Brilliant (35 page)

Such rethinking is apparent in recent changes in the New York City skyline, where subtle and complex patterns of light, rather than mere brilliance, have begun to emerge. In part, the new pattern is a return to the old. In 1925 a writer for the
New York Times
declared that there was

a new city of light and color rising above an old one.... The illuminated towers of Manhattan are fast multiplying and the application of floodlights to their summits has brought about a fascinating aspect of architectural art. If the practice continues the glory of the cloud-hung castles of Camelot will pale before the reality of the illuminated citadels, towers, pinnacled turrets and minarets that even now rise above the city streets.... Crowning [the Standard Oil Building] is a pyramid illuminated by four huge flares, a beacon that is visible for miles at sea.... The Metropolitan Tower, with its red and yellow light clusters and its illuminated clock ... may be read alike by deckhands on East River craft and watchers on the Palisades.

The advent of fluorescent light not only increased the light emanating from skyscrapers; it also changed the appearance of them at night. Once banks of fluorescents on the ceilings of offices remained on all night—long after even the cleaning crews had departed—a skyline shaped by scores of entirely illuminated tall buildings, of which the lit crowns were only a part, emerged: a skyline endlessly photographed and imagined, one that seemed to embody twentieth-century brilliance and electric energy. But in recent years, with the advent of energy-efficient lighting controlled by motion detectors, dimmers, and timers, and with ceiling lights that can be divided into zones, lighting designers can rely on more subtle effects—akin to what seemed marvelous in 1925—to maintain the individual and iconic appearance of any skyscraper. One lighting designer has observed: "The tall tower with the illuminated floors on all night long is probably a thing of the past. You're not relying on the glowing floors to [give] the building presence...[but] on the crown of light." That crown of light may be illuminated by LEDs rather than floods, and it may even be more modest than the lit crowns of the old city.

Dimming and shielding lights not only increases sky darkness but also helps birds, mammals, and insects trying to navigate the night. Although the strategies for alleviating changes in wildlife habitat are complex, since even shielded streetlights can change the habits of bats and insects, the simplest of things can make an enormous difference in mortality rates, especially of birds. Chicago is situated along a major flyway, and during the spring and fall migrations, more than 5 million birds—at least 250 different species—cross the city skies. In past years, at night, many migrants either crashed into the illuminated buildings or circled them until exhausted. Every morning, the managers of Chicago skyscrapers would pick up dead birds by the shovelful from the roofs. Then city planners instituted the voluntary Lights Out Chicago program. They asked building managers to dim or turn off decorative lighting late at night and to minimize the use of bright interior lights during migration season—from mid-March to mid-June, and again from late August to late October. They also encouraged high-rise residents to draw their shades or dim interior lights late in the evening. As a result, bird mortality dropped by an estimated 80 percent.

Granted, in the heart of any major city, the night sky will never be dark, but damping down city and suburban lights to where they were even a few decades ago will bring the dark sky closer to more people. Astronomer John Bortle, creator of the nine-level Bortle scale, which measures light pollution, noted in 2001, "Unfortunately most of today's stargazers have never observed under a truly dark sky, so they lack a frame of reference for gauging local conditions.... Thirty years ago one could find truly dark skies within an hour's drive of major population centers. Today you often need to travel 150 miles or more."

To help stargazers gain a frame of reference and help in the preservation of knowledge that only the deep night offers, the International Dark-Sky Association has been working to create a series of dark-sky preserves—places far away from development and its attendant human light—where people can travel to see the pristine night sky. In the United States, these are often located at national parks in the darkest quadrants of the country. At one of the few preserves in the East, at Cherry Springs State Park in north-central Pennsylvania—more than sixty miles from the nearest city and sitting atop a 2,300-foot mountain—more than ten thousand people a year pay $4 to stand in an observation field in the middle of the park and be stunned by what was a common sight for people a century ago: the shadows cast by the Milky Way, the sheer number of stars.

