Donna Hailson
The End of Night?
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Paul Bogard.............................
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Two-thirds of Americans and Europeans won’t ever live where they can see the Milky Way—their own galaxy, their own solar system—because two-thirds no longer experience real night—that is, real darkness—and nearly every person in the world lives in areas considered polluted by light. In this episode of On the Road with Mac and Molly, we hear from Paul Bogard, author of The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light. In his book and in this program, we travel with Paul around the globe to find night where it lives . . . showing exactly what we’ve lost, what we have left, and what we might hope to regain.
We hear how the loss of night is not only a loss of beauty above us. Exposure to artificial light at night has been cited as a factor in health concerns in humans ranging from poor sleep to cancer. Light pollution is also threatening the health of the world’s ecosystems as everything from the reproductive cycles to the migration patterns of nocturnal animals is adversely affected by artificial light at night. But there is hope. Light pollution is one kind of pollution we can readily fix. And Paul’s panoramic tour of the night, from its brightest spots to the darkest skies we have left gives us every reason to flip the switch—tonight.
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Paul Bogard is author of The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light (Little, Brown, 2013) and editor of Let There Be Night: Testimony on Behalf of the Dark (U of Nevada Press, 2008). A native Minnesotan, Paul has lived and taught in Minneapolis, Albuquerque, Reno, northern Wisconsin, and Winston-Salem. A graduate of Carleton College, the University of New Mexico, and the University of Nevada-Reno (PhD in Literature and Environment), Paul is now an assistant professor at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia, where he teaches creative writing and environmental literature.
