trouble coping. we see addicts who don't recover on their own. so many to -- that is not to say you don't come in for treatment. if you're having trouble coming right away. don't wait for to play out because it all kinds of things could happen but the natural history for people to recover on their own, on the optimistic note i will stop. [applause] ♪ >> sally satel spoke to booktv about her book "brainwashed: the seductive appeal of mindless neuroscience" nestle can. you then watch that online at booktv.org. next from the national book

festival, paul bogard presents his book "the end of night: searching for darkness in an age of artificial light". >> one of my most vivid memories is in the 1970s some friends of mine were camping in the meadow in the canadian rockies. we may back on air mattresses outside the tent. we had been forewarned that something big was coming. taking in the spectacular perseid meteor shower with no interference at all from city lights. we were dozens of miles from the nearest town and was a very big town. needless to say the shower would have forfeited much of its luster if we had watched from the vantage point in the city or a suburb. the last words of the dying and so were supposed to have been more light. i am happy to say paul bogart is alive and well but his basic

message is a variation on the great german poet outcry more natural light. to see what our love affair with artificial lighting causes us to miss, bogart has traveled all the around the world searching for a clean views of the heavens. he is the editor of the anthology let there be light:testimony on behalf of the dark and the sole author of "the end of night: searching for darkness in an age of artificial light". when not on the road he teaches writing at james madison university in virginia. with the national book festival being held indoors this year he will have to deal with artificial lighting and make the best of it today. these and gentlemen, please welcome paul bogard. >> thank you for that

introduction and thank you for being here, and i'm excited to see billy collins. i got to see him at the theater so it was good. an end -- "the end of night: searching for darkness in an age of artificial light" is a book of stories. i like to make the disclaimer at the beginning that i am not a scientist. i am a lover of science. i am a storyteller. i-man english professor and i have always loved night time. i grew up in minneapolis and still have a cabin in the northern part of the state so i grew up every summer, coming out on to the dock, under the milky way, under the naturally dark beautiful sky.

it just became a normal part of my life, and when i got around to learning the consolations which was not until after college i quickly realized i couldn't see the constellations i was supposed to see, we have lost so many of the constellations because of the late in the sky. i realize how important darkness was for the night sky i had always loved and from there i began to learn how important darkness is for so many reasons, for life on earth essentially, important to us culturally, spiritually, important to our physical health, important to the health of the ecosystems on which we rely. just so important so i came up with this book idea and went on a wonderful journey. the book goes from our brightest places like las vegas, times

square, the stage is quite bright. is ironic how often when i talk i am facing blinding light. all the way to our darkest places like death valley out west. the path the book follows starts with chapter ix and works its way to chapter i. what that does is follows the board will scale named after an amateur astronomer in new york state who came up with this scale to rank levels of darkness because he was getting tired of younger astronomers primarily saying you have to come out and see this place, it is so dark and he would get out there and it really wasn't that dark and the realize these younger astronomers had never experienced real darkness, the kind of darkness he grew up in even in the 40s and 50s.

it hasn't been that long ago and i will show a really revealing slide in a second that shows you how rapidly we have lost real darkness in this country. what i would like to do is talk a little about the book, show you a number of images. you can imagine this issue goes well with imagery, read just a couple brief passages from the book and leave plenty of time for questions because this is an issue that touches on so many aspects of our lives and i may not say everything you would like to hear about physical health, safety, environmental. i would like to answer your questions. the big question, what can we do about this? one of the reasons i love this issue is it is one of the weekend and do something about so readily. light pollution is in our control the way a lot of other issues are not.

