to succeed. And I would do it at the lake. Our cabin faces west, so my horizon across the water is a shoreline of pines with the night sky just above. I can sit at the end of the redwood dock, bare feet in cool water, and wait for the Milky Way to emerge.

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And here is where I found the first moon. Just above the trees, a barely visible crescent that if you weren’t watching would likely drop from view before you noticed. Those first few moons were easy—I could savor the twilight, the crescent taking shape, moving toward first quarter. And all this in the hours just after sunset, a perfect time to see the sky. As the month progressed, the moon turned larger, building toward half a moon high overhead, until came the nights around full when it rose opposite the setting sun, climbing from the woods behind our house to cast the sun’s reflected light across the lake’s ripples and waves. Gradually, the moon’s rise came later and later, so that finally I was setting an alarm for the wee small hours and pulling myself out of bed and into the night. It then disappeared for a few days before once again showing above the far shore, that faint curve of light. It’s a pattern that, having made it familiar, will always be part of my life. •

I was living with Luna in Reno then, in our small house where it felt like the largest room was the never-ending foothills on the edge of town. We couldn’t have known before we moved to Reno how accessible and wonderful that open space would be. We had left a good life in New Mexico, where Luna had lived her first four years and I had lived eight. But graduate school called, and when I drove the moving truck west out of the Rio Grande Valley, she hopped up onto her blue dog bed on the passenger seat, my copilot. The next four years would be a kind of “dog heaven” for her. Every morning and every evening we would drive to a trailhead, and I would set her free to run while I walked, lost in thought, savoring our repeated paths.

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First snow, Reno, Nevada

Emerald Bay, Lake Tahoe, California

What makes for a good life? For me, it has been regular patterns—walking with my dog, cooking and eating good food, hot baths at night, crawling into a comfortable bed. Occasional surprise and excitement, yes, but these regu­ lar daily patterns have given me the deepest pleasure. When Thoreau describes the moon as “so divine a creature freighted with hints for me,” I think of this. Once you become acquainted with the moon, you know where in the sky to find it, you know when it will be back. Every month, I anticipate the rise of a nearly full, full, and just past full moon, and in this return feel again the pleasure of a pattern repeated. No matter what is going on in my life or the life of the world, I know the moon will be there sharing its light. •

Part of the moon’s magic is the way it takes us to places remembered or imagined, the way it links us to who we were and to those who came before. Watching the moon and stars, we do what humans have always done, we see what humans have always seen. Because of light pollution, we see less today than what those before us saw, but the thread remains. This connection to the past, this sense of being allowed back to a place and time where some ancient world goes on— nothing brings this feeling more than seeing the moon. For me the moon often seems to show at important intervals, to mark experiences in my life. If the moon were always in the sky, this feeling wouldn’t be the same. I know I won’t forget these nights: the moon above a walking bridge in Venice when I was eighteen and away from my family for the first time; it shining above Gail’s house the summer she said no; the night another love said yes as we stood on a stone arch by a city lake; the first time I took my daughter out to introduce her to the sky.

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Joshua Tree National Park, California

Black Rock Desert, Nevada

Golden Gate Bridge, Marin County, California

When I see the moon, especially on nights around full, I am taken back to times like these. It’s as though the full moon’s light unlocks a room where all these different nights still live, and I can move among these moments that have shaped me. Who was I then? Have I lived up to my dreams? Have I kept what I loved about myself, and let go what I did not? Another part of the moon’s magic is the way it connects me not only with my past but with the past in general, that whereas the day seems tied to the present, the moon seems eternal. The moon I see tonight is the moon I saw while standing on that Italian bridge, and every night on the dock at the lake. But it’s also the moon my father saw when he first met my mom, and that my grandmother saw as a small girl, and that every person before me saw during their short time in this world. When I stare at the moon, I know my friends—on the other side of the city, of the country, of the ocean—are seeing it too, and I feel connected. And how wonderful that we can look directly at the moon. The bright sun blinds us, pushes us away, closes our eyes. The moon draws us in, invites us to see, keeps us close. •

