Our vanishing night by verlyn klinkenborg

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Our Vanishing Night

■ Verlyn Klinkenborg

Born in 1952 in Meeker, Colorado, Verlyn Klinkenborg grew up on farms in Iowa and Minnesota, where he developed his keen ob- servation skills and love for life in rural America. After graduating from Pomona College and receiving a PhD from Prince- ton University, he embarked on a career as a writer and farmer. His first book, Making Hay (1986), reflects Klinkenborg’s fascina- tion with small family farms. The Last Fine Time (1991) is a his- tory of immigrant life in Buffalo, New York, where his father- in-law owned a neighborhood bar. From 1997 to 2013, his col- umn “The Rural Life” appeared regularly on the editorial pages of the New York Times, and in 2003 those essays were published in the collection The Rural Life. His most recent book is Several Short Sentences about Writing (2013). Klinkenborg’s essays have also appeared in Harper’s, Smithsonian, Audubon, National Geographic, and the New Yorker. He has taught literature and cre- ative writing at Fordham University, St. Olaf College, Bennington College, and Harvard University.

The following essay first appeared in the November 2008 issue of National Geographic. Notice how Klinkenborg unifies his essay with striking examples of the negative effects of light pollution, all of which relate to his main idea and support his thesis.

Reflecting on What You Know

As a child, did you ever go outside on a clear night to look at the stars? Do you remember the names of some of the constellations and planets — like Orion, the Big Dipper, or Venus — that you were able to identify? When you find yourself outside walking now, do you look up at the evening sky? Are the heavens still as you remember them as a child? If not, what’s changed?

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If humans were truly at home under the light of the moon and stars, we would go in darkness happily, the midnight world as visible to us as it is to the vast number of nocturnal species on this planet. Instead, we are diurnal creatures, with eyes adapted to living in the sun’s light. This is a basic evolutionary fact, even though most of us don’t think of ourselves as diurnal beings any more than we think of ourselves as pri- mates or mammals or Earthlings. Yet it’s the only way to explain what we’ve done to the night: We’ve engineered it to receive us by filling it with light.

This kind of engineering is no different than damming a river. Its benefits come with consequences — called light pollution — whose ef- fects scientists are only now beginning to study. Light pollution is largely the result of bad lighting design, which allows artificial light to shine outward and upward into the sky, where it’s not wanted, instead of focusing it downward, where it is. Ill-designed lighting washes out the darkness of night and radically alters the light levels — and light rhythms — to which many forms of life, including ourselves, have adapted. Wherever human light spills into the natural world, some aspect of life — migration, reproduction, feeding — is affected.

For most of human history, the phrase “light pollution” would have made no sense. Imagine walking toward London on a moonlit night around 1800, when it was Earth’s most populous city. Nearly a million people lived there, making do, as they always had, with candles and rushlights and torches and lanterns. Only a few houses were lit by gas, and there would be no public gaslights in the streets or squares for another seven years. From a few miles away, you would have been as likely to smell London as to see its dim collective glow.

Now most of humanity lives under intersecting domes of re- flected, refracted light, of scattering rays from overlit cities and sub- urbs, from light-flooded highways and factories. Nearly all of nighttime Europe is a nebula of light, as is most of the United States and all of Japan. In the south Atlantic the glow from a single fishing fleet — squid fishermen luring their prey with metal halide lamps — can be seen from space, burning brighter, in fact, than Buenos Aires or Rio de Janeiro.

In most cities the sky looks as though it has been emptied of stars, leaving behind a vacant haze that mirrors our fear of the dark and resembles the urban glow of dystopian science fiction. We’ve

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grown so used to this pervasive orange haze that the original glory of an unlit night — dark enough for the planet Venus to throw shadows on Earth — is wholly beyond our experience, beyond memory almost. And yet above the city’s pale ceiling lies the rest of the universe, ut- terly undiminished by the light we waste — a bright shoal of stars and planets and galaxies, shining in seemingly infinite darkness.

