In defense of darkness

From NHPR, this is Outside In. I'm Nate Hedgie. When travel writer Megan Eves Egonis was growing up in rural New Mexico, she had free reign. She'd play hide and go seek in dried out riverbeds or come up with elaborate make believe games behind your house. But once the sun set, a pretty important rule kicked in. During the day, you can go run around to whatever you want, but at night, we weren't allowed out at all. It's not that Megan's parents were super strict. They were just very clear eyed that if you're living in a remote place, it gets dark. I don't think I was afraid, afraid of it, but I was certainly like, I know why I'm not supposed to go outside. It wasn't the darkness that was the problem, really, or the fear. We're talking no street lights, no neighbors. Just a single outdoor light attached to Megan's front door. Just a single outdoor light attached to Megan's front door, which wasn't even turned on most of the time. With that darkness came danger. That is the time when you would have scorpions and mountain lions and coyotes. But to every rule, there is an exception. And a few times a year, Megan's dad would wheel out a huge telescope and invite her outside. They'd look through the lens, trying to see the moons of Saturn or catch a glimpse of a comet. We saw the Milky Way overhead. I mean, one year, I think we even saw the Northern Lights this far south, which was amazing. These are some of Megan's favorite childhood memories. She learned to love the stars. These stars have been up there shining their light for millennia. And whatever is happening in my day-to-day that's stressing me out is really not that big a deal. Humans have been feeling this kind of awe and wonder at the night sky for tens of thousands of years. Sometimes civilizations on opposite sides of the world would notice and name the same constellations. Take Megan's favorite. It's not actually a technically constellation. It's called an asterism, which is an unofficial star cluster. But it's called the Pleiades or the Seven Sisters. And it's this little group of stars that kind of resembles a tornado. In South America, it's called the honeycomb. In New Zealand, it's Matariki. And then there's the Japanese, whose name for this astrocluster is probably something you recognize, Subaru. That's right. One of the most popular car brands in the world is named after our night sky. It's even on their logo. So once you start seeing Subarus around town, you can't unsee it's all the little seven stars. It's great. For thousands of years, being able to see a starry sky was as dependable as the sun rising. But that's not the case anymore. For most people in 2026, access to this wonder is disappearing. 80% of the world is now under light-polluted skies. That fact has become an obsession of Megan's life. For most people on Earth, there is just not a truly dark night. That's basically disappeared. And it's happened within a generation. Today on Outside In, the story of how our cities became so bright and whether in 2026, it's even possible to preserve a night sky. Our producer, Marina Hanky, spoke to Megan to find out. Stick around. Have you ever had the urge to sneak behind the cordoned off areas of a museum? Or roam the halls after closing time? The Smithsonian's flagship podcast, Side Door, will sneak you behind the scenes of the world's largest museum and research complex. Come learn about the ghosts that supposedly walk the museum halls after dark. How a train robbery gave rise to criminal forensics. Why leeches? Why did they do that? Maybe. You'll discover stories of history, science, art, and culture you won't find in a display case. You can listen to Side Door wherever you get your podcasts or find us online at si.edu. Slash. Side Door. From NHPR, this is your first time on a show. I'm sure you've heard about it. From NHPR, this is Outside In. I'm Marina Hanky. For the 300,000 years humans have been on planet Earth, we've existed alongside darkness. For Western civilizations, hasn't necessarily been an agreeable relationship. That's what I found in my research is that there is definitely a divide, at least in kind of traditional viewpoints or philosophies around what darkness means, how we talk about darkness, what meaning we assign to it. Travel writer and dark sky enthusiast Megan Eves Egonis. She's the author of the new book Night Fearing, in search of the disappearing darkness. In English, I mean, we have these like, you can write a whole dictionary of words that are related in some way to darkness that kind of associate darkness with something bad. You are leaving me in the dark. A dark cloud on the horizon. It was a dark time. Wow, that is a dark movie. Darkness is what superheroes save people from. The night is darkest just before the dawn. Where villains show their face. I'm out, come out wherever you are. And where evil creatures jump out and scare us. No, no. Give us a big loud roar. No. Well done. Well done. Well done. Superheroes be damned, Megan desperately wants