In ‘Dark Skies’, recently published by Saraband, Anna Levin considers how we can learn from and nurture our relationship with the night sky, despite ever-decreasing access to darkness. Against institutional apathy, writes Karen Lloyd, the book is a call to arms; a way of reconnoitring our long evolutionary relationship with darkness, its essential benefits, and its rightful, life-giving place in our world.
When was the last time you studied a sky full of stars? When did you last gaze at the lambent span of the Milky Way, its awe-inducing vastness a reminder of the physical scale of the universe, and of the nature of our own tenure on this tiny planet? These are the central questions at work in Anna Levin’s Dark Skies, published as part of ‘In the Moment,’ a series which invites writers to respond to being fully present in their activities and environment by Booker-shortlisted publisher Saraband. For Levin, being fully present manifests as an exploration of what exactly has been lost in the unprecedented rise of electric light and its impact upon our lives.
The loss of darkness is, if you like, what psychoanalysis calls an ‘unthought known,’ something the human mind is aware of, but that requires a catalyst to bring that thought out into the open — or, excuse the pun, into the light. This book then, is that catalyst, a personal exploration of why darkness matters and why it is a crucial part of both human life and the ecosystems that surround and sustain us. Levin’s ability to reflect that ‘unthought known’ back at us constitutes a crucial piece of evidence in the small canon of books about darkness, including Johan Eklöf’s Darkness Manifesto on the impact of the loss of darkness on natural ecosystems, and in the US, Paul Bogard’s The End of Night.
Look at any image of night on Earth from space, and what you see is a shining sphere. In much of Europe and the rest of the globe, darkness has more or less been banished. For some, this is welcome especially through concerns around personal safety in towns and cities. Indeed, Levin writes of her own sense of vulnerability around darkness, whether in the small village she grew up in where darkness began at the end of the street, inducing that familiar sense of fear that is common to many of us, or in the cities she has lived subsequently. Despite those fears, Levin is also deeply attracted by darkness; indeed she craves it. In the opening pages she describes taking holidays as ‘a pilgrimage to darkness.’ Arriving in one such place on the east coast of Scotland she takes a brew into the back garden to observe the transition from dusk to dark. As the colours begin to fade, ‘bats flicker…and then a row of artificial Christmas trees in a neighbouring garden erupts into life with flashing blue lights. They stay on all night long. It’s August.’ She goes wild camping beside the ocean, but again, light impedes; the external lights of a golf clubhouse piercing the dark. ‘It’s shut, of course.’ So much of our world, as Levin discovers, is now bereft of darkness, including the very places we assume it is still to be found.
This quest for darkness orients us towards the rapid proliferation of Artificial Light at Night, also known by the acronym ALAN, and our lack of what might be called ‘light literacy,’ where because of the cheap costs and proliferation of LEDs together with their negligent running costs, light has expanded in unprecedented fashion across the globe, and certainly far beyond anything we or our natural ecosystems have ever encountered — since life began in fact. As Levin writes, ‘the current level of brightness at night is something new to all life on Earth. It is affecting and threatening every aspect of the living world. From insects to deep-sea fish to trees. Everything. From single-celled organisms to ecosystems and all the complex interactions between species and their habitats.’ Like Levin herself, ‘the whole web of life that constitutes the living world is craving darkness too.’
New lighting technologies went through a couple of iterations. Remember the CFL, or compact fluorescent, that once switched on gave you time to nip to the shops, come home and cook your tea before they grew ‘properly’ light. In recent years I have seen lights on washroom bins and hand-driers, begging the question of how we ever coped before bins had lights. This kind of over-use of artificial light attaches to the August Christmas lights on Levin’s east coast holiday, and it attaches almost everywhere else — our workplaces, our homes, our businesses and our streets. Consider the strings of lights outside pubs and cafes that are purposefully lit all day, or the dismal ‘blue-white’ light of streetlights. In Edinburgh, when streetlighting is changed to LED, a friend of Levin’s complains to the council about the simultaneous apocryphal gloom and overbrightness outside his bedroom window. When the reply from the council arrives, stating that white LED lighting is in fact ‘more natural; more like the moon.’ Levin responds, ‘I think you have misunderstood the moon.’
At the time of reading Dark Skies, coincidentally I spent an evening with a friend at Kielder Observatory, which lies within the Northumberland and Kielder International Dark Sky Park, the second largest area of protected night sky in Europe, a status awarded by DarkSky International, the leading international organisation working to combat light pollution worldwide. In this part of Britian, the weather being what it is, there’s around a 50% chance of a good star experience, and although we didn’t see a single star, it mattered not; the evening was a thrilling ride through the story of the universe delivered by highly engaging astronomers. Aside from this, two things stood out. The first was walking the 50 metres or so from the carpark to the observatory buildings, and although lit by soft red lights on the ground, I could not see my friend, despite that she was walking right alongside me. This was the kind of darkness — that amalgam of fear and thrill — I’d last experienced on a school trip to Ingleborough caves when they turned the lights out. The other was the skyglow emanating from the conurbation of Edinburgh — over seventy miles away — the kind of all-permeating sky-lighting that now illumines the night above all our habitations, but at what cost? According to Levin, that sky glow pervades the night sky over many miles. Not only this, but the sudden steep rise in the number of satellites is making the sky brighter all over the Earth and could be affecting the migratory patterns of birds and insects. Beyond our very human concerns, light at night is impacting on the life cycles of birds, insects, animals. On an emergency dash to the local A and E unit, the blackbird I heard singing at 3.30am in the hospital car park is a case in point; singing at night wastes precious energy – energy that is required for finding food, for breeding and for the continuation of life. Artificial light at night disrupts the circadian rhythms of all life, whether human or wild species, and it absolutely matters.