We’ve lit up the night as if it were an unoccupied country, when nothing could be further from the truth. Among mammals alone, the number of nocturnal species is astonishing. Light is a powerful bio- logical force, and on many species it acts as a magnet, a process being studied by researchers such as Travis Longeore and Catherine Rich, co-founders of the Los Angeles–based Urban Wildlands Group. The effect is so powerful that scientists speak of songbirds and seabirds being “captured” by searchlights on land or by the light from gas flares on marine oil platforms, circling and circling in the thousands until they drop. Migrating at night, birds are apt to collide with brightly lit tall buildings; immature birds on their first journey suffer disproportionately.

Insects, of course, cluster around streetlights, and feeding at those insect clusters is now ingrained in the lives of many bat species. In some Swiss valleys the European lesser horseshoe bat began to vanish after streetlights were installed, perhaps because those valleys were suddenly filled with light-feeding pipistrelle bats. Other noctur- nal mammals — including desert rodents, fruit bats, opossums, and badgers — forage more cautiously under the permanent full moon of light pollution because they’ve become easier targets for predators.

Some birds — blackbirds and nightingales, among others — sing at unnatural hours in the presence of artificial light. Scientists have deter- mined that long artificial days — and artificially short nights — induce early breeding in a wide range of birds. And because a longer day allows for longer feeding, it can also affect migration schedules. One population of Bewick’s swans wintering in England put on fat more rapidly than usual, priming them to begin their Siberian migration early. The problem, of course, is that migration, like most other aspects of bird behavior, is a precisely timed biological behavior. Leaving early may mean arriving too soon for nesting conditions to be right.

Nesting sea turtles, which show a natural predisposition for dark beaches, find fewer and fewer of them to nest on. Their hatchlings, which gravitate toward the brighter, more reflective sea horizon, find themselves confused by artificial lighting behind the beach. In Florida

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alone, hatchling losses number in the hundreds of thousands every year. Frogs and toads living near brightly lit highways suffer nocturnal light levels that are as much as a million times brighter than normal, throwing nearly every aspect of their behavior out of joint, including their nighttime breeding choruses.

Of all the pollutions we face, light pollution is perhaps the most easily remedied. Simple changes in lighting design and installation yield immediate changes in the amount of light spilled into the atmo- sphere and, often, immediate energy savings.

It was once thought that light pollution only affected astrono- mers, who need to see the night sky in all its glorious clarity. And, in fact, some of the earliest civic efforts to control light pollution — in Flagstaff, Arizona, half a century ago — were made to protect the view from Lowell Observatory, which sits high above that city. Flagstaff has tightened its regulations since then, and in 2001 it was declared the first International Dark Sky City. By now the effort to control light pollution has spread around the globe. More and more cities and even entire countries, such as the Czech Republic, have committed themselves to reducing unwanted glare.

Unlike astronomers, most of us may not need an undiminished view of the night sky for our work, but like most other creatures we do need darkness. Darkness is as essential to our biological welfare, to our internal clockwork, as light itself. The regular oscillation of waking and sleep in our lives — one of our circadian rhythms — is nothing less than a biological expression of the regular oscillation of light on Earth. So fundamental are these rhythms to our being that altering them is like altering gravity.

For the past century or so, we’ve been performing an open- ended experiment on ourselves, extending the day, shortening the night, and short-circuiting the human body’s sensitive response to light. The consequences of our bright new world are more readily perceptible in less adaptable creatures living in the peripheral glow of our prosperity. But for humans, too, light pollution may take a bio- logical toll. At least one new study has suggested a direct correlation between higher rates of breast cancer in women and the nighttime brightness of their neighborhoods.

In the end, humans are no less trapped by light pollution than the frogs in a pond near a brightly lit highway. Living in a glare of our own making, we have cut ourselves off from our evolutionary and cultural patrimony — the light of the stars and the rhythms of

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day and night. In a very real sense, light pollution causes us to lose sight of our true place in the universe, to forget the scale of our being, which is best measured against the dimensions of a deep night with the Milky Way — the edge of our galaxy — arching overhead.