The moonlight most of us know is diminished. If you ever get somewhere that electric lights don’t fill the sky, the moon shines brighter than perhaps you have ever imagined. From the crowded city’s center, the moon loses much of its power. These things that the moon can do, I doubt they happen so wonderfully when its natural light is overwhelmed by the accumulated lights of a city. Moonlight moves time forward as well. I think of my daughter as she grows, staring at the moon and imagining the years to come. Already at two

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years she delights in seeing the moon before I do, and she has a lifetime of watching ahead. What do we lose if we can’t see the moon? If artificial light so fills our sky that it washes away the moon’s “world of poetry, its weird teachings, its oracular suggestions,” as Thoreau says? Without this experience we are cut off from these sensations that help to make us who we are. I love what Linda Hogan says about each of us being “the result of the love of thousands.” Our actions, what we value, how we live—all are shaped by how we see ourselves in the world. Are we connected to those who came before us? To our own idealistic younger selves? To our children as they encounter the world we have left them and who think yes, this is so beautiful, or no, what have they done? Whenever I see the moon, I recognize a dear friend. Not always present but present nonetheless. I know this friend will be there always, a friend I cannot imagine living without. •

All my life at the northern lake, I have taken the canoe out to gaze at the moon. On full-moon nights, I will wait awhile. The house sits close to shore, and a steep hill rises behind into the surrounding woods. And so, long after pale white light bathes the far shore, the woods around our house stay black. I’ll grab a wood paddle and push the aluminum canoe from among the shadows, bringing the shining shape up from the leaves and boughs. Most nights the lake lies calm and quiet and out of time. If I wait long enough, a loon will join me with a mourning call from a nearby bay. Then others will join, a chorus of calls, for a few moments filling the night air. Then suddenly, quiet. Floating. Eventually a barred owl from shore, its who-cooks-for-you,

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who-cooks-for-you-aaaaalllll. One time, two owls were close, in the near-shore pines, hooting back and forth. Without thinking, I lifted my oar from the water, and they stopped. They heard me in the quiet. The moon I see over the lake tonight looks the same as the moon I saw here forty years ago as a child. I imagine it will look the same in forty years, whether I am here or not. It looked the same back when I was imagining what my life would be, and it will look the same when I am near the end, reflecting on what my life has been. Looking at the moon, I wonder if the longing for something more will remain as well. That longing used to be about what I hoped would happen, but now in middle age I feel more the longing for what was, or what might have been. I am grateful for all that I have experienced, but still I wonder if the moon will always bring this longing. Maybe with more time the longing will fade, but maybe the longing that comes with the moon is just part of being human and so never leaves, until we do.

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Modoc County barn, California

wildness Twilight, that long blue moment, hung on the cusp of night and day, poised between sunset and moonrise. Never does the earth feel more alive than at the moment when she takes a last deep breath of day, and the night arrives on her sigh. —Robin Wall Kimmerer, “Nightfall”

I

t was late August at the cabin, the time of year when the days still feel like summer, but the nights feel as though autumn is gathering in the woods across the lake. That hint of a chill, that crispness in the air, the wood smoke from someone’s fire. I walked out onto the dock. A yellow moon burned low in the southern sky, its light rippling off water brushed by a slight breeze. Just a few lights around the shore, maybe a fishing boat in the distance, a solitary fish jump splash, a woman’s echoing laugh. Suddenly, a long howl rose from the woods beneath the moon. I first thought “coyote?” and then understood, wolf. What stuns me still is the way this ancient wild sound, ringing out on a summer night in a northern forest, reverberated through my body. The wolf was deep in the woods and I was a short dash from my door, yet this primal sensation coursed through me. I listened for a few seconds, then hurried inside.

