Wednesday, September 2, 2015

THE END OF NIGHT BY PAUL BOGARD


This is a non-fiction book about light pollution. I wanted to read a book about this subject because in The Pillow Book, Shonagon spends so much time rapturously describing moonlight, fireflies, lanterns, embers, coals, and stars--it made me realize that her understanding of night is fundamentally different from mine. When night comes around, all I need to do is turn on a few switches (or a few screens) and my life is once again swallowed up in light.

Bogard talks about the history of public lighting, starting with the great European capitals, and he talks about the advent of electric light. Most of the book is focused on light pollution in the United States. US cities have had public lighting for some time, but most of the US remained in the dark well into the 1930s, when FDR created the Rural Electrification Administration. 

Bogard focuses a lot of attention on Las Vegas, where the brightest light in the world exists (at the top of the Luxor Pyramid--a light so bright that it has created its own mini-ecosystem of birds and bats that feast on the giant numbers of insects it attracts). The lights of Las Vegas bleed into the desert and into national parks that are hundreds of miles away.

There are several national parks in the US where you can still see the night sky fully exposed. Bogard's description of these places make me depressed, because I've never seen the sky like that. On clear nights, the Milky Way is so bright that it casts a shadow. With the naked eye, you can see a distance of 2.2 million light years into outer space. That's something I'd like to see before I die. I felt very informed by this book, I learned a lot.