Investigating the history of constellations, Levin writes, ‘We join the dots because we are inherently shape finders, story-makers, question askers and dreamers, but also because the sky and the stars and all celestial happenings had such great significance throughout most of human history.’ Markings on bone tablets in the Dordogne from 30,000 BC are thought to represent the full and new moons, and are considered the earliest calendar. ‘In 600 BC a chart was drawn in China containing 1460 stars; other Chinese records show constellations going as far back as 2637 BC.’ It is a sobering thought that none of this shaping of human understanding, of making sense of what lies above and its impact upon our lives, could ever take place now, under our universally light polluted skies.
I was already aware of research by Prof Kevin Gaston and colleagues at Exeter University which proved the rapid growth of light around the globe through the advent of new lighting technology, and specifically LEDs, using something called ‘ground truth.’ Gaston’s ‘ground truth’ revealed that ALAN has expanded by as much as 270% above what was previously understood. According to Levin, the actual rate of growth of light pollution is now thought to be around a staggering 400% in some areas. ‘It’s a dizzying rate of destruction.’ 80% of the world’s population now lives under light polluted skies; here in Europe though, that figure jumps dramatically to around 99%. The Exeter research also lists some of the implications of over-exposure to ALAN, including increased human cancer risk, the decline of populations of wild species and the disruption of key ecosystem services such as pollination. Despite all of this knowledge and more, including evidence from BugLife on the impact of LED streetlights on moth populations — a staggering loss of 60% in a handful of years, with a consequential impact on numbers of moth-eating bats, to research undertaken by Emeritus Prof Bob Fosbury showing that shining white LEDs on fruit flies turns the internal oxygen molecules into free radicals, resulting in death within hours, to astronomers who cannot work without darkness and to all of us as star-deprived communities, the proliferation of light pollution and its impacts remains almost wholly outside of public discourse. I cannot think of a single other subject so evidently swept aside in the name of progress and specifically, in the fight to reduce carbon. Why is this?
Levin writes, ‘In the natural world, the rhythm of light and dark is time itself, and always has been. Life on earth evolved to the steady ticking of a great celestial clockwork. The evolution of the living world has been given governed by our small planet’s relationship with one star that its circles, and the reflections of light from that star on a rock that circles us. The perpetual motion of these orbits gives day and night, the wax and waning moon and the changing pattern of light and dark at different latitudes through the seasons.’ ‘As a species, a society, a city, a council, a street lighting department we have grossly underestimated the power and importance of light and its essential dance with darkness.’
Levin is a former section editor with BBC Wildlife magazine and describes herself as a wildlife watcher and stargazer but also as a writer who makes complex scientific subjects clear to a general readership, something which is wholly evident in this small but important book. Personal odyssey this may be, but it is never self-indulgent. Rather, Levin uses her own responses to darkness as a way of corralling information around this vast and complex subject, rendering it into an entirely readable formula; as such it earns its place in the true canon of nature and environmental writing.
At the heart of Levin’s broader enquiry (she is also the author of Incandescent: We Need to Talk about Light [Saraband, 2019]) are the bigger questions around why exactly light was made the focus of incentives to reduce carbon. When incandescent lights were subsequently banned, that same ban removed a choice from anyone who has to spend time under electric light, even though books like Levin’s illustrate so well the serious implications for our own health – and that of our planet’s, which is now all too clear. No-one suggested the removal of choice of what car you drive, and whether gas-guzzling SUVs should be banned. No-one insisted on turning the lights off in office blocks, car showrooms, schools and other kind of private and public buildings at night. No-one insisted on conducting research into what the impacts of this new technology might be, no governmental department; no local authority; nobody. No; because artificial light is so cheap, none of us is incentivised to stop and question its proliferation. It remains to be seen what responses to the dangers of living with too much artificial light may yet manifest from our governments. Against this institutional apathy, Dark Skies is a call to arms, a way of reconnoitring our long evolutionary relationship with darkness, its essential benefits, its rightful, life-giving place in our world.
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‘Dark Skies’ is out now and available here (£8.54).
Karen Lloyd is the editor of ‘North Country: An Anthology of Landscape and Nature’ (Saraband, 2022) and author of the James Cropper Wainwright Prize longlisted ‘Abundance: Nature in Recovery’ (Bloomsbury, 2021). She is a senior researcher and writer in residence with Lancaster University’s Future Places Centre.