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We have wolves in the woods around the cabin, but they keep their secrets. I think of them as drifting among the pines and oaks and evaporating like smoke when they know we are near. Every once in a while there’s a story—a wolf hit by a motorcycle, a wolf seen crossing a lane in the evening. But in four decades of coming to the lake I have heard a howl only twice. This time I knew I was in no danger—and still, I felt the instinctual fear that has been passed down, the feeling of not being king of the world. When I think of that feeling now, I want it again. I wish I could go back to that moment, turn toward the gravel lane, and set off toward that sound. •

At night, the wild world comes alive. So many creatures have evolved over millions of years to be nocturnal, meaning they need night’s natural darkness in order to survive. Many more species are crepuscular, meaning they are most active at dawn and dusk. From the tiniest insect to the largest mammal, species have evolved to use night’s darkness as time to move and feed, migrate and mate. And on a planet increasingly crowded with humans, night has become even more important to the wild world. Scientists have found that to avoid people and to use what space remains, more species are shifting their activities into the dark. One study in Nepal found the same jungle paths used by people during the day were the paths used by tigers at night. One example of night’s wildness is that of migrating birds. In North America alone some four hundred species migrate after dark. During spring and fall migrations, ornithologists use weather surveillance radar to track the great flocks moving north and south along the continent’s flyways. Many of these night migrations are made of songbirds, and it’s sometimes possible to stand outside and hear them passing over, their chips and chirps as they keep tabs on

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Wind River Range, Wyoming

Lassen Volcanic National Park, California

each other. Whenever I have a chance to hear this—to witness these migrations more with my ears than my eyes—I feel welcomed into a hidden world. Here is ancient life going on around us that normally we don’t notice. Out at night to watch the stars, wildness passes overhead. The importance of night’s darkness for the wild world makes the problem of light pollution all the more serious. We are just beginning to understand the negative impacts on this natural life from too much artificial light. Life on Earth evolved with bright days and dark nights, and this life needs both natural light and natural darkness. Knowing this, it’s easy to imagine the negative impact from our use of electric and electronic light, whether scientific studies reflect this yet or not. As one biologist told me, “Imagine how dimming the sun would impact the world’s life, and this is exactly what we are doing by increasing our light at night. We could expect the effects to be just as pronounced.” The effect on insects is a prime example. Many of us have learned the importance of bees, butterflies, and other pollinating insects. But pollinators are active at night too, especially moths. Many people have noticed they don’t see as many insects as they used to. We no longer notice a “moth snowstorm” around a streetlight on a summer’s night, or the splatter across our car’s windshield on a late-night drive. Researchers have confirmed these observations with studies that show an alarming drop in insect populations. Their once great numbers no longer enliven our wild natural night. Habitat destruction, climate change, and pesticide use are the main causes, but light pollution contributes as well. What’s maddening is that light pollution is so unnecessary. Indeed, a basic definition—the overuse and misuse of artificial light at night—reflects this fact. With insects and other wildlife already facing so many enormous challenges, it’s frustrating that artificial light at night would be an additional burden.

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Mohave County, Arizona

Wee Thump Joshua Tree Wilderness, Nevada

This diminishment of night’s wildness is cause for alarm. The positive economic benefit this wildness has on our lives would be reason enough to care, but its presence makes our experience of life richer. To be standing at the end of the dock, or out in the desert, or just about anywhere I have seen the stars, part of the experience flows from knowing that in coming out at night I join with so many other creatures. When I hear the wolf or the loon, I hear that ancient wild world. It slices across the night and echoes through my body, connecting me with those countless generations that have known these night sounds. •

One night at dusk when I was researching The End of Night, I left my rental car in the Concord, Massachusetts, parking lot of a big box store and hiked the train tracks toward Walden Pond. Officially, Walden Pond State Reservation closes at night, so I decided to sneak in the back way and find Thoreau’s cabin site in the dark. The thrill I felt setting off down the tracks faded as I got lost in the woods and began to wonder if my idea wasn’t all that bright. But finally, when I heard frogs, I knew I would find water. Of Thoreau’s many ideas, “in wildness is the preservation of the world” is perhaps his best known. The phrase is sometimes misquoted as “wilderness,” but “wildness” is more profound. Wilderness usually denotes a certain kind of place—the 1964 Wilderness Act defined it as “an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain”—the kind of place to which fewer and fewer have access. But wildness, more of us can know. The starry night is a good place to start. Just walk out into the night—being smart, aware of your surroundings—and feel the difference. You may not know why it feels different, but your body will know—just as mine did with the wolf’s howl.