the end of night is a book of stories and one of the first stories that i tell is going to avert new york state to visit a writer named bob berman. a wonderful writer of astronomy and bob is a big, greg areas, fun-loving guy who enjoys writing about astronomy with a sense of humor which he said isn't the easiest thing to do but he said the favorite column he has ever written was a collection of all the dumb questions he has been asked over the years about astronomy. he called this article an s in science. of course i said what is the dumbest question you have ever been asked? he paused and he said, it is hard to top if a solar eclipse

is so dangerous, why are we having it? [laughter] >> i also quite like those mice have a son like our son? [laughter] >> bob and i got to talking about why would people ask questions like that? be where discussing the ways that so many americans and increasingly people all around the world moving in cities have lost a firsthand experience of the night sky and night in general, natural night in general and i wanted to share with bob why i was writing the book, what inspired me, so i told him story, when i was 18 a year after high school, backpacking in europe and i will read that passage, a brief

passage from the book. the most beautiful story night i have ever seen was more than a 20 years ago when i was backpacking for york as an aging-year-old isil graduate. ..

this guy had to. some stars seemingly close, so much farther away. the milky milky way is so well-defined it had what astronomers called structure, that sense of its twisting methods. i remember stars from one horizon to the other, stars stranger in their numbers and a wooden cart full of severed heads i've seen that morning or the poverty of the red clad children that afternoon. making a night sky so plush it still seems like a dream. so much was right about that night. it was a time in my life when i was every day experiencing

something new. i felt opened in everything as though i were made of clay and the world was imprinting its breathtaking beauty. standing nearly under that moroccan sky skin against the air, the dark, the stars. the night pressed its impression on my lifelong connection was sealed. when i told bob that story he paused for a second and he says you know that reminds me when my mother-in-law came to visit us from manhattan and we heard the car pull up outside the house. and then we heard her get out of the car. there was this pause before we heard a knock at the door and when my wife opened the door the first thing her mother says, marcy what are all those white dots in the sky? [laughter] it's one of those stories that you think, in no way.

nobody can really say that but if you live in manhattan all of your life you might say something like that. the reason for that is all the light in the sky. i hope that you can see this from where you are. it's kind of a small screen but this is the world that night, a collection of photographs showing the lights. it's a really beautiful image and i want to be quick to say that light is amazing. artificial light is a miracle. i'm not here to say in on other people i talk to in the book say we shouldn't have light. the issue is how were we using light? primarily we are using light in a wasteful way, irresponsible way and i'm thoughtful ways and in a lot of ways ways as well. like in the beautiful like this but this is also an image of ways.

it's not doing anyone any good. it's not making anyone any safer. worldwide now we waste about $110 billion each year on artificial light outside so it also is a big waste of money. here's a shot of the u.s.. you can find these images easily on line if you are interested. if you are interested too in finding out what it's like where you live you can go to something called dark sky finder and it's a really wonderful map. you can zoom in and see how good or bad it is fair. when we talk about light pollution, light pollution is an under late-term that underneath which are terms. i will give you three specific examples of light pollution. this first one is what we call sky glow. i hope everybody can see this here. this is a wonderful side-by-side image of the exact same streets.

on the left you have a shot from 2003 and in 2003 they had a power outage. one of the folks walked down the street and took a picture of what it would look like with out all the light pollution and then on the right is what it normally looks like. that pale peach glow over our cities. people now in the u.s. growth thinking that the clouds are white at night, somehow. they are only white because we are lighting them. they wouldn't be quite otherwise. this is a big one. this is glare. this is light shining in all directions up into the sky into our eyes and far too often, somebody may have this experience in your homes but your neighbors lights or the street lights are shining into your bedroom. i know last night i was at the holiday inn and i pulled all the curtains shut and my room was still lit up by the streetligh streetlights. i couldn't get it dark.

