EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the first in an ongoing series of features highlighting authors and new books published by Torrey House Press in Utah.
In an Ecological Society of America article published more than 20 years ago, Travis Longcore and Catherine Rich wrote, “Lights follow roads, and the proportion of ecosystems uninfluenced by altered light regimes is decreasing.” In 2023, a post at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies indicated, “It is noteworthy that 83% of the United States is within one kilometer of a road.”
Light pollution is an issue that does not have the same cache as other environmental concerns. Reiterating the point in their 2024 article, Longcore and Rich noted, “We believe that many ecologists have neglected to consider artificial night lighting as a relevant environmental factor, while conservationists have certainly neglected to include the nighttime environment in reserve and corridor design.”
In a riveting masterpiece of creative nonfiction, author Craig Childs lifts the essential scientific language about light pollution into an absorbing narrative of adventure, meditation and multicultural exploration of human purpose and meaning. Available this spring from Torrey House Press, The Wild Dark: Finding the Night Sky in the Age of Light commands readers to think anew about how artificial light at nighttime has robbed us, as he describes, the birthright of seeing stars in the full glory of a night sky with no lights or atmospheric glare.
Running 200 pages, the book epitomizes Childs’ gifts as a writer who delights his readers with the warmth of a newfound friendship. His prose resonates poetically, as it weaves childhood memories, rapturous observations, golden nuggets of scientific research and fascinating interviews through the central chronicle of a biking adventure to find a full-dark sky for stargazing.
Joined by Irvin Fox-Fernandez, an old friend with whom he has spent hundreds of nights stargazing, Childs starts their biking journey in the bright lights of Las Vegas before heading on a course due north to find their full-dark sky destination. Instead of conventional chapter headings, Childs chronicles their journey in sections corresponding to the nine-level John E. Bortle Dark-Sky Scale, published nearly a quarter of a century ago in an issue of Sky & Telescope magazine.
Childs starts with Bortle 9, which represents the fully illuminated city, and ends with Bortle 1, when naked-eye object viewing is at its greatest splendor. It is not an idle assertion that some readers will want to recreate the author’s journey, inspired by his exuberant descriptions of stargazing. The good news is that there are still ‘islands’ of prime Bortle 1 viewing, especially for those living in the Intermountain West region.
Childs acknowledges that not everyone will share his exuberance in being awed by stargazing. ”Adverse, irrational reactions to seeing outer space are termed cosmophobia or astrophobia. Space dread,” he writes. ”I don’t find this an unreasonable response, not if you consider we live on a planet as blood-pumping gut sacks with eyes sophisticated enough to see the cosmos.”
Childs amplifies the concerns about the negative impacts of how much humans have altered our natural patterns of daylight and nighttime. Even as early as 1918, scientists published their findings about birds dying from lights. Childs recalls the twin light beams at the World Trade Center memorial in lower Manhattan, located in line of one of the world’s most important bird migration corridors. The birds ecstatically circle these beams in such great numbers that the Audubon Society recommended that the beams be turned off for 20 minutes at a time to decrease the mass of birds that had gathered. Childs has a knack for dropping in soupçons of statistics at the right moment in his story. After the lights turned off, a radar bounce picked up approximately 500 birds ”but then when they came back on, almost 16,000 birds poured back in.”
Another eye-popping statistical nugget comes some forty pages later. Between 1992 and 2013, Air Force satellites detected a 40% increase in artificial light worldwide, with some regions spiking by 400%. Childs mentions a study of more than 51,000 citizen scientists between 2011 and 2022, which showed a “sharp decrease of night sky visibility was observed around the world.” He adds, “Over the length of the study, the night sky took a hard hit. On average, if two hundred fifty stars were visible when the study began in 2011, one hundred remained eleven years later.”
The fact is that mitigating light pollution is potentially a lot easier than in contending with other forms of pollution, according to Childs. “The solution is to darken what we can and use lights colored more like flame and less like the sun. Tone down those blue headlights on cars, draw shades on windows, and shield electrified signs so they’re only seen by those who were meant to see them. Install motion sensors so that empty lots aren’t lit at every hour. Put dimmers on anything we can, Give our eyes a rest, all of them.” These measures are not intrusive, quite easy to implement and they make good economic sense (a rare quality to find these days).
