The wild dark Finding the night sky in the age of light

Early in this enchanting, mournful yet hopeful book, an Ethiopian man reports looking up at the star-filled skies of his youth and seeing God. But now, he remarks almost innocently, "I wonder what it does to us not to see the night sky." To answer that question and more, American science writer Childs and a longtime friend, naturalist Irvin Fox-Fernandez, biked deep into the Nevada desert, passing through all nine "classes" of the Bortle dark-sky scale--from dazzlingly lit Las Vegas to a basin 130 miles away below a "glimmering" canopy of stars, constellations even vanishing in the multitudes. Along the journey, Childs ruminates poetically on the ageless use of stellar navigation by all manner of species, from birds to grasshoppers to great human civilizations, and what happens to them when the stars disappear. He also reflects on the tragic rise of LEDs that blind us to otherwise star-filled night skies and the sheer magnitude of our loss. But of all the environmental dilemmas facing us, Childs points out, artificial light has a relatively simple fix, and he explains how that might be done. "It is a pollution that vanishes," he writes, "with the flip of a switch."