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Books
February 27, 2023 Issue

Is Artificial Light Poisoning the Planet?

A Swedish ecologist argues that its ubiquity is wrecking our
habitats--and our health.

By Adam Gopnik

February 20, 2023

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A beam of light shining from the top of a pyramid shaped building.
Insects are flying through the light in a crowd.
The Luxor Hotel's "sky beam," in Las Vegas, generates forty-two
billion candlepower of light each night, confusing flying creatures
that are drawn to its radiance.Illustration by Carson Ellis

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Among the many looming ecological disasters that terrify us today,
one that only a handful of people have contemplated as sufficiently
looming and terrifying is the loss of the bats in our belfry.
According to "The Darkness Manifesto" (Scribner), by the Swedish
ecologist Johan Eklof, most churches in southwest Sweden had bat
colonies back in the nineteen-eighties, and now most of them don't.
Light pollution, his research suggests, has been a major culprit:
"District after district has installed modern floodlights to show the
architecture it's proud of, all the while the animals--who have for
centuries found safety in the darkness of the church towers and who
have for 70 million years made the night their abode--are slowly but
surely vanishing from these places."

The presence of bats in the belfry, as a metaphor for disordered
thinking, is usually taken to refer to the way bats would flutter
around the upper stories of distressed churches, but a larger
madness, Eklof thinks, is responsible for their absence. A professor
at Stockholm University, he is an expert in bats, which might suggest
a deformation professionnelle in his interest in darkness, the way an
expert in roosters might have a weakness for the dawn. He is able to
tell us authoritatively that, though bats do indeed use natural sonar
to echolocate their way around, their eyes see well enough in the
dark to help in their navigation. (As so often, nature's secret to
survival is not one perfect plan but a little bit of this and a
little bit of that.) Of course, Eklof's arguments escape the narrow
world of roof eaves and pointy ears. Though the book is written as a
sort of "Silent Spring" manifesto against the ecological devastations
of light pollution, its considerable charm depends on the
encyclopedic intensity with which he evokes the hidden creatures of
the night.

Agreeably in love with darkness, Eklof is not entirely a
sentimentalist about it. Sex and violence rule the night sky as much
as they ruled the drive-in movies that the night sky once
superintended. What governs the sunless vistas is not a peaceable
kingdom but a fierce contest for life, occasionally made vivid for us
by the fiery, bioluminescent nature of its display. The firefly is
signalling and winking as desperately as a Raymond Chandler heroine
for a mate, until a greedy frog, like a Chandler gangster, stops
everything and devours it. Eklof makes it clear that the great
Cambrian explosion of species, which began the evolution of animal
eyes that could translate light into images, was set off by the
advent of predation and countermeasures to it. Advanced animal
evolution--and optical perception--began when creatures realized that
they could make a better living by eating one another than by staying
in place and absorbing nutrients from the ooze around them. Teeth and
shells, claws and hide, rose in a flurry, and among the foremost of
the defenses were eyes to sense the presence of a predator.

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The difference between light and dark is, in a way, arbitrary: what
counts as light and what as darkness depends on what wavelengths we
discern. But the nocturnal world gives rise to creatures, equipped
with large-pupilled and infrared-sensitive eyes, that see what we
cannot and that, under cover of darkness, act as we can only imagine.
And so Eklof's book is made most memorable by the sometimes wild
eccentricities of the life-forms it chronicles. Though his catalogue
of catastrophe is real, what one most remembers are the beasts in his
bestiary.

We learn, for instance, of the ghost moths, a species in which the
adult males appear in fields in twilight, white as their namesakes
and just as evanescent-seeming, floating eerily as they signal to the
females--only to mate once and then fall to the ground dead. Mouthless
by nature, they, like various others of their order, never feed at
all in their adult lives. They do not sow, or reap; they merely
fornicate once in the dark and die. (The females carry the eggs from
their lonely coupling to distribute across the fields, and then die
themselves.) Though Eklof tells us that these Tristan-and-Isolde-like
creatures are threatened by the confusing presence of artificial
light and that moths play a crucial role as pollinators ("something
of invaluable importance for keeping our ecosystem intact and
thriving"), what one recalls is the plaintive doom of their
couplings.

Biological creatures ourselves, we pair our lives with the rest of
biology. "It is fascinating to imagine how nocturnal animals
experience their existence in the dark, how their brains interpret
sensory stimuli," Eklof writes. He cites approvingly Thomas Nagel's
famous philosophical essay on why we as humans cannot know what it
feels like to be a bat. And yet we can imagine it--certainly, we can
imagine what it would be like to be an owl. We may not live as owls
do, mating once to make baby owls and then, after the owlets have
safely flown away, going off to separate perches. But we can imagine
how it would feel to soar alone all night, see your spouse for a
brief period to raise the kids, and then head off for a divorced life
in your own studio on the opposite side of town. A naturalist's acts
of empathy can be emancipating even if incomplete.