and then the third thing and i think this is really one that speaks to that light coming into our houses. light from one property is trespassing onto the other. you see on the left-hand side the science building at one of the schools i taught at an all the lights shining onto the house where the students are living. they have had to hang black curtains in their windows to try to block out the light is coming in. again this is just a waste of life. it's not doing anyone any good. here's a shot of harrisonburg where i live in virginia. this is a big shot of sky glow. one that thing i would point out is on the very left-hand side ec stadium lighting. this is from the school where he teach. i asked somebody a couple of years ago why did we leave the lights on like this all night long? the answer was, it's good advertising for the school. [laughter] anyone who runs their

harrisonburg, anybody who drives through there will think wow. all over the country we have parking lots that are lit up all night long whether there is a car in them are or like this one, no cars at all. gas stations are lit up like this. this is has nothing to do with safety. this has everything to do with getting it to stop and buy stuff here. in fact gas stations and parking lots are interesting because they are lit 10 times as bright as they were 20 years ago. we have a lot of what we call up lighting like lights that are shining up into the sky here. this is of course las vegas, the poster child for light shows. i want to point out on the right-hand side digital billboards which are spreading all over the country.

we have almost 5000 of them now countrywide and they are growing at a rate of something like 600 a month. they tend to be incredibly bright and left on all might long. also it's the type of lighting. these are called wall packs, the two lights on the buildings they are. the thing i would like you notice about these comedies are meant to ostensibly light the parking lot but in fact because those lights were shining on me are horizontal, they are arranged horizontally, that light is going for as long as they can through the atmosphere through the moisture of the air. this is the same effect you get when you are driving through the country and you look off onto the horizon and you see a security light or a bar in light or a pull light and you can see it clearly. that is because that light is shining for miles and miles sometimes. so we can light have parking lot

actually far more effectively just by shielding those lights. the light goes down to the parking lot where we wanted and not anywhere else. i want to go back to, here's another photograph. about 10 years ago a couple of astronomers from italy actually came up with something they called the world atlas artificial night sky bright. what they wanted to do was show that in fact as impressive as these photographs are, they don't really show the true extent of light pollution because it looks like, and i hope you can see this on this image, it looks like if you get out of the cities in the towns were those bright dots are that it's dark and in fact what they wanted to show is that light spreads out into the countryside. so there is no place in western europe that is naturally dark anymore. you have to go out into the north sea, off into the ocean before you get back to natural

darkness. so the brightest places are the cities shown in white and then it works its way out from there. the spread of light to something most of us don't understand. here is the image of the u.s.. this is the most revealing one and again i apologize if it's hard to see here. this is an image of -- for images of the u.s.. they have data from 1996 which is in the lower left-hand corner there. what they did which is fantastic is to estimate back to the 70s in the 50s on top there. and show was a very dark or country i always enjoy looking at the audience. i'm guessing there are people who remember the 50s or even before when this was a darker country. i remember the 70s. then the one on the bottom right here estimated forward to 2025 where we are headed if nothing changes.

here is another way to think of this. this is an abbreviated vision of the scale. we have nine down to the darkest areas, one and -- it before that i used that structure for my book starting with very bright place is working down to very dark places. in each chapter to talk about different issues. we start with history and we talk about safety and security and we talk about the logical costs of lights. i talk about the human health effects, some of the spiritual effects. it depends on our spiritual life down into the last two chapters of what we can do about this. the big issue that always comes up is don't we need all this light for safety and security? i live in harrisburg virginia recently ranked as top 10 safest cities in the u.s.. i went to home depot and i'm

told by these lights for safety and security. we are just taught that we need to light everything up for safety and security. unfortunately too often it's these unshielded lights sending light in all directions. the effect of that, light shining in all directions is it makes it harder for us to see. anybody who wants a great demonstration of that after the talk just come out and look like this. i want to show you images back-to-back of this problem of clear and have the idea that ever more light makes us safer just doesn't make since when you think about it. light is good. we are going to have lights and we are going to use it. this is an image of a yard in tucson, arizona, a typical quote unquote security light shining into the sky clearing into her eyes. the next image the exact same scene but the photographer is

