The Wild Dark
Finding the Night Sky in the Age of Light
In his fascinating travelogue The Wild Dark, Craig Childs goes on a quest to reclaim dark nights.
Childs remembers the mixture of awe and fear he felt under a Colorado night sky when he was five years old. Since then, he’s taken every opportunity to live off-grid and observe the patterns of the moon and stars. Along with his friend Irvin, he embarked on a ten-night mountain-bike ride from Las Vegas into the surrounding desert. Darkness is “historic and political,” he insists, prevalent out west only because millions of acres of public land were stolen from Indigenous people.
Reflecting how the Bortle dark-sky scale ranges from 9 (lightest; includes Vegas) to 1 (darkest), the book’s chapter numbers count from 9 down to 1. As the pair leave civilization behind and rediscover the wonder of a sky brilliant with stars, a sky quality meter is used to confirm their progress. Rich metaphorical language, such as “dusk shakes out its soft, furry tail,” and imaginative turns, such as imagining the sky from a grasshopper’s point of view, play in.
Details of the grueling trip trade off with contextual information. The book marshals ample evidence of the injurious effects of light pollution. Artificial light disrupts circadian rhythms, it notes; night shifts are detrimental, contributing to higher rates of cancer. The natural world, too, suffers grievous harm. Hormonal changes due to excess light cause birds to reproduce too early, before food is available. There are sobering stories of human events causing unwitting devastation. The 9/11 memorial light beams, for instance, attracted thousands of birds, many of whom collided with buildings or died of exhaustion.
Scientific and poetic, The Wild Dark conveys a galvanizing message: Light pollution is the simplest environmental damage to reverse. Just turn the lighting down, or off.
Reviewed by
Rebecca Foster
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. No fee was paid by the publisher for this review. Foreword Reviews only recommends books that we love. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
