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    Let There Be Night: Testimony on Behalf of the Dark
    Let There Be Night: Testimony on Behalf of the Dark
    Let There Be Night: Testimony on Behalf of the Dark
    Ebook282 pages5 hours

    Let There Be Night: Testimony on Behalf of the Dark

    By Paul Bogard

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    The development of the modern world has brought with it rampant light pollution, destroying the ancient mystery of night and exacting a terrible price--wasted energy, damage to human health, and the sometimes fatal interruption of the life patterns of many species of wildlife. In Let There Be Night, twenty-nine writers, scientists, poets, and scholars share their personal experiences of night and help us to understand what we miss when dark skies and nocturnal wildness vanish. They also propose ways by which we might restore the beneficence of true night skies to our cities and our culture. Let There Be Night is an engaging examination, both intimate and enlightening, of a precious aspect of the natural world. The diverse voices and perceptions gathered here provide a statement of hope that he ancient magic of night can be returned to our lives.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Nevada Press
    Release dateAug 18, 2008
    ISBN9780874179279
    Let There Be Night: Testimony on Behalf of the Dark

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    • 3/5
      Overall, the essays collected here veer more toward the “how I feel about losing the night sky of my childhood” variety than suits me. That said, there are a number of well-written personal essays included that meld personal experience with “fact” in an interesting and thought-provoking way, and which I truly appreciate: Chet Raymo’s “Why the Night Sky is Dark,” Christopher Cokinos’s “ A Backyard History of Light,” Michael P. Branch’s “Ladder to the Pleiades,” Anne Matthews’s “The Sound of Falling Snow,” William L. Fox’s “Night in Mind,” Robin Wall Kimmerer’s “Nightfall,” and Christina Robertson’s “Circadian Heart.” As a whole, the collection emphatically communicates how imperative it is that we ameliorate light pollution and reclaim the dark skies of nighttime, both to protect and preserve an important human cultural experience (stargazing), as well as to disrupt as little as possible migratory bird behavior, astronomical activities, etc. As Chet Raymo succinctly states: “All this light directed upward has no utility on the ground; it provides no security or convenience for our nighttime activities.” We don’t need it, so lets dim the lights. In doing so, we may be able to, for example, bring the Pleiades and the Milky Way back into view. As Michael P. Branch so aptly notes in reference to the Seven Sisters, “Insofar as our visceral experience of them is concerned, these stars are critically endangered.”

    Book preview

    Let There Be Night - Paul Bogard

    time.

    PART ONE

    SPIRIT

    What does darkness mean to the human spirit? In The Gifts of Darkness, Kathleen Dean Moore cites a sense of connection with creation, and argues that when night’s darkness is dimmed or destroyed by artificial light, we shut children off from fully half the human experience of what is wonderful. Thomas Becknell echoes Moore in Old Hymns of the Night when he writes of how millions of children grow up never having seen the night sky, and how because of our earthly lights . . . we are losing a sense of holiness and beauty and mystery. In Trespassing on Night, David Gessner offers the story of one community fighting back on behalf of darkness, and speaks of the way night’s darkness can work on you in a way that isn’t easily put into words. Putting the meaning of such things as solitude, awareness, and mental and spiritual wholeness into words is exactly what John Daniel explores in his essay In Praise of Darkness. He asks, Who can say what we are losing? as we lose the night. The loss is more than aesthetic, claims Susan Hanson in Deep in the Heart. For Hanson the loss has to do with the desire to know God, and how our ability to know God is diminished with the diminishment of darkness. And finally, in Nocturnes, Laurie Kutchins claims night as the cradle for magic, mystery, and love.

    THE GIFTS OF DARKNESS

    KATHLEEN DEAN MOORE

    We sat by a woodstove in a lean-to shelter in the Cascade Mountains. Snow had fallen all day, but the skies had cleared at nightfall. Susan and I looked out into a Milky Way so densely packed with stars that it might have been a snowdrift. The snowdrifts themselves might have been the Milky Way, snow-ice blinking in blue shadows. Tips of hemlock trees rolled like fiddleheads under the weight of glowing snow. We talked about Cassiopeia and infinite distance. We talked about children.

    I took my niece to the planetarium in St. Louis last week, Susan told me. I looked up at the angry edge in her voice. I had told her we could do anything she wanted that day, but that’s what my niece wanted most—to show me the stars. Susan leaned back against the wall and stared at her gloved hands.

    After the star show was over, you know what that little girl said? I’ll never forget it. She said, ‘Aunt Susan, did you know that a long time ago, people could see stars like this?’ She wanted me to believe her. She said, ‘Really. Once there were that many stars in the sky, and people could just look up, and there they were! Right there. In the sky.’

    Susan shoved a log into the firebox and clanked the door closed. How could she know any different? In a way, she’s right—there aren’t many stars left in her life.

    What do we take away from a child, I wondered then, when we take the starlight and give her instead a planetarium and the blinding, floodlit city? Or put the question the other way: What are the gifts that darkness gives?

    I think first of the gift of 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.

    Mystery opens the human spirit to what is beyond it. Encountering that mystery gives a person a sort of night vision of the imagination. Night vision, the ability to see in the dark, is strengthened by darkness, and quickly destroyed by light. And isn’t this true of imagination as well, nourished by mystery and diminished by the glare of certainty and human pride?

    But there’s more. Darkness feeds a sense of wonder, a young person’s great gift—astonishment at a world alive with marvels. The world is half the time in darkness; this is a fact of the great spinning Earth. When we protect children from darkness, when we dim or destroy it with artificial light, we shut them off from fully half the human experience of what is wonderful. When we limit children to those worlds they can see, we risk closing them to worlds they can only hear or smell or feel against their skin. This is an offense against exhilaration and joy. Blessed is the person who holds a childhood memory of that first night sleeping in the backyard—the heavy dew, the smell of mown grass, headlights sweeping the hedges, crickets suddenly still.

    And so, finally, this: A third gift of darkness is a more intimate connection with the natural world. When light falls away and darkness comes on, when killdeer fall silent and the hedgerows begin to breathe, when stars blink on, only Arcturus and Aldebaran at first, then the whole wash of the Milky Way, when the wind stills as the moon rises; then the structure of the built world begins to vanish. The boundaries of the body fade into darkness. Then a child might feel herself truly part of the night. This kinship is an ancient comfort, the embrace of the extended family of living things. And from this deeper connectedness can come a deeper caring for all the plants and animals and children, all of us together in this one infinite night, breathing the exhalation of elderberries and damp

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