In moderately light-polluted skies, which is the ordinary view for most people in the developed world, the major constellations, such as Orion, the Big Dipper, and Cassiopeia—many of which are defined by second- and third-magnitude stars—stand out among the visible stars. In the darkest skies, what we know as the common constellations recede back into the multitude of stars. "There's a good part and a bad part," one amateur astronomer said of looking at the ten thousand stars visible at Cherry Springs State Park on a clear night. "It's good because there are so many stars. It's bad because there are so many stars. It's hard to keep yourself oriented sometimes."

But given time, those ten thousand stars would seem natural enough. Whether we are oriented by the constellations or not, to be in the presence of a truly dark sky is an unforgettable feeling: the stars have a palpable presence; you can almost feel the pressure of them.

As great a challenge as it is, reducing our light is only part of the solution, for a third of the world still isn't tied to an electric grid, and elsewhere grids are insufficient for demand—generators may be old and hydropower plants may not be able to provide consistent power. Although some societies continue to thrive with traditional lighting, in a more widespread electrified world, many without electricity feel its absence intensely, just as farm families in rural America did during the 1930s. In our intricate, interdependent global economy, where people living in vastly different circumstances have almost no ecological distance between them, simply creating sustainable industrial economies will mean little if the standard of living in less developed countries doesn't rise. Secure people will be far more interested in building sustainable economies for themselves than will those who must struggle to survive.

The lack of adequate light alone threatens to leave many people behind. In the country of Guinea, on the west coast of Africa, electricity generation has actually declined in recent years because of a deteriorating political situation. At its best, the country's hydroelectric power resources serve about 60 percent of its citizens, and then mostly in the rainy season and for only part of the day. Those in the countryside often have no electricity at all, so some country schoolchildren look for alternatives to candlelight. "When my mother buys me a candle at home to study, it doesn't last long," one student said. Some of them walk to gas stations near their homes to study under the outdoor lights; others camp in the yards of wealthy homeowners, reading with the help of the exterior lights and the glow of windows. Those who live within an hour's walk of the airport in the capital city of Conakry study in the airport parking area, amid the departures and arrivals of international flights, the roar of engines, the bustle of people coming and going. Older students sit on concrete pilings, bent over their notes, the fluorescent lights above them. Younger students hunker on curbs and traffic islands. "I hardly ever take notice of the arrival of planes or cars.... I am here to study," one student remarked. Another said, "I used to study by candle-light at home but that hurt my eyes. So I prefer to come here."

Although light alone won't change everything, bringing it to places such as Guinea will ensure more than illumination. The darkness can be mitigated with solar flashlights and lanterns, as well as other innovations that allow adults to work and travel after dark and children to study. For the Huichol Indians of Mexico's Sierra Madre Occidental, who live burrowed deep in rugged, sparsely settled terrain, new lighting technology has made a distinct, practical difference in their lives. Architect Sheila Kennedy, in an attempt to alleviate the Huichol's isolation from modern illumination, devised the Portable Light system, which harvests and stores solar energy during the day, then offers up to eight hours of light at night. It consists of a rectangle of fabric with LED chips attached to one side. The fabric, coated with an aluminum film, reflects the light produced by the diodes. On the reverse side, two flexible solar panels are sewn onto the fabric, and these power a lithium battery stored in a small pocket on the corner of the fabric. Folded, the Portable Light becomes a shoulder bag, which the Huichol women can carry around during the day as it charges. When the sun goes down, the light, being flexible and weighing less than eight ounces, is easily adapted to different tasks. It can be spread out to serve as a reading mat, draped over the shoulders as a poncho, or rolled up and used as a flashlight.