Alongside the spectral ghost moths come the speckled and
companionable cabbage moths, as ready for one-night stands as Bobby
in Sondheim's "Company." Only after the sun sets does the adult moth,
having crawled from its chrysalis, look for a mate. "The female takes
the first step by extending her antennae forward, flapping her wings,
and secreting scents, at around ten in the evening," Eklof writes.
"The two spend the night together, one wing of the female around the
male's body, then she leaves to lay the fertilized eggs." But light
ruins the romance: "The female emits fewer pheromones in the presence
of artificial light, and furthermore, the composition of the scent is
completely different from that emitted in darkness. So mating never
gets started. The females wait in vain in the darkness."

For all the poetic appeal of his examples, Eklof has come to us from
Sweden--his book is translated by Elizabeth DeNoma--bearing a noirish
moral. The source of all this harmful light is, of course, us,
city-dwelling human beings, who are presumably keeping the lights on
all night in pursuit of our own couplings. Where once human life had
its nocturnal rhythms, interrupted only by the dim light of candles
and fireplaces, the Earth is now so lit up that, seen from space, it
glows like a Japanese lantern. Since the invention of the light bulb,
street lights and floodlights have come, ominously, to disturb
age-old circadian rhythms, to the point that, Eklof writes,
"artificial light, the polluted light, is now dominant--light that
causes birds to sing in the middle of the night, sends turtle babies
in the wrong direction, and prevents the mating rituals of coral in
reefs, which take place under the light of the moon."

It turns out that the strongest source of illumination on Earth is
not some helpful harborside lighthouse but the "sky beam" atop the
Luxor Hotel, in Las Vegas. Creating forty-two billion candlepower of
light every night, meant merely as a come-on to tourists and
gamblers, it unintentionally excites and undoes flocks of birds,
genetically programmed by evolution to fly toward bright light--and,
in 2019, attracted clouds of grasshoppers, who flew toward the
pseudo-Egyptian pyramid with all the horror of a pseudo-Egyptian
plague. "Every evening Nevada's meteorologists could see on their
radar screens the swarms approach Las Vegas," Eklof says. Whoever
would have imagined that reconstructing an Egyptian tomb and sending
a piercing pillar of light from it to the heavens would reawaken an
ancient curse--that is, aside from every screenwriter with a spec
script? The, er, black comedy of this effect is not lost on Eklof,
but he sees it as something less than entertaining. In recent
decades, he tells us, the biomass of all flying insect species has,
by some measures, collapsed by close to seventy-five per cent.

Nor are bugs and birds alone affected by the light; so are plants,
and so are humans. Our eyes adapt badly to darkness, and our night
vision--which is activated by the pigment protein rhodopsin--takes a
long while to turn on, as anyone who leans back on a car roof to
watch the evening stars knows. By now, cities such as Singapore and
Hong Kong are so brightly lit that their inhabitants scarcely call on
night vision at all, and, as their rhodopsin becomes superfluous,
they may well create descendants who, in even middling darkness, are
as blind as, it turns out, bats are not.

"Do you want me to make you a tea youll forget about until its gross
and cold"
"Do you want me to make you a tea you'll forget about until it's
gross and cold?"
Cartoon by Gabrielle Drolet
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The really insidious light pollution that people experience is of the
indoor kind: our laptops and our devices bathe us in their light, and
we find ourselves trapped in the same kind of death spiral that the
Luxor beacon creates for the poor Las Vegas grasshoppers. Our daily
cycles of melatonin and other sleep hormones are disrupted, with
sometimes dire effects. "The body enters a vicious circle where
stress and disturbed sleep go hand in hand," Eklof writes. "We become
vaguely depressed." Overweight, too: "Obesity has many causes, but
one of these is constant low leptin levels, which is a direct result
of the breaking down of the melatonin circle." The grasshoppers beam
down to their burning death; we just grow chubby and cheerless.

Eklof insists that doom is still avoidable. "Light pollution is the
easiest of all environmental problems to solve, at least
technically," he writes. "We, as private individuals, can, with
little cost, reduce the amount of our light pollution. With light
shades, downward-facing light sources low to the ground, and dim
lighting, we can reduce the cities' total amount of light, as well as
the artificial light scattered in the atmosphere."

Yet the glum practicality of the solution seems inadequate to the
wound it describes. "The Darkness Manifesto" has, beyond its
ecological arguments, a particular moral temperament. Eklof does not
merely think that too much artificial light is bad for our ecology,
which it doubtless is; he thinks that light, and our preference for
amplifying it, is in itself morally dubious. In his view, the will to
light the night is in essence a will to power. Industrialized
capitalism lights up our streets not to assist us on our path home
but to show that its empire is inescapable. His point is made with a
kind of good-humored if slightly puritanical melancholy that one
thinks of as distinctly Swedish; in this spirit, he quotes
Strindberg's observation that electric lighting, presented as
betterment, was simply a way of getting workers to work more. Dimming
the world is a necessary and reasonable goal, he believes, and he is
encouraged by various green initiatives, including Earth Hour, an
annual event newly promoted by the E.U., in which electric lights are
kept off for sixty minutes, both to discourage power consumption and
to remind us of the antique joys of candlelight.