going to hold his hand up and block the light thus mimicking a shield of that light. when he does that you can see the bad light -- bad guys standing in the fence. i will go back. i don't know how well you can see it that but you can definitely see him barely an offense before but lamely shield that light we loose the shadow and we can see better. wherever you live, whatever city in america you can see unshielded lights like this and wherever you are you will see lighting getting brighter and brighter. one of the things that is happening right now is where switching from electric lighting to electronic light to l.e.d. streetlights for example. great promise with l.e.d. because they are primarily focused out of the can control them but also great peril and the sense that they are

oftentimes much brighter. everywhere is getting brighter and few places are getting darker. we can shield other lights. we can shield also -- ballfiel ballfields. that is what it looks like. it's actually more light on the bottom, on the field than there was before. we can shield streetlights like this. this is slightly out of focus but this is the effective when you shield streetlights you can see all the way down the street. there is no light shining into your eyes. this is in florence, italy. i'm happy to talk more about any of these issues but i always liked it and the slides with an emphasis on the beauty of light at night in the beauty of night because that's really what inspired me to write the book and that's really what i'm trying to share in the book is how beautiful it is. how important darkness is and

how much this wasteful irresponsible overuse of light is costing us. so whether it's beautiful light at night like this in london or in paris where they have spent -- i talk in a book about how they have spent the last 30 years relighting the city to create the atmosphere of the city of light that we know and love. they really have an aesthetic iferent from so many places we known the united aeul le is in saf that creates a romantic atmosphere symbolismne for a candlelight vigil. let us not forget the beauty of natural light whether it's the wonderful man's light or certainly starlight like this from northern minnesota where i am from. i love this image. i hope you can see it.

it's an image down here on the bottom of a human being coming face-to-face with the milky way on the ocean. one of the things that stays with me so much from writing this book is that we have taken what was once one of the most common human experiences, that of walking out the door and coming face-to-face with the universe and we have made it one of the most rare of human experiences. what is the cost to that? when you think about all the science and astronomy, spirituality, religion, art that has come from the experience of a true night sky, something like this this van gogh painting from the south of france. i was so excited to go to the south of france for the book and see where van gogh had painted this painting, where he stood

and saw the stars in the sky. kind of funny if you see the milky way or the big dipper on the top there. astronomers have gone back and figured out that actually the night seemed, the big dipper was behind him. [laughter] he thought it would look better. so i was excited to go there. from the exact spot you can see it and there it is. you can see the plaque that says on the spot and vincent van gogh but you are blinded so you can't see anything else. on that scale that i mentioned 921 and the book follows that journey. here is a level 2. this is a night in death valley national park. it was an amazing night and i write about it in the book. maybe the darkest place, certainly one of the darkest

places i have ever been but this is still a level 2 because you can see the bottom right-hand corner of the globe from las vegas they are. i will leave you with a few other level 1 darkness. this is at the racetrack in death valley taken by dan durazo from the national park service of the milky way overhead. i think i will and there and leave some time for questions and thank you very much. i appreciate being here. [applause] >> a couple of years ago i stayed in something advertised as a dark village in a district of england. it probably wasn't won by any means but the village was proud that they were not contributing to light pollution. but my question is, why aren't

the these shielded lights readily available? is the cost? >> guest: manufactures are getting better and better and thank you for the question. we are seeing more shielded lights but if you go to your local home depot or lowe's like i did you'll find in the lights that you were able to buy for your house, i actually counted 85 or so unshielded lights and about five shielded lights. so we are still on the backend of the curve in terms of getting things out there. i think the biggest thing with this issue is just that people aren't aware. if you are younger than let's say 40 you have probably grown up subsumed in light, swamped in light. you don't know any different so when you go to buy a light for your house you're not even thinking about this. and as i set the good thing

about the new l.e.d. streetlights they are primarily shielded primarily focused down. because they are so much brighter oftentimes it makes the sky below worse. let me just quickly say and maybe the question speak to this too but i didn't spend much time talking about the human health effects of artificial light at night and that's something that really obviously is important to all of us. very quickly the three things that scientists are finding about her exposure to light at night if it's disrupting our sleep and contributing to sleep disorders which are tied to every major disease we are dealing with. it's confusing our circadian rhythms, those internal rhythms that orchestrator bodies health and the thing that worries people the most is its impeding the production of the hormone melatonin in our bodies. so some serious issues human healthwise too.

