#312： The Costs of Light Pollution and the Benefits of Darkness
Episode Stats
Summary
Well throughout human history, the nighttime sky has been a source of inspiration for art, literature, philosophy and religion. But if you're like most people living in cities or suburbs, or even rural parts of the country, you've likely never encountered a truly dark night. Thanks to electric lighting the nighttime can be as bright as day, and while it's allowed us to function well into the midnight hour, electric lighting has deprived us of many of the spiritual and physical benefits that only come out in the dark. My guest today has written a book where he explores the decline of darkness in our modern age. His name is Paul Bogard, and his book is The End of Night.
Transcript
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brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast well throughout
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human history the nighttime sky has been a source of inspiration for art literature philosophy and
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religion but if you're like most people living in cities or suburbs or even rural parts of the
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country you've likely never encountered a truly dark night thanks to electric lighting the nighttime
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can be as bright as day and while it's allowed us to function well into the midnight hour electric
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lighting has deprived us of many of the spiritual and physical benefits that only come out in the
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dark my guest today has written a book where he explores the decline of darkness in our modern
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age his name is paul bogard and his book is the end of night searching for natural darkness in an age
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of artificial light and today on the show paul and i discuss what true darkness actually looks like
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and the type of undark night that most modern folks experience he then shares where the last
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few spots in america and europe where you can still experience true darkness and what the night sky in
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those places looks like we then delve into what we miss out spiritually by not experiencing true
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darkness as well as the health detriments that come with being exposed to artificial light 24 hours a
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day paul also shares some of the common myths about darkness such as the idea that darkness is more
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dangerous than light the show is going to inspire you to seek out a remote area of wilderness so you
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experience the beauty that comes with a truly dark night after the show's over make sure to check
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out the show notes at aom.is slash bogard paul bogard welcome to the show great to be here so you wrote
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a book called the end of night and it's all about how night time has pretty much ended for most of
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human civilization i'm curious what led you down the path to start exploring the end of night and why
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darkness has these benefits that we often overlook well i guess i think of myself as lucky i grew up
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in minneapolis but the year i was born my grandparents and parents built a cabin in the northern part of
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the state where we call it up north here so all my life i've been going up north to this cabin on a lake
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and so i grew up with what i would describe as real night or real darkness that's you know darkness
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without really any artificial light and i used to still do actually take the canoe out into the
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middle of the lake and just kind of lie back under the stars and soak in the universe so having that
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firsthand experience of a real night and real darkness especially as a kid and growing up i took
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that with me into the rest of my life and when i was looking for a subject to write about after college
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i started thinking about nighttime and writing about it and when i discovered the problem of
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light pollution everything just kind of clicked and all of a sudden i was writing about all the
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benefits of darkness and all the costs of of light pollution why does darkness have such a bad rap
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because like i mean everyone's afraid of the dark like that's the thing you're supposed to be afraid of
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we do everything we can to illuminate the dark what's going on there yeah there's no doubt about it i mean
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i think a lot of you know this issue of of light pollution comes down to our fear of the dark and
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you know it's a fear of darkness that goes back pretty much as far as we go back i think and
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you see it in in historical literature nighttime and darkness as being the time of thieves and
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danger and that kind of thing and then certainly our popular culture has uh reinforced that you know
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so that's when attacks happen that's when home invasions happen that's when the bad guys come out
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all that and so i think if you asked most people kind of you know when does when's the most dangerous
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time to be out or when does crime happen people would say at night in the dark and the surprising
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thing is that statistically that's just not true you know i've talked to police in a lot of different
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cities when i was writing the book and they said you know everybody thinks that
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night time is is the dangerous time but you know daylight is when houses are being robbed and
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and you know people are being attacked by people they know inside their house you know it's very
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it's relatively rare to be attacked outside so we have all these preconceived notions about
