Why Darkness And Stars Have Become A Luxury Only For The Elite—New Book

Night’s window was opening. As the sky turned a deep shade of blue, stars began to appear above Hovenweep National Monument, Utah, one of the world’s first Dark Sky Parks. As a campfire crackled behind me, the Milky Way appeared in the southwest beside the restful silhouette of the Sleeping Ute Mountain.

I was under the darkest skies I had ever experienced. It had taken me a week to get here, having traveled thousands of miles by plane and vehicle. Since 99% of people in North America and Europe live under light-polluted skies—600 million people—my quest to go stargazing under dark skies put me in the 1%.

The problem, of course, is rapidly spreading light pollution.

Darkness Is A Luxury

Dark skies are now a luxury for those able to travel? Yes—and that’s a wretched state of affairs. “Darkness must not become another point of access for the elite, for those who can jet off to find darkness in far-flung places,” writes Dani Robertson in All Through the Night: Why Our Lives Depend on Dark Skies ($29.99, hardcover/audiobook on Audible). Her engaging new book brings the problem of light pollution into sharp focus. “The night sky is for everyone, all beings, all things,” writes Robertson. “Where is the rage against the dying of the night?”

Do Not Go Gentle

There’s plenty of rage in Robertson’s own prose. Her paraphrasing of a famous line from Welsh poet Dylan Thomas in his “Do not go gentle into that good night” is no cultural accident. Known as @DaniDarkSkies on social media, Robertson works as a Dark Sky Officer (yes, they exist!) for Project NOS in North Wales, arguably the darkest region of the U.K.

You might think that the very fact that her job—to protect the vast Eryri Dark Sky Reserve (Snowdonia National Park, well as the AONBs of the Isle of Anglesey, the Clwydian Range & Dee Valley and the Llŷn Peninsula)—is a recognition that light pollution is a problem. But protecting islands of darkness is a rearguard action precisely because light pollution is getting worse. Artificial lighting has increased by at least 49% globally in just the last 25 years, according to recent research. Stargazers and astronomers can see the night sky vanishing in real-time.

Light Obsession

Robertson’s book is a much-needed call to arms in an age when the high price of energy exists as a major political issue at the same time as more and more lights are being left on unnecessarily. Why are humans so obsessed with light? “The landscape has been smothered,” she writes, comparing excessive artificial light to a pollutant that humanity is ignoring. “It can be easily controlled, yet it has been left to meander its way over everything, blanketing everyone, removing senses, and choking the life out of the living things beneath it.”

Stare at the night sky at midnight from any city, and there’s a perpetual twilight that’s completely normal and yet utterly unnatural.

The problem is the advent of cheap LED lighting, which has allowed the spread of bright, white and badly installed security lights to scar the suburbs of cities. Otherwise friendly neighbors, those that dutifully recycle and talk about cutting down on flying and driving, think nothing of installing new unshielded motion-sensing LED lights on their homes while leaving their curtains and blinds open at night.

The kicker is that the introduction of LED lights should actually be the death of light pollution. They can be easily shielded, dimmed, timed and controlled. This is why Robertson is angry—we already have the solution to light pollution, but society cannot be bothered to do anything about it.

Fear Of The Dark

Fear of the dark is, argues Robertson, one of the reasons why it’s challenging to get people to switch off, or even reduce the brightness, of all kinds of lights—including, perhaps most importantly, streetlights in urban areas. “This fear is intrinsically human,” she writes, from experience. “But for too long, darkness has been wrongly blamed for societal issues and used as a symbol for all things evil.”

At the root of her argument is that it’s not darkness that terrifies people; it’s male violence. A colorful description of a Friday night in the Welsh Valleys helps make the point that a curfew on men would work much better than advising women to stay indoors after dark.

History Of Stargazing

Laced with lyrical anger, All Through The Night is also an entertaining primer on humanity’s relationship with the night, including the night sky. One of the most fun chapters examines the history of stargazing. It begins with an account of witnessing a total solar eclipse in 1999—complete with a very British tale of pointlessly fiddling with eclipse glasses while thick clouds blocked the view—from beside a neolithic burial chamber.

Robertson tells us about the growth in the popularity of astronomy during Covid-19 and works backward, via Lemaître’s theories about the beginning of the universe through Isaac Newton, Chinese astronomy, Native American petroglyphs, Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Babylonians, and neolithic sites in the U.K and Ireland, Turkey and Germany. “From day one we have always reached for the stars and beyond,” writes Robertson. “Will we still wonder where the next adventure takes us if we cannot see the stars?”

That stargazers are dreamers is a compelling argument. Find someone who complains that we’re “wasting money” on space exploration and moon landings and you will also have found someone who never looks at the stars.

Plastic Moment

Light pollution needs its moment. In time, it may become the next ocean plastics or noise pollution—both accepted as problems by society—but right now, it’s little more than a niche spin-off of the campaign to cut carbon emissions. After all, all light pollution is on-the-spot proof of energy wastefulness. That Dark Sky Parks are on the rise—as well as the first Dark Sky Resort in 2023—is great news, but they alone will create dark night skies only for the elite able to travel, and rural dwellers. Do we need more articles about “best places to go stargazing?” Unless the quest for dark skies can become a movement in urban areas, then the night is doomed.

The night sky is a playground of science and humanity, and it offers a rich vein for writers, but most books on the subject lack emotion. Not so All Through The Night, a highly original book that comes at this big societal problem from unexpected angles. It bristles with anger about the loss of the stars, but it’s born from a lifelong love of the night that Robertson is desperate to share. “I want you to fall in love with the night,” she writes. “I want you to protect it and fight for it before it is gone forever.”