Brilliant_ The Evolution of Artificial Light - Jane Brox [116]
Amid the brilliance, it seems almost nothing remains unaltered by light. It affects the foraging and schooling patterns of fish and the timing of migrations. It alters the drift stream of insects on water and the vertical migration of zooplankton and fish. It diminishes the effectiveness of bioluminescent creatures. Fireflies were once bright enough to light up a village night. Now human light washes out their glow, which makes it harder for them to attract mates. And plant life is not immune. Measured light and darkness signal plants that the right pollinators are available and that competition is minimal. The coarse and prickly cocklebur (Xanthium pensylvanicum) —thriving in vacant lots and dumps, catching on clothes, riding on fur—flowers nevertheless and is keyed to its optimum bloom time by the length of the night. But the dark needs to be continuous: "A light break as short as one minute in the middle of a long night would prevent [it] from flowering."
Even when our lights are meant to be their most heartening and consoling, they have consequences for wildlife. In 2004, during the annual Towers of Light tribute to commemorate those killed on September 11, 2001, spectators in New York City wondered at "the thousands of little stars ... suspended in the air." It was a calm, moonless night during the fall migration. The upward flow of warm air in the columns of light induced moths to circle in the lights for fifteen stories or more, and thousands of birds, also drawn to the columns, circled above the moths. Few people understood what they were seeing. "Some people thought they were specks of dust," reported the New York Times. Others, perhaps remembering the rain of debris on that clear day three years before, concluded otherwise: "Some people saw ashes. Some thought there were fireworks in the light columns. Some saw spirits."
What they could not see, of course, were the actual stars, most of which were obliterated by the brilliance of the city night.
20. More Is Less
At the second match the wick caught flame. The light was both livid and shifting; but it cut me off from the universe, and doubled the darkness of the surrounding night.
—ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON,
Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes
DURING THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY, Vincent van Gogh saw countless subtleties in the dark skies of southern France: "One night I went for a walk by the sea along the empty shore," he wrote to his brother, Theo, in 1888. "The deep blue sky was flecked with clouds of a deeper blue 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 sparklingly gemlike than at home—even in Paris: opals you might call them, emeralds, lapis lazuli, rubies, sapphires." As van Gogh—aided by gaslight—painted that sky, he also painted myriad relations between the celestial and the human. In Starry Night, the illuminated village appears intimate—and inconsequential—against the roil of stars and the quarter moon above it, while in Starry Night over the Rhône, the human light and starlight are in conversation with each other: a couple stand at the lower right of the painting, and all around them the world is alive with light. Just beyond them, the river is ribboned with the reflection of the streetlights of Arles in the distance. And beyond the river, the town itself spangles the horizon. But it isn't too bright to stop the stars overhead or the sense of night as enormous and other. The night sky, defined by the brilliance of the stars, occupies almost half of the canvas.
Even in the midst of Arles, in The Café Terrace on the Place du Forum, Arles, at Night, human life negotiates a middle distance between