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that darkness is dangerous and to go off that then that light is safety and that more light is more
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safety and you know it's important to say that some light can certainly help us be safe outside help
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us see our way but the the challenge is that we just think that more ever more light will make us
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ever safer so we keep pumping out more and more light yeah i thought that the chapter on sort of the
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myths of darkness being unsafe because that's what you hear right whenever like for home security
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like you gotta have outdoor lighting have a well-lit house because bad guys like to do things when they
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can't be seen but you make the point and i think a police officer made the point like well bad guys
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also like to see what they're doing exactly yeah i heard that again and again when i was researching
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the book that you know i heard people say uh bad guys are just as afraid of the dark as we are
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and they you know they like to be as you said they like to be able to sort their tools in the light
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they like to see what's going on and you see it on you know remarkably if you go to say a website
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of a police department your local police department you're bound to see a message that reads something
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like you know make your house safe at night light it up light up your yard so even the police are kind
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of following behind this questionable notion that you know light makes us safe and darkness is dangerous
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yeah and then i mean you also to point out like too much light can be dangerous particularly on
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roads and highways where just we flood the streets with light and it actually creates this glare that
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makes it harder to see and can increase the chances of accidents yeah it's really true i mean i think
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especially if you think of you know as you get older your eyes change it becomes more difficult
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to drive at night in some part because of what's happening physically to your eye but then we have
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all this glaring light shining into our eyes as well and i think you know when i give talks and when i
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give readings and that kind of thing i sometimes apologize to people because i say you know once you
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once i've talked and shown you some of these things you're going to go out into the night and start
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seeing this everywhere and one of the things you see is glary light you know light that's allowed to
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just you know we're kind of shooting it all over the place and including straight into our eyes which
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makes it harder to see which makes it more dangerous at night and let's have light but let's have light
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just going down where we need it and not shining into our eyes or alternately into our bedrooms into our
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houses that kind of thing right and going back to the bad guy you had some pictures in there of
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houses that were just you know had lots of light but you couldn't see the person because there was
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no contrast or they were wearing all white and you couldn't tell that they were there yeah it's
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really remarkable there's a great friend of mine sent me this uh two images and and they're in the
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book of of the same scene of a yard in tucson and in the first scene you just kind of you see this
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this yard with a bright light and the second scene he's put up his hand to shield the light so that
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you have the light just going down and nowhere else and then you can see the bad guy who was you know
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standing behind the in the shadow all the time but because the light was so bright you couldn't see
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him you're you know bright lights make our pupils shut down so it makes it you know we see makes it
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harder for us to see bright lights cast shadows where the bad guys can hide and i think even maybe the
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biggest issue that we're talking about here too is that bright lights give us the illusion of safety
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so we we look out onto a street we look out onto a college campus and we see it all lit up and we
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think oh it's safe but you know lights aren't going to make you safe and if somebody's out there
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they can hide easily and yeah lights don't make us safe lights don't make us safe later on we'll talk
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more about how we can use light more smartly i guess is the word i'm looking for yeah but uh let's talk
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about this idea of true darkness or real night what is that and what sort of darkness do most people
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experience who live in the cities and suburbs yeah i think it's a really interesting question because
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you know if you ask somebody does it get dark at night they're gonna you know duh like of course it
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gets dark at night but it honestly it really it doesn't get dark at night not at least not as dark
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as it used to there's a couple different ways to think about this one is something called the
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bordel scale which is a a nine point scale starting at starts at nine in our brightest places so pretty
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much any any city downtown and works its way down to a level one which would be what we call natural or
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real darkness so that is darkness as it was before the advent of electric lighting essentially and