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Whenever I give a presentation, I choose the most beautiful images I can find. But I always make the point that seeing the stars is only part of what makes the experience of a starry night. For me, looking at a screen pales compared to being out in the night. Knowing that around me the skies and waters and woods and fields and deserts and mountains are coming alive—wildness is a big part of the difference. Coming out into the starry night, we have a chance to feel a too-oftenforgotten side of who we will always be. A side that for Thoreau meant the difference between preservation or not. The hair on the back of our neck, the tingle in our spine, the quickening of our heart—we know in a way we too seldom do that we are part of a living world.

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Crater Lake National Park, Oregon

mystery Artificial light makes it difficult to see beyond our constricted, human-centered world. A child might be forgiven for thinking that’s all there is. But when we douse the lights, a child can discover that the universe is lit by lamps humans did not switch on, deepened by distances we cannot fathom, moved by forces we do not understand. —Kathleen Dean Moore, “The Gifts of Darkness”

I

n my first memory of this life I am five years old and standing on the dock with my father watching satellites pass through sugary spreads of stars. It is summertime at the lake in northern Minnesota, to where I have returned every summer since. Why is that memory my first? Why not something else from my five years on the planet? Maybe that’s just where the film starts, where I had reached an age to begin putting down memories that four decades later I still can recall. But maybe it says something about the power of the moment, that of everything I had experienced so far, this one made its mark. Now I have a two-year-old daughter who has learned to point out the moon, and who sometimes says “no stars” when presented with a city sky. I have no idea whether she will remember the moments she has lived so far, but we are conscious of the experiences we give her. For example, we share her with our parents as much as possible, hoping the time she spends with her grand­ parents will shape her life long after they are gone.

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Joshua Tree National Park, California

My mother and father are both in their eighties. The man on the dock in my first memory is twenty years younger than I am now, and the days—and nights—keep coming. I cannot imagine the world without my parents. I don’t want to. Yet if life takes its natural course, someday they will be gone, and I will still be here. I sometimes think of the first full moon that will come after they pass, the first moon in my life to shine down without finding them here. I know the same will happen for me, that one night a full moon will rise, and I will be nowhere to see it. But these thoughts are too big. How can we no longer exist? How can anything exist in the first place? Especially when everything we know tells us an endless black universe surrounds our blue-green home, how came this world to be? •

We are a species that adores the light and fears the dark, and mystery is a kind of darkness. We aren’t good at letting it be. We aren’t good at engaging. We avoid, ignore, or shoo it away. We try to explain, we try to control. And the unknown is frightening—I know this firsthand. All my adult life I have sometimes feared the way my body has felt. A stomachache, a headache, a lump in my throat. They say it is “only” anxiety, but the sensations are real, and sometimes I have endured a panic that stays for days, or weeks, or worse. But each time I make it through my fear, the world opens in a new way. If I once took something for granted, I no longer do. Whatever I loved before this mysterious fear, I love even more. When we lose the night sky, we lose a chance to become familiar with mystery. As much as we know about the stars, so much has yet to be known.

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Logan Pass, Glacier National Park, Montana

Fort Churchill State Historic Park, Nevada

And even when we have studied something so long—like the moon—that we have packed up our instruments and moved on, mystery remains. Why are so many of us pulled by the moon to look up in wonder? (And why some seem immune to that pull is mystery of another kind.) Walking out at night and seeing a starry sky, coming face to face with the universe, presents us with something greater than we can grasp. All the stars we ever see are shining within our own galaxy—the Milky Way Galaxy—and beyond our galaxy are countless others. We cannot fathom what we are seeing, let alone what we are not. Where did we come from? Where do we go? What is all this we are looking at? By preserving the night sky, we preserve this experience. •

