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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.
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