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what's remarkable when you start thinking about it this way is to learn that most americans live most
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of their lives in levels five and above so this whole second half of the scale of darkness is something
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that most of us never even experience we don't even know what it what it looks like and it's getting
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harder and harder to know what it looks like certainly in the lower 48 states there are very few places
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that you could honestly say are a level one darkness where there's no evidence of artificial
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light either you know no uh no light off on the horizon or uh no light even in the sky from or on you
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know from uh from a distant town or something like that so yeah it gets dark and it gets darker in the
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countryside than it does in the city but it doesn't get dark like it used to and if you've you know if
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you've lived long enough uh as i have i guess to to grow up with experiencing real nights real darkness
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and now you're in the same place you've seen the change it's not as dark as it used to be
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and so i mean where can people still experience darkness unaffected by human light here in the united
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states well you know the if you're uh this is the crazy thing if you're east of the great plains so
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the whole half of the eastern part of the country technically there's no more natural darkness left
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uh again there certainly are dark places people go stargazing you know um some of the national parks
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thinking of acadia up in maine or out on uh the outer banks uh some places in west virginia
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there are places where you can experience you know close to a real night but to get back to
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that real natural darkness you have to get out into the ocean off the coast or if you're lucky out into
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the western states sometimes you can get back to some southern utah is a great place to go the oregon
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desert there are places where you can you can get back to it but for most of us most of our nights
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we're not even close and how does the night sky change when there's little or no light pollution
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because i think you know we look at the stars and like oh there's some stars there you can see the
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big constellations like the big dipper cassiopeia but what happens well how does the sky change
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whenever you have absolutely no light interfering with your stargazing yeah it's an entirely different
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experience really i'll give you a good example which is when i was working on the end of night i was
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living in winston-salem north carolina and working at wake forest and i remember walking home one night
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and i was in the fall and i looked kind of over into the eastern sky and i saw you know the stars of
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orion which are great the three stars in the belt and betelgeuse and rigel these super bright stars and
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and you know everybody most of us know what orion looks like i couldn't really see any other stars but i
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was you know psyched to see those stars and then i learned soon after that that these stars in orion
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are 98 or 99 percent brighter than any other stars in our sky so essentially what i was what i was seeing
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were these super bright stars and i wasn't seeing 98 or 99 percent of the stars i could be seeing most
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of my students have never seen the milky way which is an awesome experience and when you do get into
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those experiences of sort of what i'm saying is real night or real darkness you can have the feeling
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of there are so many stars that you feel like you're falling into them it's just this kind of
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disorienting dizzying experience and the stars are rising out of the horizon on one side and falling off
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the edge of the earth and the other and you it's just the surreal almost surreal experience you'll start
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to have a different the sky actually if you're in a dark enough place actually looks more deep blue
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than it does black so there's actually enough light in the sky that it causes just an entirely
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different experience and it's it's an experience that used to be completely common that all of us
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would have experienced if we'd been alive you know 100 150 200 years ago and now it's something that
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very few people ever experience right and you talk about uh vincent van gogh's starry night that famous
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painting and everyone's kind of like what's going on there like it's blue it's not black there's
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different colored stars but you think that he's like tripping on something but just the way you
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described it like that's probably what he saw like he saw a deep blue sky with different colored stars
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yeah that's a great example i often show that image in my presentations and i say you know
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van gogh has it had his had his issues but i think that uh you know a lot of people look at that
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painting and they just think he was as you said dripping on something or a crazy man or something like
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that or as one museum guy described to me van gogh was a werewolf of energy you know we just think he
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was this this uh unbelievable human being and that may all be true but he was also seeing a sky that