to change this narrative. Because for her, darkness is associated with something really important, a starry night sky. But for as long as we've had darkness, we have also had light. And light? Well, it's winning the war, for better and for worse. Three centuries ago, most urban streets were incredibly dark. Take London, one of the biggest cities in the world at the start of the 1800s. Even with oil at torches available, it was impossible to keep flames ignited on all the city's empty streets. Instead, the wealthy would take advantage of a pretty unique profession for the time. They were called Link Boys. You had a system of young men who were employed by well to do people who wanted to go out at night, maybe to eat or drink or go somewhere. And they would actually carry a torch in front of these people and walk them home. Some summer job, right? Basically, the first industrial scale artificial light at night was installed in factories during the industrial revolution so that for the first time in history, human beings could be put to work during the hours when they would naturally be sleeping. In 1805, at Phillips and Lee Cotton Mill in Manchester, 50 gas-powered lights flickered on. Beyond increasing productivity, these gas-powered lights meant no open flames or a constant sourcing of candles. And they were just brighter. Inside the mill, it took 900 lights to illuminate what had required 2,500 candles. That quickly spread outside of factories towards homes and then onto our streets. Advancements in illuminated light continued rapidly over the next few decades. In 1879, physicist Joseph Swan used newly invented electric bulbs to light up a busy shopping street in Newcastle, England. And then it followed right after that, already in the 1880s, to London and Paris. And then in LA as well. Imagine a map of the world's streets lighting up one by one. 1887, Argentina, 1889, Lisbon, 1904, Sydney, from street lights to office buildings, gymnasiums to doctor's offices. And once we figured out how to do that, we've just added more and more and more and more and more. All this electric light wasn't actually universally popular at first. When one Scottish author saw Paris' first electric lamp, he penned this scathing review. Such a light as this should shine only on murders and public crime, or along the corridors of lunatic asylums, it was, quote, a horror to heighten horror. But the spread of electricity was like a bright, blinking snowball careening down a mountainside. No amount of cranky, candle-loving authors would be able to get in its way. And as every new light flickered on, a little bit of nighttime darkness disappeared. Big broad question, but what is the state of natural night in 2026? It's a big question, but it actually has quite a straightforward answer. And that is that the night in 2026 is shrinking measurably and very quickly at this point. There was a study done in 2023 that was published in the journal Science, which found that the night sky is getting brighter at about 10% per year, which is honestly almost unfathomable to have that kind of more light year on year. It's a little hard to imagine, but picture a baby born in the suburbs of a medium-sized city. It's late, they're fussy, and their parents take them outside where they can see about 250 stars. 18 years later, and that baby has become a teenager. One night, they crawl out onto the roof, definitely not up to anything nefarious, and look up at the same sky. They now would only see 100 stars. This, by the way, is already way more than most people in cities can see. Where Meghan lives in London, she can usually make out about four stars in her backyard. If she could turn off every single light in the city, she would be able to see about 5,000. What's blocking Meghan's view is formerly called Sky Glow. You probably recognize it as the yellowish pace that clouds a city at night. Sky Glow is especially bad in cities because, well, duh, there's a lot of lights in cities, but also because of air pollution, which is really just lots of tiny particles hanging in the air. City lights hit those particles, bounce off of them, and keep ricocheting their way around the atmosphere. But this yellow, hazy pollution doesn't just stay in cities. Light travels. In Death Valley National Park, visitors trying to stargaze, will see Sky Glow from Las Vegas and Los Angeles. So for most people on Earth, there is just not a truly dark night. Not one where you can see the Milky Way, where you can see stars, where you can see meteor showers. The natural night. That's basically disappeared, and it's happened within a generation. Although few want to see electric lights while visiting Death Valley, there are pretty compelling reasons to illuminate a city. Say, I don't know, keeping airport runways lit, directing patients to hospitals. But the negative effects of evening light are pretty hard to ignore. And Megan thinks nothing illuminates those effects better than one creature, the moth. I've just gotten kind of interested in