Paul Bogard's Let There Be Dark

Paul Bogard's article, "Let There Be Dark", centers around the claims that maintaining the integrity of our night sky should be an environmental priority. He artfully uses a variety of emotional appeals related to "the good old days" in order to stress the importance of a dark sky. "Let There Be Dark" begins with an anecdotal account of a fond childhood memory. The author describes "woods so dark that [his] hands disappeared before [his] eyes," and "night skies in which meteors left smoky trails across sugar spreads of stars." The beautiful imagery becomes even more rare once Bogard states that "8 out of 10 children in the US will never know a sky dark enough for the Milky Way." Americans are becoming increasingly aware of the insidious nature of new technology on our environment, and many long for days long past when the grass was greener and the sky was bluer, and "Let There Be Dark" targets both older individuals who wish for a more beautiful world for the next generations, and younger individuals who want their world to be as healthy as the previous ones. The article paints a dark sky as a privilege given only to the previous generation (everyone over 35) but also questions why this has to be.

After an entire paragraph discussing how artificial lights destroy our bodies, Bogard claims that it affects the non-human populations co-inhabiting Earth. The line compared light pollution to a "bulldozer of the night, wrecking habitats and disrupting ecosystems several years in the making" is especially powerful and effectively communicates the realities of humankind's effect on the globe at large - not only does artificial light pollution affect the health of the Earth itself, but it devastates its ecology as