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we no longer see anymore and we have evidence of that in his letters to his brother theo where he
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would write about the different colors of stars over paris which you know you go to paris these
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days and you're lucky to see two dozen stars let alone the colors of of the stars so when i'm talking
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about that painting sometimes i say you know the night sky has inspired artists for you know all of
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history um van gogh's the one of the best examples of that and just think about all the young van gogh's
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out there right now who are not being inspired yeah so i mean yeah it seems like not being able
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to see the full solar system that's what's out there has probably really disconnected us from the
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cosmos or nature in a in a weird spiritual way i definitely think so i mean i like to say that you
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know we've taken what was once one of the most common human experiences which is walking out the
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door at night and coming face to face with the universe and we've made that one of the most rare of
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human experiences and that that experience that first-time experience of coming face to face with
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the universe has as i said that inspired art but it's also inspired religion philosophy spirituality
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science all these things all these elements of what it means to be human and there are a lot of costs
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to light pollution that have we can attach dollar signs to or talk about in terms of human health
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environmental health but then there are also these what are often sort of intangible costs you know what
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do we lose when we can't see a real night sky it's hard to put a dollar sign on it but that doesn't
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mean it's not incredibly valuable to who we are as a species so what was life like before we had
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electric lights i mean did i mean right now because of lights we can just be out 24 7 and everything's
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fine what happened what was life like before that did people just stay in as soon as that didn't you
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know as soon as the night came didn't leave their homes or were they out and about what was life like
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you know everything that i found was that it was a mix you have some stories of when night came
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people went this is i'm thinking especially in in western europe people would you know go inside and
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kind of batten down the hatch you know as though uh they were on a ship and a storm was approaching you
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know lock lock themselves inside kind of turn over the outside to the the bad guys as it were but then
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you also have stories and and and histories of night being the time of freedom you know of when
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people who were in one way or the other in bondage during the day were then at night kind of allowed
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their freedom and they could go see their friends or they could be with their partner my fiancee was
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in rwanda last summer and she had these remarkable stories of towns that you know have either no
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electric light or electric light only for part of the evening and then the rest of the night is dark
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and she said you know people would come out and see their friends and the streets were you know alive
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with with neighbors and seeing themselves and the night became this friendly friendly time where people
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were out and about rather than this what it is i think too often even in modern society kind of a
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time when people are nervous and anxious and and kind of going inside to hide so historically they
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were both both things but i think it's so hard for us to even imagine what it's like before electric
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light because we're so swamped in it that it's hard to think like what would i do if i were in that
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situation right you also talk about how people stayed in bed longer than we do like they'd go to
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bed pretty much when it got dark and they'd lay there and sometimes they would wake up in the middle
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of the night and now we think oh man it's insomnia this is i gotta go to the doctor get some ambien
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but for them that was just like a natural part of sleeping you would have a first sleep and then you'd
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wake up do some stuff and then have a second sleep and wake up in the morning yeah it's it's a
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remarkable thing uh this was discovered by a historian at virginia tech who wrote a book called
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at days close who discovered in the literature from western europe this what you just mentioned
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the the idea of first sleep and second sleep and it makes a lot of sense if you think about it you
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know if there's no electric light if there's no electricity to do all the things that that we do
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when it gets dark out folks would go to sleep and they would they would sleep for a while and then
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they would wake up at one or two or three in the morning and have this uh this intermission as it
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were in their sleep and he discovered stories of you know couples would uh make love they'd have you
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know conversations uh people would get up and go see their friends people would pursue you know their
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their private hobbies you know things that they didn't get to do during the day and then they would