Thinking Critically about This Reading

According to Klinkenborg, are there any benefits to lighting up the night? What are the consequences? (Glossary: Cause and Effect) For you, do the benefits outweigh the consequences? Explain.

Questions for Study and Discussion

1. What is Klinkenborg’s thesis, and where does he present it? (Glossary: Thesis)

2. Are there any digressions, discussions, or information in this essay that do not logically connect to Klinkenborg’s thesis? (Glossary: Thesis) Explain how each paragraph in the essay relates to his thesis.

3. What does Klinkenborg mean when he says that “we are diurnal creatures” (paragraph 1)?

4. In what ways is light “a powerful biological force” (6)? 5. What can be done to remedy the problem of light pollution? 6. Klinkenborg claims that “light pollution causes us to lose sight of

our true place in the universe” (14). What do you think he means? Do you agree or disagree with his conclusion? Why?

Classroom Activity Using Unity

Carefully read the following progress report from an elementary school teacher, paying special attention to how well the opening para- graph establishes a unified set of themes that are addressed in the body of the report. Identify places in the body paragraphs that touch on those themes. What opportunities do you see for improving the unity of this report?

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PROGRESS REPORT Student: Jared Greene Teacher: Melissa Holman Report: December 2014

It has been a pleasure to welcome Jared to second grade. A respon- sible member of our classroom community, his behavior at school is respectful and appropriate, and he is a student who can be counted on to do the right thing. At all times, he works hard, takes pride in his work, and is eager to share what he has accomplished with teachers, family members, and classmates.

Reading: The reading curriculum is taught through the structure of Reading Workshop. This includes reading independently, reading with a teacher, reading with other students in a weekly reading group, and taking lessons on reading strategies and phonics. . . . Jared is an enthusiastic participant during group meetings. He likes to discuss literature, and he frequently makes text connections and predictions during group mini-lessons.

Writing and Spelling: During Writers’ Workshop, instruction has focused on generating story ideas; developing one idea into a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end; “reading like a writer” to notice choices authors make in the structure and language of their published works; and expanding “small moments” into detailed stories. Jared is working on a research piece about the Wampanoag (Native American) language. Jared has a strong sense of story struc- ture (beginning, middle, end) as well as many of the conventions of nonfiction (table of contents, index, glossary).

Mathematics: We have completed three units in our Everyday Math curriculum, incorpor ating lessons in money, telling time, addition and subtraction, place value, and “number stories” (word prob- lems). Mathematical thinking is an area of true strength for Jared. He understands concepts of operation (addition, subtraction, etc.) and demonstrates comfort with basic and more complex math facts. He is growing increasingly limber with his use of numbers and is able to see that there are many strategies for solving any given problem.

Social Studies and Science: We are wrapping up the work of our first three Charles River research units, which focused on river

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geology and erosion, mapping, and the water cycle. Jared has been an active participant in our Charles River research. He is naturally inquisitive, enthusiastic about the material, and care- ful in his hypotheses and observations. He is able to record de- tailed notes and enjoys predicting the outcome of experiments and projects.

It has been wonderful to have Jared in my classroom since September. I look forward to fostering his intellectual and social development throughout the remainder of the school year.

Suggested Writing Assignments

1. What examples of light pollution can you identify on campus or in town? Some things you might look for include overillu- minated parking lots, walkways, and streets; lights not prop- erly shielded; and lighting left on in buildings after closing. How might the light pollution you identify be corrected? Write a letter to the building and grounds administrator at your school or to your town manager in which you argue to have the light pollution reduced or eliminated. Be sure that all of your reasons support your thesis.

2. Klinkenborg claims, “Wherever human light spills into the natural world, some aspect of life — migration, reproduction, feeding — is affected” (2). Do some research in your library or on the Internet about how human light affects the migra- tion and feeding patterns of certain migratory birds or the reproduction of certain animals, such as sea turtles. Write a unified essay in which you report your findings.

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