One should admire Childs for curating just enough science to pepper a conversation that eventually turns more philosophical and spiritual in a cosmological and metaphysical meditation. This becomes prominent when he and Fox-Fernandez reach the spots for darker Bortle scale viewing. Every reference ties into the book’s central question: “What does it do to us to not see the night sky?” The bonus is how much Childs entertains us while he elegantly lays out his case.
One should not underestimate the human desire and appeal of stargazing. To wit: the huge popularity of viewing normal astronomical events like a total solar eclipse, such as in 2017 when portions of Utah were the prime spots for viewing. Yet, the wisdom of Indigenous peoples also informs us that such events carry profound meaning for our human consciousness and spiritual intelligence. “In Diné tradition, seeing an eclipse is thought of like opening a door on an act of love-making, spying the sun and the moon as they go hip to hip. It’s not considered something one should gawk at, clapping and waving like we were,” he writes. Here, Childs evokes the majesty of the universe that would have made the late Carl Sagan beam with pride. “Up there is a thing not to be trifled with. It has its own power, which we quickly forget, so busy with our hands and our many tasks down here.”
By the time the duo have reached their end-goal in Bortle 1 viewing territory, Childs has led us deep into metaphysical contemplation. Ann Finkbeiner, who started writing about early universe astronomy four decades ago when she was in her forties, talks about her field as esoteric. “Astronomy is so arcane it will never matter… Don’t say that to an astronomer, because they don’t want to hear it. But it will never matter,” she tells Childs. “It’s very difficult what they do. And they are very, very smart people, very creative. So, I’d like to know what’s worth burning up all those brain cells and creativity? What is it about astronomy that’s worth these lives?”
Amateur astronomy is a big deal, easily a billion-dollar industry with strong growth especially in the U.S. and in recent years, in Asia and Pacific Ocean regions. The fastest growth in telescope sales is in instruments costing between $200 and $1,000. There has been a growth spurt in portable binoculars that attach to smartphones. Childs sees astronomy as “an act of faith to extrapolate across such distances, believing in Mars and in giant stars hanging in the fabric of galactic arms. It is an act of science to show us what we can’t see.” When Finkbeiner tells him, “You know, for the early Christians, curiosity was a sin,” Childs responds, “There’s a whole universe that is really none of our business.” Finkbeiner adds, “But I want to know.”
In an interview with The Utah Review, Childs says, “When I proposed the book, I didn’t know how I was going to put it together.” At one point, he thought about going in reverse order with the Bortle scale than what ended up in the book. To capture the maximum impact of their experience on a night-by-night basis, Childs and Fox-Fernandez chose biking over driving (too fast) and walking (too slow).
He says that they were surprised how each Bortle level “had its own flavor,” and that experiencing each one tuned their eyes to pay ever closer attention to the viewing differences in each destination. For example, when they were in a Bortle 5 spot, the satellite maps indicated that it was a much darker sky (Bortle 3). Realizing that these sky maps were not “quite right,” they concentrated their viewing on discerning the transitions in viewing the sky one night to the next.
He explains that in the first couple of days, they struggled to get out of Vegas on their bikes and wondered if they would ever make it even to Bortle 5. “By the end of the trip, we were not as sore and not feeling as painful and we thought that we could keep going a thousand miles hopping from the darkest Bortle spot to another,” he adds.
Initially, he did not know which stories he would bring into the book but he kept a journal throughout the journey which helped to clarify the puzzle pieces he eventually assembled. “If I would have thought too far ahead about how the story should flow, then it would have guaranteed it falling apart,” he says.
“To lose this view would be a cardinal sin,” he says. In their Bortle 1 destination, they are 85 miles away from Ely, Nevada, and in the clear night sky, it is impossible to locate. Las Vegas is a tiny bump as faint as one of the visible nebulae, “ineffectual against the greater skyscape.” Childs’ radiant prose makes us readers envious to discover first-hand such an astonishing experience.
The book goes on sale May 20 and preorders are available. For more information, see the Torrey House Press website.