As she fine-tuned the Portable Light for the Huichol, Kennedy also discovered something new and useful for American society: "Working in the so-called Third World, not only are we bringing people the benefits of a little power, we're also getting great ideas about how we can translate these technologies to our own countries.... The idea that we're going to have a top-down centralized system of lighting in our housing and architecture is an historically outdated idea." She and her partner, Frano Violich, have also designed the Soft House, named after Amory Lovins's idea of a soft path for energy—that is, diverse, local, renewable energy sources that match the scale and needs of the consumer. In this house, curtains, flexible walls, and translucent textile screens not only glow with light but also harvest solar energy. Although the Soft House is still in the experimental stage, Kennedy sees it as the path to the future:

Instead of a centralized grid, imagine a distributed energy network that is literally soft—a flexible network made of multiple, adaptable and co-operative light-emitting textiles that can be touched, held and used by homeowners according to their needs.... The 'soft house' demonstrates the daily experiences of living with textiles that generate power and emit light. Translucent movable curtains along the ... perimeter convert sunlight into energy throughout the day, shading the house in summer and creating an insulating air layer in winter. Folded downward, a central curtain establishes a habitable off-the-grid energy harvesting room. Folded upward, this luminous curtain becomes a suspended soft chandelier.

Not only do we need to imagine such solutions across cultures and across the globe, but we also need to think back to the past, to ask ourselves whether we are hampered more by brilliance than our ancestors ever were by the dark. It's not too much to imagine that a new night carved out of abundance might also be a time of great possibilities, when we might ask in our way, as Cyril of Jerusalem once did, "What [is] more helpful to wisdom than the night?" And it's not too much to imagine a night with room for more than mere brilliance will allow: the flowering of cockleburs and the warmth of cafés in evening; the safe passage of loggerhead turtles and skyscrapers figured anew; the stars above "more brilliant, more sparklingly gemlike ... opals you might call them, emeralds, lapis lazuli, rubies, sapphires" and our own long-storied selves intimately at home in immensity.

T
HE LASCAUX CAVE REMAINS
closed to the public, but in the years since Mario Ruspoli created his cinematographic record of the drawings there, the French Ministry of Culture and Communication has built a replica of Lascaux for visitors, and the walls of the cave have been photographed in brilliant color. Archaeologists have examined the drawings with more precise instruments and lenses and now count 1,963 different representations: 915 can be discerned as animals, 434 are signs, and 613 can't be named. There is the one man. They now believe that the horses, with their heavy coats, mark the end of winter and beginning of spring, that the aurochs mark high summer, and that the stags—antlered, depicted in herds—are painted as they were in autumn, just before mating season.

Although the Culture Ministry upgraded the air-conditioning system, in 2001 a technician found mold in the air locks of the entrance site, and within a few weeks the cave floors and ledges were covered in white. Workers suppressed the outbreak with quicklime, but over the next two years, mold continued to grow throughout the cave. In 2003 the ministry began a more comprehensive eradication program, which suppressed the mold once again. Although technicians constantly survey and maintain the site, behind the sealed door of the entrance, the marks of the Paleolithic painters are becoming less and less discernible, and the pigments on the hides of the animals, drawn from memory more than eighteen thousand years ago, are fading.

Meanwhile, our lights draw their own patterns in the dark, as they shine and reflect upward through smoke and ash and cross the same turbulent night winds that make the stars appear to twinkle. If you gaze at the map of earth at night as seen from space, you might imagine the way we appear to astronauts orbiting in the intergalactic silence: come close of day, the earth appears as solids built of illumination and voids created by its absence; in patterns drawn by global drifts of excess and scarcity, thought and afterthought, fortune, innovation, insistence, and accident—patterns that have been accreting for twenty thousand years and conjure no simple feeling. Look once, and you might be amazed at the gift of so much light. Look again, and you might feel sobered by the enormous extent and reach of it. Look yet again, and the countless lights seem to take on unwitting shapes: see the way the crowded headlands of the eastern seaboard make the shape of a head with an outstretched neck, the peninsula of Florida the forelegs, and the Pacific Coast the agile back legs of a fleet stag gathering speed as it rushes headlong into the black Atlantic.