The night is dark, right?
Well, it turns out the truth is a bit more complicated than that. In this scintillating (sorry) and illuminating (last one, I promise) book, Paul Bogard, a writer on all facets of light pollution, examines the diverse nature of darkness, humanity's changing attitude to it, and especially how we can protect "true" darkness on a 21st-century planet soaked in light overspill.
The book, subtitled Searching For Natural Darkness In An Age Of Artificial Light, is a mix of reportage, personal memoir, science reporting, interviews with activists and experts in the fields of astronomy, light pollution, lighting design and more, plus some poetic musings, historical research and philosophical interludes. This hotchpotch of styles is a familiar approach to nature writing these days, but it works well enough here, only falling flat when Bogard becomes a tad too polemical or ponderous.
For the most part, this is a book of quiet revelations. It is cleverly structured in line with the Bortle scale, a system devised in 2001 by astronomer John E Bortle to describe the gradations of darkness in the night sky across the world. Each grade is given a number, with nine containing the most light pollution (typically an inner-city sky) and one being a completely dark sky, or as near as is possible.
The chapters of The End Of Night mirror this, with Bogard starting at nine and counting down to one. So he begins in the brightest city in the world, Las Vegas, at the Luxor Beam, the extraordinarily bright light shooting up into the heavens. From there he troops around the world, visiting sites with different Bortle scale numbers, talking to experts and spending a lot of time gazing up at the night sky, wishing he could see more stars.
Bogard has really done his research. A trip around London reveals that it still contains 1600 gas lamps, left over from a pre-electric era. That chapter also sees him quoting the likes of Robert Louis Stevenson's A Plea For Gas Lamps and Charles Dickens's Night Walks, as well as giving an in-depth description of Paris's superior lighting design compared to many other urban sprawls.
As we move down the Bortle scale, Bogard takes the reader away from cities to suburban conurbations, then towns, villages and finally into forests, deserts and mountains, in search of ever darkening skies. Along the way, he discusses with passion every facet of light and dark. One of Bogard's biggest bugbears is badly designed lighting, the ever-present glare of shopping malls, petrol stations, car parks, streets, building security lights and much more.
He argues that humans have become addicted to bad lighting and too much light, and examines ways we can redress the balance. One of the most interesting passages here is when the author takes to task the prevalent assumption that more lighting means safer communities.
It seems there is actually no evidence for this misapprehension – indeed, quite the opposite – but as Bogard points out, it's not really in the interests of energy companies and the people who produce security and street lighting to let the truth propagate.
Another fascinating section of The End Of Night is the chapter that deals with the ecological disaster of light pollution.
The effect on nocturnal animals over the last 50 years of increasing night lighting has been staggering. With apparently 80% of all florae on the planet being pollinated by moths (the book is full of facts like this), we could be in serious trouble if we don't get our act together.
As the book edges towards a darker and darker ending, the statistics and research tend to fall away, leaving the author and the dark skies he loves. As Bogard gazes up at the sky above Death Valley National Park, jam-packed with stars, the Milky Way stretching across the firmament, he does a great job of describing the simple yet profound pleasure of darkness. That he is only 160 miles from where he started, in Las Vegas, is surely testament to the fact that, if we want to, we can protect our dark skies in the future.
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