Our Environment, Animal Tips & the Great Outdoors

Protecting our nights: Envoys of beauty

By Published On: February 3rd, 2025

It’s eighteen degrees out at 9:12pm on December 23, and I’m at a trailhead, fumbling with the buttons of my headlamp. Ten minutes ago, I was in Falls Village, watching the Housatonic boy’s basketball home opener against Thomaston. We lost by fifteen.

We had a respectable first half, though, much like the Steelers did two nights ago, when I opted to stay indoors and watch football instead of heading out into the longest of nights – the winter solstice – when the sky was a lucid black and the stars like pegs on a Lite Brite board. Even a couple of hours ago, I might have been able to see constellations, but at this rate, my photos for this article will look like I’d forgotten to remove the lens cap, and I am wondering about the purpose and wisdom of heading off into a stand of pines that will lend a palpable sense of terror to what is turning out to be one of the blackest nights of the year. 

Our place in the universe

The natural brilliance of the full moon illuminates the Great Falls at night, though artificial light mars the scene

Winter nights at this latitude lend themselves to cosmic, existential meditations about our place in the universe, and constellations are companions to those musings. Historically used as navigational reference points, the stars continue to orient us in the age of GPS to the third rock from the sun and to the very ground from which we view the cosmos. Once again, Emerson probably put it best: “If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.”

Well, not exactly every night. With my late start and the late-arriving clouds, my Christmas Eve-eve outing amounted to a half-hour’s march through pitch-black woods that I wouldn’t dream of attempting without a headlamp and two spares in my backpack. 

A lack of brilliance

But more and more, even clear nights lack the brilliance that mesmerized Emerson in the nineteenth century. Artificial light from terrestrial and celestial sources obscures our view of the heavens so that we are not seeing the same sky our ancestors did. To the availability of cheap LED lighting and even cheaper associated electrical bills, most of us say, “don’t mind if I do,” adding strings of Christmas lights and leaving them on 24-7, along with the quotidian house lights and additional illumination around public buildings and utilities, all in the name of safety.

Artificial lights and their effects

Or, as in Becket, Massachusetts, to light up yet another marijuana-growing facility. Concerns about the plant’s additional illumination prompted a group of citizens, organized under the DarkSkyMassachusetts umbrella, to rework a version of the legislation that was passed in Sheffield in 2023, restricting light fixtures in new construction to “fully-shielded” models with downward-facing lamps. About fifty towns in Massachusetts have passed similar ordinances … but why?

First, there are biological reasons. Artificial light has direct and ancillary effects on everything from moths to humans, starting with the chemical signaling that most of us know as our circadian rhythms. Sunlight (or the absence of it) cues feeding time for many species, and in turn, the predators that rely on those species. Moreover, studies have shown that exposure to artificial light at night can impede the production of melatonin, the naturally-occuring hormonal secretion that affects sleep and associated health functions ranging from diet to mental health. Some studies even indicate that night-time lighting can cause “epigenetic” changes in humans that, while not altering our genetic code, can activate our DNA in abnormal ways, leading to certain kinds of cancer. 

Although surrounded by urban light, our area enjoys several pockets of dark skies around the Southern Taconic range and the Catskills

The environmental impact

Then there are additional environmental and ecological reasons. All of the aforementioned effects of artificial light work on every member of an ecosystem, most of which spent the last hundred thousand years operating in complete and utter darkness and developing feeding patterns and anatomical adaptations according to diurnal cycles. The lightbulb, now a mere 140 years old, disorients insects and the animals that feed on them – most notably migratory birds, but including mammals as large as black bears, for whom insects can constitute ten to twenty percent of their diet. Thus, artificial light impacts a significant portion of the food chain, turning the food web into more of a Gordian knot. 

Cities such as Denver, even a mile above sea level, enjoy significantly less access to dark skies than rural areas

The added value of all of this light is dubious at best and injurious at worst. Although a certain level of light can serve public safety interests, some studies suggest that there may be a threshold level of illumination, beyond which there is not only limited functional safety benefit, but limited additional perceived “feelings of safety” as well. Yet, public policy and municipal practices tend toward the “more is better” approach, resulting in potentially inequitable installation of artificial light sources in historically marginalized communities. One study of the sociological aspects of lighting in the United States found that communities of Black, Asian, and Hispanic populations “tended to live in brighter neighborhoods” that experience the greatest impact from light pollution. 

More, or less, awe?

Yet for all of these investigations into the impact of light pollution, a more poetic argument wins out. The diminution of the night skies limits our sense of awe. Sometime around the age of eight, I attended a talk at a local university that featured slides of wondrous celestial objects: nebulae, galaxies, and solar systems such as those that are sometimes still visible to the naked eye under the right conditions. That imagery, albeit projected in a lecture hall with fluorescent lighting and now decades in the past, invested me with a sense of awe that continues to drive me outside on the coldest winter nights to see what the sky has to offer. It is the same attraction that inspired legends in our ancestors and drew Walt Whitman away from the “learn’d astronomer.” 

Dacher Keltner, in his 2023 book Awe, notes that, “many worry today about how the dimming of the night sky in this era of light pollution is harming our capacity to wonder.” The night sky, and by extension, awe, “seems to orient us to devote ourselves to things outside of our individual selves. To sacrifice and serve. To sense that the boundaries between our individual selves and others readily dissolve, that our true nature is collective.” Although we can experience that nature by cheering on a high school basketball team, the stars – envoys of beauty – appear night after night, throughout eternity, to remind us of that truth, provided we can see them.  

We live in one of the few parts of the Northeast that still enjoys reasonably good night sky viewing conditions. An isthmus of darkness surrounds the tri-state juncture on top of the South Taconic Range, and the Catskills are blessed with even blacker skies. But to get a taste of truly primordial skies, the interior of Maine, the Adirondacks, and the desert Southwest are incomparable. Even the famed, pupil-searing lights of Las Vegas can be left behind in a matter of hours for a view of the Milky Way that may keep the viewer awake with more wholesome attractions. Astrotourism to such locations is gaining in popularity each year, and with it, the elective burning of fossil fuels and the luminescence of those areas. Responsible stewardship of our planet suggests that we should, instead, do what we can to preserve the darkness that is already above our heads. •