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A few years ago, my relationship to darkness had turned a bit fanatical. I was living on the Canadian Prairies in Regina, Saskatchewan, and I’d found my way into a regimen of extreme early rising. Waking each day sometime after midnight but well before the suggestion of dawn, I would drape myself in a hooded fleece cape, light a votive as thick as my forearm, and carry it like a torch as I puttered importantly around the kitchen, arriving at my desk to scribble longhand as if engaged in some form of monastic cosplay.
My obsession with the smallest hours of the morning seemed to have something to do with darkness in particular. By rising in the dark and maintaining its integrity, I felt I was evading the tide of linear progression, easing my way into a place of dream-inflected removal where anything was possible but nothing really counted. I’d discovered what Rilke called “the dark hours of my being,” when “the knowing comes,” and I “can open / to another life that’s wide and timeless.”
I’d moved to Regina only a couple of months earlier, after my partner took a temporary job that would keep us there for less than a year. We’d cut a long-term deal on an Airbnb apartment near downtown in a neighborhood that Google Maps insists is named “Transitional.” The area’s blankness felt lived-in: long-suffering construction projects, half-empty parking lots, buildings with boarded-up windows closing their eyes to the street. At the end of our block was a large hospital. From my desk, I would watch the newly discharged patients leave each morning at first light, never dressed for the weather, wandering away from the night like ghosts unglued from their bodies.
Saskatchewan, like its southern neighbor Montana, puts a marketable spin on its flatness. Its provincial motto, “Land of Living Skies,” reminds us that topographic sameness can make room for some big-time empyrean wonder. Regina is a city so bare and crime-ridden and uninhabitably cold that even locals consider it a punch line, but I loved living there. No Reginan ever believed me when I told them so. “You don’t have to say that,” they would respond. Or: “Why?”
The sky was as advertised: monstrous, dazzling, everywhere. I was enraptured by the excess of space. In the midafternoon (which is the end of the day when your day starts in the middle of the night), I often went for long walks, making idle loops around the city. I loved the way each season conjured creative forms of resistance to human life: the dry gasp of winter; spring melt like a fit of largesse; late summer’s bile-yellow moths splattered on windshields and clogging radiator grilles, their bright, dead bodies attracting clouds of wasps.
But for all the hours I spent awake in the dark, and for all the time I spent admiring the breadth of the sky, it never occurred to me to put the two together. I never left the house at night, never drove out of town to observe the stars. My version of the dark was interior and contained. When the spell broke each morning with sunrise, I would blow out my candle, admit the present, and do things like check my email, funnel podcasts into my skull, and scroll through Instagram. That was where I saw a photo of a camping tent dotted with red lights and geolocated with a tag for a “dark-sky preserve” in Ontario. As someone in the business of privately preserving my own corner of the dark, I got curious.
The earth is warming, but it’s also brightening: the luminance of the night sky is increasing between 2 and 6 percent each year. It’s not just that there are more of us on the planet: the rate of brightening far outpaces population growth. A recent study estimated that nighttime artificial light increased up to 270 percent globally between 1992 and 2017, and up to 400 percent in parts of Africa and Asia. About 83 percent of humans—more than 99 percent of North Americans and Europeans—live under light-polluted skies. The majority of children born in North America today will never see the Milky Way.
The ecological consequences of eliminating the dark are increasingly well-documented. Under the influence of artificial light, dizzied migratory birds careen off course and can turn in endless circles; insects forget to mate; plant photosynthesis goes haywire; and infant sea turtles crawl up the beach onto lit-up roadways to be squelched by cars. Scientists have documented a 76 percent decline in flying insects from 1989 to 2016; light pollution has been identified as a crucial factor. And the human animal is hardly immune: we are blinkered and sleepless, saturated with artificial rays that jolt our metabolic systems like a drug. Overdosing on artificial light—or, to put it differently, denying ourselves darkness—is linked to cardiovascular disease and obesity, depression and diabetes. Some researchers are ready to classify our light-disrupted circadian rhythms as carcinogenic.
Darkness has become endangered, and beyond the ecological or biological effects, there are other, arguably greater losses at stake. For as long as we’ve been human—and possibly longer—we have looked to the heavens to find ourselves. Our view of the stars and planets has been crucial to the physical sciences, to navigation, to religion, to myth. Every culture makes meaning from our vantage on the stars, etching patterns, projecting stories and beliefs overhead. In that sense, artificial light is blotting out access to the primary source text of our cultural heritage.