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go back to sleep and sleep until the sun came up so to extrapolate that forward to our time where we
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think of like waking up in the middle of the night is you know we freak out if we wake up because we're
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like oh my god you know you know do i have insomnia is something wrong and a number of the sleep docs
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that i talked with said you know this is a totally normal thing what is pretty unnormal is this idea that
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we we go to we you know stay up into the night with our electric lights go to bed at 11 get up at
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seven and sleep straight through it's it's not like that normally right so let's talk about
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light pollution and its effect on the ecosystem i mean we call it pollution we don't think of it as
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that we think of pollution like a smog and stuff going into water but light can harm our environment
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so what ways has light pollution harmed our ecosystems you know it's it's this is the issue that really
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brought me to writing the end of night it's the thing that matters to me most is our impact
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on ecosystems and our fellow creatures and the surprising thing is we just don't know that much
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about it it hasn't been studied that much it's in the early stages and yet when you start to think
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about it and another a number of biologists told me this and talked to me about this if we think about
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the fact that life on earth evolved with bright days and dark nights and you know we we generally we
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generally acknowledge that we need sunlight it's really important but they said you know we also
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need darkness and then you think about how much light pollution there is how much uh and light
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pollution is the definition essentially is the overuse and misuse of artificial light so it's just we're
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using way too much we're kind of blasting it all around and essentially what that does for
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nocturnal creatures and crepuscular creatures those creatures that are active at dawn and dusk is it
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ruins their habitat and so they have evolved to depend on darkness for mating for migration for
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feeding for all these different things and then we come along and light up the light up the night
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we essentially ruin that habitat yeah so go ahead sorry oh go ahead no well i was just going to give
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you know a couple prime examples in north america for example we have more than 400 species of birds
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that migrate at night people don't know that you know during migration season and and in some ways
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all year round at night there are there are birds moving overhead migrating and they are drawn to our
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artificial lights they're drawn off course they're drawn into urban areas a lot of the birds that end up
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flying into windows during the day were drawn into that area at night by our bright lights we're having
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a real problem with insects being sucked out of the ecosystem because they're drawn to artificial
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light at night just kind of from the lowest uh the base of the food chain insects up to the top of the
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food chain we're seeing we're everywhere we look we're seeing impact of artificial lights on different
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species yeah i think the most visceral example that i've seen i think it was a planet earth the
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documentary of one of them about sea turtles when they hatch they use the moon or the stars
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to like figure out where to go right back to the ocean but with artificial light like they're
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heading towards like busy streets and they're getting run over that was probably the most visceral
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example i've seen of that it's a really dramatic example you know these these sea turtles that have
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evolved for over hundreds of millions of years to come on the shore lay their eggs when the when the
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eggs hatch the hatchlings come up onto the beach and they have evolved to scurry toward the brightest
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light on the horizon which is as you say has been the moon light or the stars on the ocean which is
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obviously the way they're supposed to go now the brightest light on the horizon is the condominium
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behind them or the hotel or the street light and so they come up and they head that way and they go
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into the street they're run over they die of dehydration they're picked off by predators it's a real
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problem and the good news is that a lot of places recognize this and people are you know watching the
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beaches so that when the when the hatchlings come up they help them to the ocean and that kind of
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thing but but we lose a lot of you know sea turtles are endangered anyway and we lose a lot of them
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just from this light pollution and you talk about bats they're often feared because they're associated
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with the nighttime right but they play a vital role in our ecosystem like they eat mosquitoes they eat
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bugs and if we don't have bats we're going to have this problem with infestations of insects
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right exactly bats are such a great example of everything we're talking about here because they
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are associated with knights and a lot of people are afraid of them for really no i shouldn't say