moths through my research because they're one of these creatures, a bit like bats, who are in a similar position. They've just got really bad PR. Well, consider me got by the anti-moth PR machine. They're flappy little wings. The way that when you're in a tent, they just get right up in your zone. Blah. Of course, it is not actually me that they are interested in. It's my headlamp. Essentially, moths use the moon and stars to find their way and navigate. And when they come across a light bulb that's open and on at night, they basically kind of think it's the moon, and they just start circling it, thinking that they're going in the right direction to get away from the moon, and they get trapped. Yeah, I'm imagining it right now, like, I'm using my phone for GPS. And suddenly it's turn left, no turn right, no, it's 0.5 miles, no, it's 25 miles. I mean, that would run havoc on my ability to navigate. In 500 feet, take a left, take the exit, recalculating. Take the exit, take a left. At Sports Games as a teenager, I remember looking up with some combination of awe and disgust at the sheer volume of moths doing this exact dance around our lights. I don't think I realized what a gruesome thing I was watching. They're not doing that because they're dumb. They're doing it because they're completely confused. They circle and circle and circle until they either bash themselves against that light bulb and get burned, or they simply exhaust themselves and fly there to their death. In the past 50 years, the global populations of moths has fallen by a third. Light pollution was one of the main culprits. Moths aren't the only animal affected by our extraordinarily overlit world. 60% of invertebrates are nocturnal, and most of them depend on the moon in some way for navigation. Firefly courtship dances are getting disrupted, crickets can't tell whether it's day or night, and bird migrations have gone haywire. The news for us humans isn't much better, and a lot can be blamed on one specific lighting technology. LED is a new form of lighting technology. It's called light emitting diodes, and it's a different technology than our old incandescent light bulbs. It's far more efficient, which means it can produce a lot more light with a lot less energy. More light for less energy. Sounds like a pretty good thing, right? But there's a downside. In 2011, the global LED market made up less than 1% of general lighting. By 2019, that number had grown to 47. Your TV is lit by LEDs, your car headlights, your phone, and recently, our street lights. For years, street lights in the US were primarily lit with a technology called high pressure sodium lamps. Don't worry about it. What you would recognize them by is that orangey glow, which a very surprising number of people on the internet are incredibly nostalgic for. These newer LED lights are very, not just bright, but white, blue's end of the spectrum light. Yeah, these are the ones that, like, when I'm driving on the highway sometimes right now, they legitimately look blue at night. Yeah, exactly. And I mean, that is literally true because light kind of falls on a spectrum, and the LEDs are on one far end of the blue spectrum, which is the more harmful end in terms of our health. Consistent exposure to LED lighting has been shown to reduce sleep and seriously disrupt our body's natural alarm clock. LED street lights are five times more powerful in affecting circadian rhythms than the sodium lights they replaced. It's not just LEDs, though, that are causing us problems. A 2024 study in the Journal of Environmental Pollution showed that exposure to nighttime light in general was associated with a 21% higher risk of cardiometabolic diseases, like heart attacks and strokes. Some clinicians have begun to consider that the simple act of avoiding light at night could be treated as a serious non-pharmological intervention for mental health disorders. Of course, the flip side of it is we've found that darkness does us well, right? What does darkness give us? I mean, the more I've studied this and the more time I have spent in the dark, the more convinced I am that we really need darkness, and not just for our physical health, but for our emotional health and for our spiritual health if you have a spiritual practice. It's a time for us to go inward. It's a time for us to self-reflect. And also, it's a sense of looking at the night sky as a way of getting perspective on our size. It gives us this idea that we're both tiny, insignificant, and also giant. What Megan's describing here is a feeling of awe. It's an emotion that psychologists take pretty seriously. And sure, maybe that's a cliche. But feel awe like this enough and it reduces people's stress, lessens inner critiques, and can inspire acts of selflessness. Looking up at a clear night sky can make you feel like you're part of something bigger. So, when we come back, what can we do about light pollution without going back to the dark ages? Summer always changes how I get dressed. 