For all the threats that the bright skies pose, the darkness conservation movement is relatively young. Founded in 1988, the Tucson-based International Dark-Sky Association is the principal global accreditor of darkness, awarding five different classifications to “dark-sky places.” Canada, however, has its own set of dark-sky designations. In fact, it holds its darkness to slightly higher standards than the IDA, applying more stringent criteria to the color and directional cast of the limited night lighting permitted in its dark-sky preserves. While the IDA is a staffed nonprofit focused exclusively on light pollution, the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada is an older association overseen by volunteer stargazers, some of whom call themselves “RASCals.”
Of Canada’s twenty-six certified dark-sky sites, the darkest is Grasslands National Park—180,000 acres of protected badlands and prairie only 210 miles southwest of Regina. To measure darkness, RASCals use the nine-point Bortle Dark-Sky Scale. Unprotected rural areas typically hover around three, while the most saturated urban cores are an eight or nine: that faded, purplish wash that passes for night in a city, where light scattering in the atmosphere can make the sky bright enough to read by. Grasslands is a scant class one: the darkest the sky gets on earth. “We’re talking about world-class darkness,” one RASCal said, boasting that the Grasslands sky is practically a Bortle zero (the scale doesn’t go this low, but I took his point: it’s really dark).
After several years cultivating my early-morning communion with the dark, I decided to go to Grasslands and immerse myself in the real deal—the raw, exposed, outdoor kind. With neither the equipment nor the wilderness skills for a backcountry expedition, I planned to stay at a roadside motel and venture out for two nights of solo hiking and dark-sky gazing. I cross-referenced potential dates with a lunar calendar, looking for nights when the intrusion of the moon—what Shelley once compared to “a joyless eye”—would be minimal.
My rationale was not that complicated: in a moment of apocalyptic overtures, I was craving something elemental. I was looking for something pure, something timeless—the darkest dark sky in all the land. In the dark-sky movement’s effort to preserve the night from the encroaches of artificial light, I recognized something of my own formless longing. What was the dark, I wanted to know. If we could have it back, what might it show us?
“If we keep the eyes open in a totally dark place,” Goethe wrote, “a certain sense of privation is experienced. The organ is abandoned to itself; it retires into itself.” This, I think, is more or less what I was looking for—a return. I hoped to abandon myself to something I already possessed. I wanted obscurity so totalizing it might convert into clarity.
Our attachment to light is old and tenacious. Light is knowledge, vision, truth. A clever person is brilliant; someone lovely lights up the room. We shed light on an issue to provide insight, and when we are struck with epiphanic understanding, we have seen it: the light.
According to the Rigveda, the sun god Surya drives a horse-drawn chariot across the sky, expelling the dark and its evils, while in ancient Egypt, the solar deity Ra was thought to battle a serpent of darkness in the underworld each night, returning in the morning to bring light and life back to earth. Many indigenous peoples of the North American Plains gather annually for a sun dance to celebrate seasonal renewal and the coming of the light. In the Old Testament, light is the first thing God orders into the universe: fiat lux, let there be light.
In Plato’s Republic, Socrates describes the sun as “the offspring of the Good.” Its light is to the visible world what goodness is to the world of pure knowledge: an illuminating presence, a necessary condition for truth. The sun offers a material analogy for the very form of the Good—a goodness beyond the realm of sense, time, or space. Manichaeism—a Gnostic religion that thrived in the third century—frames all of existence as a struggle between light and dark; its founder, Mani, was called the “Apostle of Light,” the supreme “Illuminator.” In twelfth-century Persia, Illuminationist philosopher-mystics pictured the corporeal and the immaterial along a spectrum of light and dark, with pure light as the highest form of presence.
And yet, even in the persistent dualistic understanding of light as good and dark as bad, there are gradients and complications. Light and dark appear on the Pythagorean table of opposites, for instance, but the associations are not entirely intuitive. Light is aligned with “the one,” and “good,” but also “odd,” “motionless,” and “limited.” Darkness, meanwhile, is “unlimited,” “motion,” “even,” “bad,” and “the many.” Light, for all its virtues, does not give us everything—it is square and finite, still and inconsistent.
In the Greek pantheon, light derives from darkness: Nyx, the night, couples with Erebus, the dark, to birth Hemera, the day, and Aether, the bright sky. Day is hitched to night, the hours to the sun and the moon. In The Iliad, Nyx’s “hateful darkness” is one of the forces to which even Zeus is subject.
This is a common thread in many creation myths: dark first, light second. Sometimes, this darkness takes the form of a watery void into which the world is birthed; at other times, we begin inside the dark of a cosmic egg, a seed, or the body of a god. For the Zuni people of the Southwest, the first humans on earth are crowded in four dark, subterranean worlds until they are led into the light by the children of the sun. According to the Kuba and Boshongo of Central Africa, the god Mbombo, or Bumba, is alone in the dark until he vomits up the sun and heavens. In the Haudenosaunee creation story, the first woman falls to daylit earth from a dark hole in the sky. Light is an intervention; darkness is original, primordial, the backdrop against which conception is forged. Life is only appreciable by way of the absence that precedes it.