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no reason but any danger that a bat might carry from rabies is the prime example is way overblown and
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when you compare it to the benefits that they bring to humanity we really ought to be loving bats and
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and praising bats and thinking they are as cool as they really are i mean there's more than a thousand
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species of bats they when you look at the pictures of them they're they're fascinating faces and the
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ears and nose and then a prime example is uh the bats down in austin texas who there's uh bats who live under
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the congress avenue bridge who come out and fly into the it's just this amazing emergence of millions of bats
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coming out and they fly into the agriculture fields around the city and eat pests and they save the
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farmers you know hundreds of millions of dollars every year huge value right huge value it's something
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we ought to treasure uh and yet we're afraid of them so it's it's this this odd feeling that we have
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for something that is actually helping us so uh besides the the harm on our ecosystems uh you
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researched that this exposure to light 24 7 might actually have some health detriments to humans as
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well so what are some of those detriments yeah there there are primarily three different areas
00:25:06.740
and the first is that all this exposure to artificial light is night is contributing to sleep disorders so
00:25:12.460
it's impacting people's ability to sleep their length of sleep sleep docs have a term they use which is
00:25:20.080
short sleep and long light so because we're exposed to so much light way into the night we end up having
00:25:27.080
these short periods of sleep and what i was told which is really compelling is that short sleep or a
00:25:32.700
lack of sleep sleep disorders are tied to every major disease that we're wrestling with these days so
00:25:38.140
obesity cancer diabetes depression you know you name it a lack of sleep seems to have a real detrimental
00:25:45.300
effect the other second area is that exposure to artificial light at night confuses our circadian
00:25:52.220
rhythms which is these these rhythms that orchestrate our organs our body's health essentially and
00:25:58.060
it was described to me as uh if you imagine the organs in your body as an orchestra each one a different
00:26:03.840
instrument the circadian rhythm is the conductor keeps the orchestra together and if you confuse that
00:26:09.520
conductor it follows that the the rest of the orchestra is going to be confused and people think oh it's
00:26:15.920
no big deal you know i can i can pull an all-nighter or i can fly to europe and i can i can function but if
00:26:21.800
you do it night after night after night or a few nights here and a few nights there it leads to real
00:26:28.740
serious issues such that the world health organization now lists working the night shift as a probable
00:26:34.940
carcinogen and the american medical association is really concerned about exposure to especially
00:26:41.500
blue light at night and the third the third area that people are really nervous about is that it seems
00:26:48.140
like so we have a hormone called melatonin a lot of people have heard about that it's only produced in the
00:26:54.920
dark so if you're sleeping with the lights on you're not producing melatonin if you get up at night and you go to
00:27:00.220
the bathroom and turn on the light the production of melatonin in your body stops and what they've
00:27:05.900
found is a lack of melatonin in our bloodstream is linked to an increased risk for breast and prostate
00:27:12.580
cancer so this gets people's attention and all these things together you know what i say to people is
00:27:18.960
like every other creature on earth we evolve with bright days and dark nights you need darkness for
00:27:25.540
for health and if you're not already sleeping in the dark start tonight yeah that uh section about
00:27:32.900
the increased rates of cancer amongst nurses who work the night shift really blew my mind i had no i
00:27:38.660
mean i think we all understand if you work the night shift you're probably gonna be tired and fatigued
00:27:41.600
and that has lots of problems but the idea that it can cause cancer really sounded some alarms in me
00:27:45.900
yeah it does for a lot of people i mean cancer gets our attention and you know we should be careful to
00:27:50.600
say you know we can't say if you see a bright light at night you're going to get cancer nobody's really
00:27:56.300
saying that but it does it seems to increase the risk for cancer and when there's there's a you know
00:28:03.600
a real compelling uh argument that i detail in the book about the the link to breast cancer in women from
00:28:10.700
exposure to light at night and as as the researchers said to me you know even if it's only
00:28:15.660
10 or 15 or 20 percent of breast cancer cases that is still a lot of people and with all these things
00:28:23.080
that we're talking about you know when it comes to to exposure at light at night so much of this
00:28:28.620
exposure could be reduced you know so it's it's so often it's unnecessary exposure with high costs
00:28:37.120
so okay let's talk about that then how can we be more thoughtful about lighting at night times
00:28:42.520
obviously it's not possible just to eliminate all light at night time what can we do to light the
00:28:49.140
skies or light our way without trying i guess mitigating some of the downsides of too much light
00:28:54.080
yeah for sure there's a lot we can do and i'll just you know reiterate the idea too that
00:28:59.800
the problem isn't artificial light it's how we use it basically so we're going to have artificial light
00:29:06.080
increasingly we're going to have electronic light so light emitting diodes leds are kind of
00:29:11.960
taking over the the world and and that's good in a lot of ways they they can do a lot of a lot of
00:29:17.520
wonderful things so we're going to have light how do we use it let's use it thoughtfully and responsibly
00:29:23.460
and uh as good neighbors let's not use more than we need for example in your own house turn off your
00:29:31.080
lights at night and as i was just saying sleep in the dark try not to be staring into your screens
00:29:37.020
before you go to bed the blue light from your screen seem to have a real detrimental effect
00:29:42.300
in our communities we can have what are called light ordinances which are basically just rules
00:29:48.500
that dictate how what kind of light we'll have and how we'll use it and again the the biggest thing in
00:29:54.780
our communities and and all over is if we're going to have light let's direct it downward let's have what
00:30:00.460
we we call it shielded let's have it downward so it lights the street it lights the sidewalk
00:30:05.280
but it doesn't shine up into the sky it doesn't shine into people's eyes so those are kind of the