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And if you ever get stuck, Shopify is always around to share advice with their award winning 24 seven customer support. See less carts go abandoned and more sales go with Shopify and their shop pay button. Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at Shopify.com slash outside in go to Shopify.com slash outside in that's Shopify.com slash outside in. From NHPR, this is outside in. I'm Marina Hainke. While working on the story, I've been paying extra attention to light at night. I've noticed sky glow. I've seen some very unhappy mods, but there's something else that's pretty hard to ignore. Humans tend to find a lot of joy during the evening hours. And usually that joy involves light. As a night sky enthusiast, as someone who has worked a lot on the many negatives that we have of not having a natural night. What do you think about the idea that like there are people who overjoy in a New York City skyline, right? Or I was thinking for me, like some of my most cherished memories probably as a teenager is playing field hockey under really bright stadium lighting. How do you balance that? How do you think of the benefits of an illuminated night? Well, I mean, there's no question at all in my mind or I think anybody's mind that light is beautiful. We're attracted to light and our eyes are there evolved in a certain way to kind of see light in a certain way. We see a different spectrum of light than other creatures can see. We see a lot more types of light than a lot of creatures can see. And we see it in a different way and that's beautiful. Not something that we should hate or dislike. For me, it's all about balance and coming to find a way that is, that allows us to experience that beauty and that charm and the nightlife that we want to have in our cities and also the important nighttime jobs and roles that people do at night that require lighting. It was a great pull through to Ramel though he makes no mistake. A flip of a switch, all 50,000 lights illuminate the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree. One of Megan's colleagues once framed the necessity of light in a way that's always stuck with her. It's a bit like this. Ambulances with their sirens are actually a form of noise pollution. They're extremely loud, they're disruptive, but we need that noise because that's life saving for somebody. So that's a form of noise pollution that we're willing and gladly take on in our environment. And the same thing we need to sort of have that balance view towards light. If an occasional ambulance siren is a form of noise pollution most people are willing to put up with, imagine a fire station that decided to allow their sirens to run 24-7. That is how out of balance Megan thinks we are with our light use. You describe yourself at one point as a light waste grump. What is light waste? So I think a good way to compare this is actually our use of plastic, right? So there are probably a million ways that plastic is so useful to us. It is a great technology. It has immeasurably changed human history and life on this planet and helped us in so many ways. And also we use it way too much and we put it in places where it shouldn't be. And so there's that point of like, at what point is this too much? Dark Sky International estimates that about 30% of outdoor light is wasted. That could be light that's shining onto something nobody's looking at, think of your backyard mood lighting, or spilling out way past the area it's intended to illuminate, like an unshielded greenhouse. When I asked Megan for her classic example of light waste, she pointed to something oddly specific. In the UK we have all these shops that have real estate signs in them? Like I said, niche. Real estate agents do not work at night, but they put their shop windows full of listings and then light them up insanely bright. And so it's so that people walking by will stop and look at them, but nobody at 9pm is going to stop and look at like a house listing on a random street. Once you start looking for the real estate listing versions of light waste, you will not be able to stop. There's the computer screensaver that flickers all night through an open window on my block. The university building down the street that doesn't seem to turn off a singular light at night. I'm imagining you walking through your hometown of London, very crumpy some nights. It's hard because once you start, you know, I never thought in my earlier life that I would be so obsessed with light bulbs, but here we are. And you know, now I walk around and I just say, God, there's... When you start looking around your environment at how many light fixtures there are, it starts to become overwhelming. Music But in a moment when trying to solve different environmental crises can sometimes feel like a very grim game of whack-a-mole. Megan is actually more optimistic than you might think. It's not that we don't have the solutions, we already have the solutions. The issue is having awareness and then