>> thank you very much for your presentation. pollution scientifically is used to define an actual harm to the environment. given that what you argue that in fact lighting is harming the environment or not? >> thank you for the question. it's a great question. i would say absolutely. it has an enormous effect on the environment and if there's one thing i'm really passionate about it is what we think of as environmental issues. if you consider the fact that life on earth evolved with bright days and dark nights for basically for forever until only very recently and every species essentially has evolved without rhythm. we now have 60% of invertebrates in sex are purely nocturnal and we have 30% invertebrates.

so many other species are what we call corpuscular, they are the most active at dawn and dusk. all this life has evolved to rely on darkness so when they fled that habitat with artificial light we are essentially destroying that habitat. these species really struggle to adapt to that so it's an enormous issue. some folks probably have heard about the sea turtles in florida that have come on too short to lay their eggs. when the hatchlings come up out of the sand they have evolved to scurry towards the brightest light on the horizon which for hundreds of millions of years were the stars and the moon on the ocean. now it's the parking lots, the hotels, the streetlight -- streetlights in the wrong direction. they have more than 400 species of birds that migrate at night alone that are impacted by the lighting. through the ecosystem light at night really does impact our

environment. >> i'm an architect here in town and i was aware of the document on the internet that you had referred to and the architects and planners have actually made a code to obtain darker nights. you know it's not adopted by the international building committee. we have a building code but it raises an issue on exactly what you are saying. >> absolutely. i think that's really true and i've worked with a number of architects. one thing people forget is that bright light shining in your eyes is not beautiful. it's really pretty and floodlights just blasting against the side of the building is not beautiful lighting. i love talking with architects

who are aware of how beautiful might lighting can be. as i said when i go to paris and walk around with a guy who was in charge of relighting paris and one of the things i loved about this guy was yet a parking pass. he could park anywhere in paris. imagine our freedom. and he just talked about how carefully and thoughtfully -- notre dame used to be lived in the 50s and 60s and 70's like you light a lot of buildings here in the u.s., just floodlights. they took those down. now they have lived it so it's darker on the bottom and it gets gradually lighter toward the top is your eyes rise toward heaven. they have done all these interesting things to tell stories and create beauty with light. we can do such a better job with our light at night. >> thank you. i thought it was funny your image of tucson arizona.

i remember when i was there i partake in some amateur astronomy and we would have to go way out and of course he would still have the city below. i also remember some of the fellow astronomers saying that the city council was actually pretty good about working with the astronomy committee and they actually implemented some codes and stuff. basically one of them was to shield the streetlights and have them angled down like you were saying. i wonder have you heard of any other cities nationwide? because i think it is just a city council thing in most cases generally. also one more question, what would you rate the light level for d.c.? >> d.c. is at least a nine. [laughter] yeah no d.c. is really light polluted there's no doubt about it. though the monuments at night are beautiful but in general it's really lit.

it's a great question and it's a question about something we call a lighting ordinance. tucson arizona and flagstaff arizona had the best lighting ordinances in this country. and that is primarily for at least at the start was for the nearby astronomical observatories. if you go to tucson and flagstaff, i am sure there are folks here who have been there, you see a city that is darker. it is lit differently and it is therefore darker than most of the cities that we know. with no attending rising crime, no problems that people might immediately think of ocoee need more light. none of that. it's just lit differently and is just a matter of getting used to that. the international dark sky association which is headquartered in tucson and you can find on line at dark sky.org can help you in your community

with getting a lightning ordinance on the books. there actually are statewide lighting ordinances. new mexico has one and i know some other places have them. one of the big problems is enforcement of course. there are not so many people driving around looking for lights to enforce. there are no white police so like many things it will come down to spreading the awareness among all of us so that when we start to see light at spreading in all directions whether it's our house or where we work that we say something to somebody and we think, we can do better than this. we can light more thoughtfully and responsibly and more beautifully. >> i knew this is what's going to happen. i was going to ask what legislative efforts -- mike.