00:30:10.580
the basic ways i guess i would say is to in your own house be in the dark turn off your your house lights
00:30:17.340
in your communities make sure that your light is focused downward that we're not using more light than
00:30:22.380
we need and as a society then to start realizing that because some light help us helps us be safe
00:30:29.820
more light doesn't automatically make us safer are there any cities who are sort of on the forefront
00:30:35.880
of reducing light pollution or being smart smarter about lighting yeah absolutely and there's a lot of
00:30:42.000
really cool work that's being done with lighting around the world here in the states two prime examples
00:30:48.220
are in arizona flagstaff and tucson flagstaff is remarkable if you go there and a lot of this is
00:30:55.540
dictated by the uh the astronomical observatories that have been there but in flagstaff and in tucson
00:31:02.960
you will see exactly what i'm talking about which is that the lights are focused down sometimes the lights
00:31:08.660
are more uh the colors of the light are more amber colors rather than this bright blue white light
00:31:15.360
and so that's pretty remarkable to see if you go to a you know a gas station for example which are
00:31:21.680
in most of the country one of the prime examples of light pollution where gas stations and parking lots
00:31:28.240
are lit 10 times as brightly as they were only 20 years ago so we've really ramped up the lighting
00:31:35.060
in gas stations if you go to a gas station in in flagstaff or tucson it's much dimmer and at first
00:31:42.160
you're like wow it's super dim and then as you're there you just think well i have all the light i
00:31:47.040
need and there's it's not like these places are overrun by by thieves and criminals everything's
00:31:52.500
fine there's just less light some of the cities in europe like amsterdam copenhagen oslo are really
00:31:59.420
doing amazing things with their lighting lowering the levels of light putting lights actually in the
00:32:04.960
street rather than shining in your eyes so there's a lot of cool stuff we could do with lighting
00:32:09.760
that we're not doing and i think that goes along with kind of rethinking the way that we use light
00:32:15.580
at night yeah and also i guess another recommendation would be for folks to get out to a place where they're
00:32:20.820
they can experience true darkness yeah for sure because if you're i like to say you know if you're
00:32:26.500
younger than about 40 in the u.s chances are you've grown up swamped with artificial light like you don't
00:32:33.740
know what it really is to live without artificial light so having that first-hand experience of
00:32:40.660
getting out somewhere where you can see what a real sky looks like uh and then you know maybe you've
00:32:46.480
heard me talk or you or somebody has pointed this out to you kind of looking around at the lights
00:32:50.260
around you and thinking well this is kind of dumb like why do we need lights that are going up into the
00:32:55.860
sky it's not helping anybody it's not making anybody any safer we can have lighting let's just focus it
00:33:02.000
down yeah you know it inspired me there's a i want to get out to i live in oklahoma and out in the
00:33:06.640
panhandle there's a state park called black mesa which i don't think there's anything there's no light
00:33:11.960
around there i want to get out there because i don't i know i've seen the milky way once but it's
00:33:16.660
been a long long time and i want to see that again yeah absolutely and i would you know just to touch
00:33:22.500
back on where we were a little bit earlier you know a night doesn't have to be a level one on that
00:33:29.080
portal scale to be pretty amazing um you know you can have what would bring maybe a two or three or
00:33:35.100
four on that scale and you can still be awed by being out at night the problem is that most of us
00:33:42.220
honestly are way up in the seven eight nine range most of the time you know so we're just really not
00:33:47.600
we look up and we see 25 stars when really we we ought to be able to look up and see 2500 stars
00:33:54.680
that's the difference that most people don't don't realize so paul you've got a new book out
00:33:59.280
and i haven't had a chance to read it but it looks fascinating it's the same thing i love how you take
00:34:02.420
these like sort of obscure ideas things we take for granted and try to flesh things out it's about
00:34:07.800
dirt what what caused you to explore go from the night sky to exploring the ground beneath us
00:34:13.980
you know it's a it's an entirely different subject in a lot of ways but similar themes which is to say
00:34:21.780
i'm really interested in the the costs from our separation from nature and the benefits from
00:34:29.180
being connected to nature and realizing our connection to nature so you know the end of
00:34:33.840
night is about being cut off from darkness because of we're using too much artificial light
00:34:38.120
and the ground beneath us is is really about this uh firsthand experience of natural ground
00:34:45.040
we are cut off from that as well we live this kind of stunned me when i when i found this out but
00:34:51.300
we live um in in the civilized west 90 to 95 percent of our time inside or in our cars and then when
00:35:00.260
we walk outside we walk on pavement a lot of us so we've lost a literal connection with the natural
00:35:06.480
ground and then i started thinking about all the the really vital grounds that we don't have a lot of
00:35:14.000
us most of us don't have connection with especially like the soil that provides our food the the
00:35:20.200
grounds that give us our our energy even the grounds that give us our spirit and that was one of the
00:35:25.520
great things about the book is to learn not only about soil and pavement but also to go to places
00:35:32.920
like gettysburg and talk about hallowed grounds and to other places talk about sacred ground what do we
00:35:39.240
mean by those places and why are they important so it's another it was a really fun book to write
00:35:45.380
and hopefully takes people uh in a lot of neat places well great well paul where can people learn
00:35:51.000
more about your work i have a website i would invite people to uh it is uh paul hyphen bogard
00:35:57.680
so p-a-u-l hyphen b-o-g-a-r-d and um you can read about the books and find out lots of good stuff
00:36:04.460
fantastic well paul bogard thank you so much for your time it's been a pleasure
00:36:07.300
it's been my pleasure thanks very much my guest is paul bogard he's the author of the book
00:36:12.480
the end of night you can find that on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere he's also got a new
00:36:16.340
book out about the ground beneath us it's called the ground beneath it's about dirt you can find
00:36:20.440
out more about his work at paul-bogard.com also check out our show notes at aom.is
00:36:25.340
slash bogard where you find links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic
00:36:28.920
well that wraps up another edition of the art of manliness podcast for more manly tips and advice
00:36:45.800
make sure to check out the art of manliness website at artofmanliness.com if you enjoy the
00:36:49.660
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