Undoubtedly, the loss of night to artificial illumination is a loss
for diversity in every sense, ecological and experiential. Yet we can
wonder if what human beings mainly experience as improvements must,
in every instance, be subordinated to the "welfare of the planet," a
concept that is itself available only to humans. Nor are Eklof's
examples always exemplary. He notes that van Gogh's "Starry Night"
could not be readily painted today, given the light pollution of
contemporary Provence. ("Maybe this was a manifestation of his inner
darkness, or simply how the night sky could be experienced as
crackling and chaotic--before the entry of electric light.") But the
gas lamps of London, enemies of night, were themselves another
haunting Romantic subject, as van Gogh knew from his love of
Whistler, with an equivalent poetry of their own, while in his
earlier "Starry Night Over the Rhone" the bright lights of human
habitation are themselves made to shine with an almost celestial
aura.

Inevitably, what presents itself as empirical inquiry reflects a
cultural mood. Every environmental apocalypse bears the imprint of
the apocalyptic imagination of its time: even the Book of Revelation,
with its raptures and its scarlet woman, has a rich underpinning in
Roman imperial politics. In the same way, Paul Ehrlich's "The
Population Bomb" (1968), now much derided, shared a semantic space
with the sculptor Robert Smithson's "Nonsites," site-specific
installations that were made in the same year and produced
photographic monuments to the entropic wilderness of blighted
post-industrial landscapes. Ehrlich's specific pessimism may have
been empirically misconceived, but it was part of the poetic
pessimism of its time and perhaps a necessary corrective to a
preceding era of pro-growth boosterism--as Smithson's grim dust piles
were correctives to the paradisiacal glow of industrial materials
beloved of the other minimalists.

The allure of night is one of the great cultural discoveries of the
Romantic era, with its twilight landscapes and piano nocturnes, and
Eklof's book is, sometimes knowingly and sometimes not, a Romantic
one. If nature is made secondary to human will, as in classical and
Enlightenment times, then a care for nature expresses itself in
bucolics and pastorals--nature as a setting for human amorousness or
agriculture. If the value of nature is an absolute, as it was for the
Romantics, we discover ourselves in sublime nocturnes and moments of
wonder. The Romantic love of darkness is a turn toward the embrace of
nature in all her aspects. The faces that seemed hostile to us were
to be as welcomed as those which seemed obviously benign.

The Romantic contradiction is that, since nature is in itself moral,
no landscape can be left unmoralized by man. When the lights go off,
we fumble in the dark for meaning as the ghost moth fumbles for its
mate; the loss of night to artificial light thus becomes not merely a
mistake but a sin. A few decades ago, expressions of an original
taste in natural phenomena were usually sprightly or self-consciously
eccentric in tone--Alexander Frater's wonderful travelogue "Chasing
the Monsoon," in 1990, made the case for rain almost entirely on
sensual grounds. Today, we would stress that rain is essential to
life, an obvious truth, but one whose emphasis holds virtue to be
more important than pleasure. Eklof's nocturnal tastes are acceptable
now only if we can make them part of a crusade.

It may seem unduly sunny, but surely not false, to say that we need
both artificial light and natural darkness. Winged creatures rightly
petition us to ease the intensity of the Luxor beam, but the city
planners who insisted on mandating a high incandescent signature for
every new sign in Times Square--the so-called LUTS (Light Units Times
Square) measure--were aesthetes more than despoilers. Times Square
must shine to remain timeless. We can want a brightly lit Vegas
Strip, while still wanting the desert outside Vegas, or for that
matter the suburbs of New Jersey, to offer the spectacle of stars.
The Enlightenment taste for progress and the Romantic love of mystery
may be cabbage moths who seek each other in the night.

"More light!," Goethe's famous deathbed command, was the battle cry
of the Enlightenment, which produced the progressive-minded science
that eventually gave us the light bulb and the neon sign and the
L.E.D. "Turn on the night!," still the essential cry of the
Romantics, from Caspar David Friedrich to Kiss, urges us to love in
darkness. The light of reason makes searchlights and lighthouses; the
love of darkness asks us to adjust our eyes and egos sufficiently to
see as owls do. Seek light in the morning; accept the night when it
comes. Then call it a day. 

Published in the print edition of the February 27, 2023, issue, with
the headline "Turn Off the Light."

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Adam Gopnik, a staff writer, has been contributing to The New Yorker
since 1986. He is the author of, most recently, "A Thousand Small
Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism."

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