having an impetus for it to be done both politically and at a kind of infrastructural level. Reason number one for the optimism? The technology. The great thing is that now LED technology has evolved and is currently still evolving. LEDs can come in different color temperatures. We can put filters on them to change the color temperature. We can install different types of smart lighting, which can be dimmed or work on motion sensors. There was a really fascinating trial that they did in a small suburb outside of Paris where they reinstalled the lighting on a couple of blocks of houses, I guess. And the residents, they were all given an app on their smartphone and they can literally control their own street lights on those streets. And they found that they've reduced their light use by half. But it doesn't necessarily take a fancy pilot program to take advantage of these new technologies. Especially because even though we've talked a lot about street lighting, most pollution comes from buildings, including the ones we live in. So there are some really easy things that people can do around their homes and in their communities that will make a difference immediately. Number one thing, close your curtains, close your blinds. If you've got a skylight or a roof window, make sure that has a covering on it at night. Megan recommends taking a light audit. You'd be amazed what fixtures you've completely forgotten exist. So you want them pointed down, you want them to be a warmer color temperature, and ideally you'd want them on some kind of a motion sensor or timer so that they're off when you're not using them. Outdoor fixtures should have what are called light shields. Imagine a little hat for your lamp. They help minimize sky glow and also remove sharp glare, which ironically can impede our ability to see at night. These light shields and timers and new bulbs are making their way into actual law. Maine just passed its first light pollution bill, which requires all publicly funded lighting to adhere to a new set of pollution-conscious standards. This includes enforcing warmer-toned LEDs, which means you're still getting cheaper energy without compromising health. The second case for optimism is the simplicity of light pollution cleanup. Light doesn't have any residue, so when you turn off a light or stop using it, the problem is simply solved. Megan compared this to, say, addressing microplastics. Totally a worthy problem, but a tricky one. Even if we stop making plastic today, our landfills, our oceans, heck, our bodies are still full of this stuff. Dark Sky advocates argue this is literally as simple as the flip of a switch. Much of Dark Sky discourse is pretty easy to support. I mean, who doesn't love a starry sky? But when talking about light pollution, there's one pretty big elephant in the room. Before reporting this story, the one fact I thought I knew about urban lighting was that more street lights meant less crime. Isn't darkness actually more dangerous? I mean, this is such an emotionally charged topic for people. And it is something we have to talk about very carefully, because this is something people feel very strongly about. And actually, there's not a lot of hard evidence that crime goes up in dark hours or in dark spaces. The evidence Megan's referring to here comes from a groundbreaking publication printed in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health. It's been replicated in several other communities. Most crime is committed during the day. That's point blank, the right statistics. So we can't say that more crime happens at night. We also can't really say that things like street lighting actually reduce the number of traffic accidents, because statistically they don't. Of course, what makes this an emotionally charged topic isn't the traffic accidents or the burglaries. Many women report feeling fear walking down a dark street at night. And I'll be honest, I'm one of them. Megan isn't trying to discount that feeling, although she doesn't think darkness is necessarily what's to blame. So lighting is something that we use for our own eyes and for our own comfort. And comfort emotionally is the most important part of that. It's about how we feel, not necessarily what is true. And so, you know, this idea that dark alleys are dangerous and all that sort of stuff, it's because we feel more vulnerable in the dark. And that is what leads us to think that the dark isn't safe. Megan writes in her book, If darkness was the problem, Las Vegas should be the safest city on earth. She's being a little glib, but I get her point there. Several researchers have found that increasing feelings of safety at night has a lot to do with radiating light, rather than having some places intensely illuminated bordered by sudden darkness. Other considerations include minimizing glare, again a symptom of overlighting, and constructing public spaces in a way that doesn't leave narrow walkways or tight turns. Basically, even though safe cities don't need to be lit up like