Passage II

SOCIAL SCIENCE: Passage A Is adapted from the article “our Vanishing Night" by Verlyn Klinkenborg (@2008 by National Geographic Society, Inc.). Passage B Is adapted from the book The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light by Paul Bogard (@2013 by Paul Bogard).

Passage A by Verlyn Klinkenborg

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 reflected, refracted light, of scattering rays from overlit cities and suburbs, 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. We've 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. And yet above the city's pale ceiling lies the rest of the uni­verse, utterly 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 mammal s alone, the number of nocturnal species is astonishing. Light is a powerful biological force, and on many species it acts as a magnet, a process being studied by researchers such as Travis Longcore and Catherine Rich. The effect is so powerful that scientists speak of song birds 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.

Passage B by Paul Bogard

Unless Vincent Van Gogh 's The Starry Night from 1889 is traveling as part of an exhibition, it hangs at home on its wall at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in Manhattan as fifty million people pass by every year. On a Saturday morning I stand near VanGogh 's scene of stars and moon and sleeping town , talking with its guardian for the day, Joseph, as he repeats, "No flash, no flash," "Two feet away," and so "Too close, too close" again and again as people from around the world crowd near. "What's the appeal of this painting?" I ask. "It's beautiful," he says. "What more can you say than that?"

You could rightly leave it at that. But I love the story this painting tells, of a small dark town, a few yellow-orange gaslights in house windows, under a giant swirling and waving blue-green sky. This is a painting of our world from before night had been pushed back to the forest and the seas，from back when sleepy towns slept without streetlights. People are too quick, I think, to imagine the story of this painting-and especially this sky—is simply that of ”a werewolf of energy," as Joachim Pissarro, curator at the MoMA exhibition Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night, would tell me. While Van Gogh certainly had his troubles, this painting looks as it does in part because it's of a time that no longer exists, a time when the night sky would have looked a lot more like this. Does Van Gogh use his imagination? Of course, but this is an imagined sky inspired by a real sky of a kind few of the fifty million MoMA visitors have ever seen. It 's an imagined sky inspired by the real sky over a town much darker than the towns we live in today. So a painting of a night imagined? Sure. But unreal?

In our age, yes. But Van Gogh lived in a time before electric light. In a letter from the summer of I888, he described what he'd seen while walking a southern French beach:

The deep blue sky was flecked with clouds of a blue deeper than the fundamental blue of intense cobalt, and others of a clearer blue, like the blue whiteness of the Milky Way. In the blue depth the stars were sparkling, greenish, yellow, white, pink, more brilliant, more sparkling gemlike than at home-even in Paris: opals you might call them, emeralds, lapis lazuli, rubies, sapphires.

It's remarkable to modem eyes, first of all, that Van Gogh would reference the stars over Paris—no one has seen a sky remotely close to this over Paris for at least fifty years. But stars of different colors? It's true.