It’s not just bats and other animals that suffer the effects of light pollution – humans need darkness too
very year, deep in certain Swedish mines, the bat population is recorded. Each time I take part in the count, I turn out the light for a moment inside the darkness of the mountain to experience the unique sensation of stillness. I’ve started to try to bring that experience with me out of the mine and into my everyday life. Whenever I get the chance, I switch off for a little while and sit in the dark. In an armchair, in the garden, or in the forest.
For some years now, an increasing number of scientists have taken an interest in the impact of light on physiology and ecology. We have begun to pay attention to the consequences of the absence of darkness, notably in the extinction of crepuscular and nocturnal animals, in plants that fail to be pollinated or bud too early and leaves that drop too late, in migrating animals that cannot navigate without the starry sky.
The problem, of course, isn’t confined to the insect world. Birds that fly at night navigate incorrectly or crash into skyscrapers, newly hatched sea turtles that obey their 200 million-year-old instinct to follow the lightest point on the horizon, out to the sea, stray instead into beach hotels and city centres. Coral animals that rely on the phases of the moon to know when it’s time to mate fail to properly make out the blurry night-time signals.
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