Times Square, nobody's arguing that they should be pitch black. That's not reasonable. We don't live in a society where that's even possible and certainly not what I would recommend doing. For somebody so evangelical about darkness, Megan is actually more measured than I thought she'd be about this need to coexist with electricity. But it doesn't mean she thinks people living in cities need to count themselves out of finding joy in a starry sky. Most people don't go outside and look up at night. Even when I'm walking around with friends in London just after the pub, I'm always like, oh look, it's Venus, or oh look, it's Jupiter. And they're like, what? You can see that? I don't think we can see anything in London. I'm like, yeah, we can. There, look up. Look up. Urban stargazing could easily sound like an oxymoron. Megan would offer a different framing. No, you were not going to be able to see the Milky Way. You may not even be able to make out a constellation. But as long as you can see one star, you have the opportunity to tap into something else that the cosmos can offer. A feeling of togetherness. Because that star you're seeing is the same star Megan saw in New Mexico, or even that cranky author in Paris in 1881. It's amazing to me that I can go to Uzbekistan and stand in a mountain in Uzbekistan and talk about the sky with somebody. And we're both familiar with those stars, even though we grew up in opposite sides of the world. It puts us together as humans and takes away all of those borders and things that we think make us so different and reminds us that we're all the same. We're all here on planet Earth, on the good spaceship Earth, and we're all the same. So, we're going to round out today's show with some tips for the hopeful urban stargazer. Tip number one, face the right direction. If you can find a place of open sky, if you're in a city that has tall buildings, you need to try to get somewhere that is the edge of that. So for example, if you're in New York, you want to get to one of the rivers. The best way to face is away from the center of the city. You want to get to one of the rivers. The best way to face is away from the center or the downtown area. Tip number two, pull out a stargazing app on your smartphone. Megan uses something called SkyView, but there's lots of them out there. I got to say, these apps are so cool. They'll orient you and they'll identify the stars that you're looking at. And tip number three, consistency is key. Do it regularly enough throughout the course of a year so you can start to see how the sky changes. Because for me, that's the coolest part, is when I see a certain star coming up, I know, ah, the year is changing, time is passing, and it helps me feel connected to the rhythms of the cosmos. Okay, mark my words, I'm going to try this. I was saying to my editor, I was like, I don't live in New York City, I live in Portland, Maine, but we get skygloved, like we do, it's light-balluted. You can stargaze tonight, no matter where you are. I stargaze in London, so I can promise you, you can do it anywhere. That is it for today's episode, which was recorded, produced, and mixed by Marina Hanky. Alright, it is 10.29 p.m. and I'm going to go look for some stars. It was edited by our executive producer, Taylor Quimby. I'm your host, Nate Hedgie. Our staff also includes Felix Poon, Justine Paradis, and Jessica Hunt. Let's see, I see one star, I see two. Rebecca LaVoy is NHPR's director of On Demand Audio. I see three and four and five. Music in this episode came from Blue Dot Sessions, Air Eye, Chris Zabrinsky, Lennon Hutton, and Carol Luna. Oh my God, is that the Big Dipper? You can learn more about Megan's book, Night Faring, at her website. We'll link to it in the show notes. Alright, I'm breaking out the app. He's telling me it's not, and he's telling me it is part of Ursa Major, and I can see one, two, three, four, five, six stars of that constellation, the other ones. Victims of light pollution. Also, today was focused on the light pollution that shines up from the Earth's surface, but there's also light pollution that comes down from space via satellites. We did a whole episode on that a couple of years ago. It's called the New Space Race. Again, we'll link to that in our show notes. Virgo, hello. I thought it was a shooting star. Outside In is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio. It's peaceful out here. It's not the mill nowhere, but it's peaceful. Have you ever wondered why Reese Witherspoon founded Hello Sunshine, or where Kevin O'Leary got his start, or even how Alex Earle became the most accessible founder to someone who may not even consider this space? Enter the Founder Mindset, the new podcast from Harvard Business School Foundry, hosted by me, Reza Satchu. As a leading educator in entrepreneurship, I've built multiple high-profile companies and mentored thousands of students and founders through the realities of starting and scaling ventures. 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