Taoism takes this further. Rather than position light and dark as locked in a hierarchical binary, it suggests that darkness has its own relationship to truth. Obscurity is part and parcel of revelation. In the Tao Te Ching, the named and unnamed parts of reality “spring from the same source but differ in name; this appears as darkness. / Darkness within darkness. / The gate to all mystery.”
Light is facile; it does all the work for us. In the modern, well-lit world, our powers of observation are spread out, vitiated, diluted. Too much light makes it impossible for us to see: the human eye adjusts its baseline to the brightest thing it can find, so one point of excess changes the whole, makes everything around it obscure. Picture a sports field at night, how everything beyond the purview of the floodlights transforms into an unreachable void. Turn off the lights, and the undifferentiated shadows might reassert themselves as recognizable shapes and objects.
Light is attractive, yet distorting. The dark, on the other hand, doesn’t distract or astonish—it waits, calls us back. We have to work harder to attend to darkness, but you may be more richly rewarded for it. The lit world may be the one we crave, but there are things we need from the dark.
It started to rain as I drove into Val Marie, a tiny village of about a hundred people on the edge of Grasslands National Park. For long stretches of the summer, the sky had been withheld by smoke from wildfires burning across the north of the province, and it hadn’t rained in weeks. Now a succession of fat drops was accumulating into what would, by evening, become a steady drubbing. “Sorry for you, but not sorry for the land,” a ranger at the visitors’ center told me.
I only had two days to deliver myself to the darkest dark sky, and the first night was a wash. I stayed in my room at the motel—which seemed to double as a junkyard, with a bank of trailer suites plunked in a field alongside a sunken jalopy, rust-cankered farm equipment, and a small amphitheater of nonfunctional toilets—and considered watching a movie from the VHS selection. The best choice was Field of Dreams, but all I could think of was how Ray Kinsella was a criminal-level light polluter.
The next day, the rain had stopped but the cloud cover remained, leaving the diurnal hours loose and formless—the sky gray-bright and hard, the wind so strong it felt personal. The landscape was enormous, but not entirely flat; the park’s main scenic drive ran along the rim of the Frenchman River Valley before descending into the wetlands below. I spent the day wandering around, watching bison hulk across the expanse like roving geologic features. Closer, hundreds of prairie dogs chirped and scattered, popping out of underground tunnels and scratching at the earth with furious, devotional intensity.
The sky was still gauzy as I stationed myself by one of the lookouts above the valley, where I planned to catch the first stage of nightfall. As the dark descended, I could sense more than see the drop-off on one side of me. In every other direction, the emptiness seemed to elongate, growing bluer and more chilled. It stayed cloudy for a while. I started to wonder whether I would get what I came for. But then it happened: crossing into astronomical twilight, layers of cloud and light peeling off the sky like fine plies of tissue, more and more stars exposing themselves by the minute. I kept thinking I’d arrived, hit the limit of the dark, and then the sky would dig a little deeper, find another reserve. Somewhere toward the horizon, coyotes yipped and howled like spooky, discordant yodelers.
The eradication of darkness may seem like a fringe, superficial issue to get worked up about—more of an aesthetic problem than a load-bearing one. Pontificating about spectrum and glare and sky glow at this late hour might sound like fussing over design details when the house is on fire. But rather than a straggler on a lengthy environmental fix-it list, we might instead think of darkness as a synecdoche for the basic problem of human imposition on the natural world, the fundamental assumption that it’s ours to conquer.
Many other human-generated problems are hard to picture, hard to measure, hard to hold in focus. The dark night, by contrast, is retrievable: beyond the insomniac scrim cast up by human activity, the sky is still there, in its pristine, original condition, just waiting to be witnessed. If we made concerted changes—formally declaring artificial light a pollutant, implementing ordinances, swapping in more responsive technology, funding dark-sky preserves—we wouldn’t have to wait decades or generations to see the dividends. The magnificent starscape could be delivered to us right away, with the flick of a switch, at the speed of light.
Part of me, then, was hoping to glimpse the resolution of a solvable problem—to preview some achievable goal, a place we could return to if we really tried. In my mid-thirties and mind-warpingly ambivalent about procreation, I wanted to stand in a field of grass and believe that the future could be a place worth existing in, that there might be some value in human continuation, that we could reform our relationship with the planet and make good. I wanted the dark sky to tell me that it was possible, that it was worth it.