What if a starry night were part of every human life? How might it change the way we live? What if the experience of a starry night were a common way of learning about all that we cannot control? What if it were something every parent shared with every child, a way of explaining when there are no words? Sharing a starry night with a child is like giving them another language, one that speaks intangibles. Why not teach our children that mystery is a fact of life? I like the thought that my father showed me the stars that night for this reason. Knowing him, he probably just wanted to look for shooting stars. But even if we don’t think about it consciously, we tend to want to share the stars with those we love. It’s a way to communicate a respect for beauty and mystery, a respect for the brief time we get to be alive. •

In Luna’s last summer, when she had lost much of what had made her the greatest dog I have ever known, and the vet told me she had only weeks left, I decided

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to say goodbye at the cabin in Minnesota. On her last night, we went out onto the dock under a waning gibbous, one of those big moons that rises late and stays through the night. I sat on the dock with my legs crossed and brought Luna onto my lap—the same way she had crawled onto my lap as a puppy fifteen years before. In some cultures, I would have hummed or sang a song of the dying, a song of goodbye. Too much of my own culture, I sat quietly, holding my friend, my face alternately in her fur and turned toward the sky. There was nothing I could do to keep her with me, nothing I could do to take us back to days spent hiking at dusk on the desert city’s edge, the owlets tucked into the cliffside, their mother curving toward us in silent flight, the day’s light draining and the first stars taking their positions in the twilit sky. The life she knew is the best thing I have so far done with mine. But I could do nothing to keep the end from coming. She has been gone now six years, and I like that if I were able to go back, I would do nothing differently. I would give her the same life, and I would be out on the same dock where, so many years before, my father pointed me toward the Milky Way and wordlessly said, Beauty and mystery and life, here you go. I would hold my friend and say thank you, again and again. •

Two loving parents, four grandparents alive well into my twenties, a family cabin on a northern lake where I first learned about night—I am lucky to have grown up in the circumstances I did. So many people live where they can barely see a dozen stars, where the moon can rise and cross the sky unnoticed, where they have no choice about the night they know. But for those who do, we can choose to have the light we need but not more than we need. We can choose

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Lake Tahoe, Nevada

Supermoonrise, Mohave County, Arizona

to have darkness, too. In our choices today about our use of artificial light, we shape the night our children will know in the future. I can’t imagine growing up without a starry night. I can’t imagine life without the qualities that make the experience what it is. And yet, unless I make the effort to take her to where darkness still exists, my daughter will never know the night as I have. Here is what I like to remember: light pollution is readily within our abilities to solve. The first step is to recognize what we are losing, and what we have to regain—something once common, now made rare, something that until just a few decades ago, every human before us had known—the firsthand experience of a natural starry night.

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Bay Bridge, San Francisco, California

afterword by Beau Rogers

M

y love for nighttime photography began after I moved to Reno, Nevada, for graduate school during the summer of 2008. I had already been spending the majority of my free time with landscape photography and became knowledgeable about the Friends of Nevada Wilderness nonprofit organization because of my affiliation with the Literature and Environment Program at the University of Nevada, Reno. Friends of Nevada Wilderness let me know that they needed some photographs of the Granite Range near Nevada’s Black Rock Desert; so I decided to go there for a Saturday night in September during a new moon. With the dry air and little chance of precipitation, I decided to cowboy camp without a tent. An hour or so after dark, I witnessed the greatest display of stars that I had ever seen. From horizon line to horizon line, north to south and east to west, billions of stars twinkled in the cloudless sky. It was so impressive that I had a hard time going to sleep and gazed in awe for hours. A few months later, Dr. Michael Branch informed me about an upcoming meteor shower, and I returned to the same exact place. My life of night photography had begun. A few years later, I started teaching intro to digital photography classes at Truckee Meadows Community College in Reno and Western Nevada College in Carson City, and I decided to make night photography a focus of the course.