[inaudible] but the following question to that would be one of the major advocacy efforts one of the major groups in an activist manner to effect this area. i am currently fighting the wells fargo in my neighborhood to get them to lower their lights. last year the mother ship landed on wells fargo. i'm thinking of showing up at the synthesizer trying to communicate. also the last i checked it was illegal to use your -- in the city. the number of lights on cars that i find to be really dangerous. i wonder if there's any activism around that because i feel like it's a sensitive issue. speaking of sensitivity i also want to ask do you think there's anything about being red-headed that makes you and i really angry? [laughter]

about this issue in particular because i feel the brunettes don't care as much. [laughter] you have traveled the world so i'm just curious of your opinion. >> i'm not angry. i'm full of love, full of love. but we are passionate, there's no doubt about it. there is a lot there. i do think that the headlights are something i hear about from a lot of folks. all it takes is for one of those cars coming at you with their headlights not even high beams that some of these l.e.d. headlights where you are blinded, where you can't see to start thinking like wow this might not be such a great idea. i think so often we think that because some life whether it's streetlights are headlights are lights on our houses can help us be safer and more secure at night, that ever more light will make us ever safer and that conclusion just breaks down so quickly. the brighter it gets, it makes it harder for us to see and it reduces our safety.

the thing about advocacy is there is really not a lot of evidence on either side about this issue. the folks at -- are trying to gather the data that shows some of these things we are talking about. you won't make your city safer by turning the lights out. you will actually just waste more money. there are things that everyone can do whether it's on the level of their own house, their own neighborhood, their own community with this issue and again i really believe this is something we can do something about. i am excited to see a twins shirt coming up to the mic. >> i do apologize for any light pollution. [laughter] >> i am from minnesota too so i cherish the minnesota pitch blackness back in the 1970s. before reading your book -- the

ultimate darkness but you are saying it's not. can you explain? or try to tell me why. >> in northern minnesota? >> yeah. it's really dark. >> absolutely. what the scale was talking about is the light in the skies is certainly sometimes people say if you go to the canes and that is not what i was after in nl in the woods in northern minnesota in our cabin on a cloudy night if you walk into the woods you can see your hand in front of your face. it's that kind of darkness. even under a starry sky they could be really beautifully wonderfully dark. i want to encourage everybody to get out and do that. there really doesn't matter if it's a scale one, two or three. it's just a way to get us to think about what we are losing in the value of this darkness.

if you get out and it seems dark to you, fantastic. that's awesome. we need to get especially her kids out into the night and let them experience the sentence sounds in the value of the darkness. >> concerning oncoming headlights there was an old proposal to put polarizers in front of all headlights and in windshields so they would be cross polarized for oncoming headlights. they would illuminate things as well for the driver and pedestrians could wear polarized sunglasses. any chance of bringing that back? >> the neat thing about all lighting i think in this issue is that technology is changing all the time. people are working with this issue all the time. i would say no matter where you live lighting at night is going to change. night is going to change.

it's a matter of how we change it, so whether it's headlights, streetlights, the lights in our houses it's all going to change. we are really at a crossroads right now at the place where we can say you know we have got enough lights. we like light and we are going to have played but let's not have too much light. let's not waste energy. let's not endanger our health. let's not endangered in bremen more than we need to. let's bring back some of the darkness. thank you very much. i think i'm out of time, so appreciate it. [applause] ♪ >> next lynn sherr describes the life and career of sally ride america's first woin