When did we become so afraid of the dark?

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Have you ever flown down the west coast at night and wondered where night went to? The coast used to have bright spots punctuated between darkness. Now it’s largely one long string of lights from Vancouver to Mexico.

We seem terrified of the nighttime and bitterly determined to beat back the darkness.

Our Nights are Getting Brighter and the Earth is Paying the Price

I remember an encounter I had with a first year science student at the Bamfield Marine Station back around 2002. I was out at BMS finishing up some of my PhD thesis research and there was a group of Science One students visiting from UBC. I was walking back from the labs to the cabins through the dark and noticed a young man standing in the dark, alone, staring up at the night sky.

Since he was young and alone, and since there are predators out in these parts, I altered my direction slightly to intercept him and stopped, asking “Is everything OK?”

He said “What’s that?”

“What’s what?” I responded.

“THAT!” he said, pointing to the sky.

I’m naturally sarcastic so I simply said…. “The sky.”

“No!” he said, “THAT!” pointing again.

“Stars??”

“No!” he said, “that streak!” and he waved his arm in an arc.

I followed his arm’s path and said “The Milky Way?”

His arm fell and he simply said “Oh.”

“Have you never seen it before?”

“No.”

And then he wandered off towards the dorms.

I stood there, dumbfounded, for a few moments. He’d never seen the Milky Way before. How was that even possible?

Easy, he’d never left the city before. He’d never been away from the light pollution.

Another, somewhat related incident with a woman who joined our lab to undertake her PhD also highlighted the same, utterly foreign concept to me. While settling on her PhD research topic it was suggested she visit Bamfield to undertake some pilot studies on tide-pool sculpins. I was volunteered to drive her out since it was somewhere I often disappeared to for pleasure; a friend and her husband lived out there, she was the Research Coordinator for the marine station, and I’d throw my kayak on the roof of my truck and head there when I’d need a break from the city.

On the trip out my fellow grad student commented on the logging road and how strange it was to be driving on a road that was not used at night. When I expressed confusion at her statement and told her that, “…of course it is driven on at night”, she exclaimed, “But how does anyone drive on this road, there are no lights!?!?” My obvious response was “Yes there are, they are on the front of the truck!” She truly didn’t believe me.

She’d also never been away from city lights.

Some of my favourite memories are of lying on the massive lawn at my Grandma and Grandpa’s, between the house and the cherry orchard. Grandpa would lay next to me and check his watch with a flashlight, then point to a corner of the sky and say something like “Sputnik should be coming over that hill in a minute or two.”

He was never wrong.

The nights were black and the sky was alive with the lights of the moon, the stars, a planet or two, satellites, and of course, the Milky Way. I later had a boyfriend in the same town and we would drive to the edge of a the fields and lay on the hood of the car while he would point out the different constellations to me – Orion, Cassiopeia, and so on…..

My friend, Alison, live out of town and I loved to sleep over at her house. We’d often spend the night in a trailer down by the fishponds and we’d stare up at the swirling purples and greens of the Northern Lights. I could see the Lights in town, but the colours were drowned out by the streetlights, and that was back when streetlights were few and far between and the bulbs were dim.

Today LED lights have taken the world by storm and darkness seems in short supply.

When we moved to our present home five years ago I remember the first time I turned off the lights downstairs before heading upstairs to bed. When the lights went out I froze for a moment and exclaimed “Good lord it’s dark up here!” We’d moved up the hill from Marine Drive, a major road brightly lit by streetlights and businesses. Up here we had only one streetlight within the block, on the other side of the street, and it was largely hidden by a line of huge cedars that line the driveway dividing our and our neighbour’s yards. Across the street was a four-plex completely hidden behind a jungle of conifers, a swath of blackness at night.

It was wonderful.

Was…..

The new complex across the road is so brightly lit with LED lights along its walkway, its stairs, its driveway, under trees, over the decks, under the soffets. We have lights too…two landscape lights that artfully light up the maple tree and the large rhododendron from below. We also have some that line the inside of our courtyard for evening enjoyment, and a few that light the outside of the courtyard wall and highlight a few plants and a second, small, maple tree. They are all on timers and are turned off around bedtime. Other than that we have one photosensitive exterior light over the entryway that stays on all night.

We joke that we never get kids at Halloween because we have a dark driveway that probably seems a bit uninviting.

The lights from the new townhouse complex are annoying and shine into our yard obtrusively. We have been eyeballing things with a new fence in mind to try and reduce their impact on our normally comfortably dark yard.

And then the new streetlight was installed on Friday.

Good grief.

It’s across the street and down a lot and it lights up our front yard like a soccer field. Our once dark driveway is now filled with hot, harsh, blue-white light. The light was intended to light a new crosswalk, it also lights up the yards on both sides of the street for at least two houses in each direction.

I’m a terrible sleeper and when I wake up at night I like to roll over and look out at the stars, somehow the big dipper comforts me with its presence. But now all I see is the hemlock at the end of my driveway, brightly lit with blue-white light. The sky surrounding it is drowned out by the new streetlight. I’m hoping that the District can be convinced to either dim it, or install a shroud to reduce the sphere of spill or, preferably, both.

Darkness is healthy for our brains. It tells us to slow down and gets us ready for a good sleep (says the insomniac). But with the invention of the energy efficient LED light, costs of lighting everything has been reduced so we compensate for the savings by installing even more lights.

And it’s not good for us, or for the animals around us that rely on darkness.