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Mount Rainier National Park, Washington

I learned as much as I could about perfecting the technique while enjoying the capabilities of new digital cameras able to use high ISO in ways previously not possible. I would lead a field trip every semester to Nevada’s Fort Churchill State Historic Park for night photography, and the students loved it. Many would tell me that it was the best field trip of their entire academic career. My photos ended up catching the attention of an outdoor tourism website, and then Dr. Scott Slovic put me in touch with Paul Bogard to work together on this project. Most of my nighttime images at the time were taken in Nevada, but Paul and I decided to spread the coverage across the West. I went out several times during the summers of 2017 and 2018 and spent the entire summer of 2019 collecting nighttime images. After more than a decade of shooting at night, my main advice is to use a sturdy tripod, a fast wide-angle lens, and a camera that does well at high-sensitivity settings (ISO). Good planning and patience are two other helpful skills. For Milky Way photos, astronomy apps for smartphones are invaluable. Always remember that the galactic core of the Milky Way is next to the constellation of Scorpius, and the five nights before and after a new moon are typically the best. My favorite image is the one of Washington’s Mount Rainier, for which I had planned over a year in advance and reserved a backcountry campsite near the Sunrise Visitor Center on the west side of the park. In 2014, I accidentally found a great location for night photography there and decided to return when I had more experience and better camera gear. It was a cloudy day during the drive to the mountain, and the situation did not look promising. I arrived in the late afternoon and walked about four miles to my campsite. An hour before dark, I walked another mile to the viewpoint and was disappointed to see that the entire mountain was hidden in the clouds. I almost gave up and returned

114   afterword

to camp, but then a hiker passed me. When I told him about my disappointing situ­ation, he quickly said, “Man, all you need to do is walk another couple miles up this trail. You’ll end up above the clouds, and the view is amazing.” I am so glad that I followed his advice. For several hours, I sat on a rock and enjoyed the most incredible view: Mount Rainier surrounded by stars with the clouds below the peak like a bowl of cotton candy.

afterword   115

Glacier National Park, Montana

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We thank Dr. Scott Slovic, who first brought us together on this project. For both of us, Scott has been a source of unfailing support over the years. Without his interest in our work, this book would not exist. Thank you to Scott for his opening words, and to Karen Trevino for hers. We thank all the good people at the University of Nevada Press. We are thrilled to have this book be published by a press we both admire. To Margaret Dalrymple, JoAnne Banducci, Sara Vélez Mallea, Sara Hendricksen, Iris Saltus, and Jinni Fontana—we are grateful for your support of this book. Our thanks as well to Justin Race for his initial excitement about the idea. Thanks to Clark Whitehorn, who immediately expressed his support and helped the project move forward. And, especially, we thank Alrica Goldstein for her enthusiasm about the book and her guiding hand in bringing it into the world. •

PB: My thanks first to Beau Rogers, whose photographs fill this book. It’s humbling and exciting to have such stunning images placed alongside my prose. Thanks to all those who work to protect darkness around the world. Thanks especially to the folks at the International Dark-Sky Association, including Ruskin Hartley and John Barentine. Thank you as well to Fabio Falchi for his Atlas, and for his tireless work against light pollution in northern Italy. Several of the chapter epigraphs come from essays I collected for Let There

117

Be Night: Testimony on Behalf of the Dark. To Ken Lamberton, Janisse Ray, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and Kathleen Dean Moore, my gratitude again for your words. My thanks to new colleagues at Hamline University and to past colleagues at James Madison University, Wake Forest University, and Northland College. I am grateful for your friendship and support. Love to Rose and Ron Hilk. To my parents, John and Judith Bogard. To Caroline, and to The Bub.

118   acknowledgments

Tahoe City, California

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Paul Bogard is the author of The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light, The Ground Beneath Us: From the Oldest Cities to the Last Wilderness, What Dirt Tells Us About Who We Are, and the children’s picture book What If Night? A native Minnesotan, Paul is now an associate professor of English at Hamline University in Saint Paul, Minnesota, where he teaches writing and environmental literature. Find him at paul-bogard.com

ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPHER Beau Rogers leads photography workshops across the American West and teaches English at Mohave Community College’s Bullhead City, Arizona, campus.

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