Hello Darkness My Old Friend
Anyone who has experienced a guided tour into the depths of a cave has probably shared my experience. Four hundred feet below the surface, a National Park Service ranger stationed at Carlsbad Caverns directs our rapt company to a row of low benches. Once we are seated, she proceeds to turn out the few electric lights dimly illuminating the bizarre speleothems hanging from the ceiling and protruding from the walls. Now we are enveloped in an absolute, disorienting darkness that most of us had never encountered outside the womb.
But darkness is indeed relative. On another occasion, Trina and I were enjoying a relaxing interlude at a rustic hot springs resort perched on the side of a mountain in southern Colorado’s Sangre de Cristo range. The site included an abandoned mine that was home to thousands of Mexican bats who, to the delight of the resort’s patrons, emerged in a dusky minutes-long wave each evening just after sunset.
The environmentally sensitive managers had adopted strict measures to reduce light pollution from the facility, so throughout the night artificial illumination was virtually non-existent. Since the unadorned guest cabins lacked bathrooms, occupants needed to feel their way along a path to a commons building to find relief during those empty hours. However, to our surprise (and delight), on most nights we made the trip even without a flashlight. At seven thousand feet and far from the nearest town, the Milky Way shone so brightly that our surroundings were visible and the tall pines cast shadows even on moonless nights. This was, indeed, a “friendly” darkness.
At the cusp of the equinox, with the shift from light to dark crossing its annual threshold, I began to think more seriously about darkness. For those who suffer from seasonal affective disorder (SAD) like my wife, Trina, the increasing darkness can provoke a downward spiral into depression and anxiety. I get that, which is why our home’s LED’s stay on the greater part of the day from October through March. But physiological issues aside, isn’t it true that we humans harbor a long-standing - and perhaps antiquated - prejudice against darkness?
For centuries, of course, there were valid reasons to be intimidated by darkness. As England’s immortal Bard once declared, “the night is a vast, sin-concealing chaos.” Predators, both human and animal, relied on darkness to rob the unwary or sate their hunger. Is it any wonder that when gas mantles - ten times brighter than oil lanterns - were installed on English streets in 1807, the Times of London declared, “There is nothing so important to the British realm, since the advent of navigation.”
But the balance has shifted. If, for much of human history, darkness was an enemy to be fought, the problem for us these days is a surfeit of light. It seems almost unimaginable, but America’s night skies are now so contaminated with the ambient surface light from our towns and cities that the brilliant Milky Way can no longer be seen by three-fifths of the population. And, as Joshua Sokol observes in the latest issue of Scientific American:
Wasteful nighttime lighting drastically disrupts animals, plants and the ecological relationships that knit the worlds together…. It’s easy to imagine the planet’s wealthier regions cranking out ever more wasted light powered by wasted carbon.
Sokol acknowledges that lighting technology still plays an important role in keeping people safe, but that our use has become excessive and counterproductive. “The brightness standards are driven by convention, not science,” he complains. And although some cities have adopted the recommendations of the International Dark Sky Association (founded in1988), “the general trend was, and remains, dismal.” The fact is, our technologically-enabled capitalist civilization never sleeps, and restful nights have gone the way of the Sabbath. Light is a boon to commerce, and the acquiring of vast fortunes.
And, of course, there are deeper biases at play here as well. In Western culture, darkness has long been associated with evil and depravity (hence the demonizing of dark-skinned peoples): heaven is a light-filled realm, while the denizens of Hell languish in darkness; the righteous ally themselves with the light, while “the dark side” holds the unscrupulous in thrall. In terms of cognition, insightful individuals are said to be “illuminated” while their clueless counterparts remain “in the dark.”
Ironically, confining a victim to a brightly lit space for a prolonged period is a commonly employed and highly effective torture technique. “We prefer Apollo’s to Persephone’s world, Madeleine L’Engle writes, denying the obvious fact that “where there is only light and no shadow, there is no life.”
I’m not suggesting that life within a pitch-black cave is preferable to a colorful upper world bathed in warm sunlight (Plato suggested as much in his oft-quoted allegory). Only that our own health and that of the planet’s myriad living systems would profit if we made more of an effort to avoid false dichotomies.
