"Under the Stars" by Matt Gaw

In his book, Under the Stars:  A Journey into Light (Elliott & Thompson, 2020), Matt Gaw takes on how artificial lighting and light pollution have changed the natural world and the human condition.  He travels the length and breadth of the United Kingdom to study this phenomenon, and astutely describes how human beings seek to control their environment.  His experiences detailed here involve walking the landscape in darkness and appreciating the gift of the night that most of us fail to recognize.  “The snow, the cloud, the clear skies, moonlight and murk, starfall and darkrise,” he writes near the end of his book.  “Each night, whether it contained happiness, wonder, fear or frustration, has been unique; each experience has shown me darkness in a different light.”

The book is packed with scientific, cultural, and historical gems.  He details the collision 4.5 billion years ago of the earth and another planetary body the size of Mars, and how the mantle and core of the two entities became one prehistoric earth.  The moon was formed from the leftover debris of this colossal collision.  The moon now edges away from us, approximately 3.78 cm into space each year.  “In billions of years’ time,” he says, “her light will be invisible to us and the earth, abandoned, will spin slow and lifeless.”  Poetry, indeed, but more importantly, this is science as poetry, both lyrical and factual.

The moon is earth’s companion in the universe.  It is the all-important shadow, a celestial body we believe we know intimately.  She is a strange other world; even the word “lunatic” comes from the Latin word for moon:  luna.  “It has long been believed that her silvering light brings with it madness and mayhem,” Gaw writes.  Her craters and geographical features are illuminated by a combination of light from the sun and by the reflected light of the earth.  Moon and earth are symbiotic.

Part of the difficulty with climate change and the preservation of natural resources falls on our outsized view of ourselves in the universe.  We are the alleged masters of this universe when, in fact, we live in constant ebb and flow with the stars, the oceans, the shifting tectonic plates.  Gaw focuses on this and believes that in studying light, darkness, and the universe, we are “forced to acknowledge the vast scale” of that universe, “and the tiny space we occupy in it.”  We have trouble understanding this underlying precept.  Most people do not fathom their insignificance, in the greater whole.  And therein lies the problem.

The book is about getting in touch with this smallness, even if it is only a partial understanding of the yin and yang of the natural world.  Where Gaw excels is in looking at the night sky and communicating the sense of awe and wonder glimpsed from his window on the universe.  He travels to places with no light pollution, parts of England and Scotland that have sworn off artificial light in favor of darkness at night.  There he gazes up at the wonders of the heavens, the constellations, the purity of natural light from the moon and stars.  This perspective becomes his Holy Grail, his ultimate realization of what abounds in starlight and primordial dust.  Because of our incessant need to light up the night, we have lost our appreciation of those secret hours when our part of the earth is in shadow.  Gaw writes, “The baseline for what we expect at night, the starlight that we expect to see, has over time warped and fallen to new lows.  The constellations have come unstrung, the shared cultural experience of generations, a sense of place and perspective, along with a light older than humans, gods, the earth, have all been lost.”

Gaw follows out where this thesis leads us, even to a discussion of religion.  He explains how darkness is present in much of the Bible, how it is associated with evil, and those creatures who dwell in darkness are always inherently destructive.  Those who sin live in darkness.  Gaw finds this binary designation—dark and light, black and white, good and evil—shortsighted and rooted in our fears of night and incipient darkness.

One of the more interesting parts of the text is Gaw’s discussion of the human need for sleep, and how that need has fared in history.  He discusses the origins of curfews, and how with the Industrial Revolution, our sleep patterns were forever altered.  We did not always sleep in one solid block; our ancestors slept for half the night and woke for an interlude where one might “talk, tell stories, pray, have sex,” and then engage in a second sleep for the remainder of the dark.  The average person rose with the sun and slept after the sun set.  Working the so-called graveyard shift, or pulling all-nighters is unhealthy and leads to conditions that threaten our lives.  In our world, foregoing sleep is a false badge of honor.  Gaw cites several well-known human beings who claimed to never sleep, like Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla.

Gaw ends his rumination with his family on vacation on the Isle of Coll in Scotland.  There he ventures out onto the sands of the beach and studies the heavens.  He convinces his wife and family to join him, and they take in the swirling haze of the Milky Way and the stars that arc across the sky.  It is a fitting and meditative end to this study.  Matt Gaw awakens us to the world of shadows and night.  He reassures us the dark is nothing to fear, and to the contrary, is something to welcome and revel in.