Consider the turtle hatchlings on Florida’s beaches. For millennia, they found the ocean by following the horizon’s natural light. Today, sprawling condos and streetlamps send them crawling inland toward highways, away from the sea. For them, lights out is a matter of life and death. The same is true for migrating birds, which circle illuminated skyscrapers until they collapse from exhaustion, or for humans, whose melatonin production—and thus cancer-fighting ability—is disrupted by nocturnal light pollution.
When the lights go out, our other senses wake up. We hear the creak of the house settling. We feel the weight of the blanket. We look up. Lights Out
We live in an age of luminous excess. The average person’s waking hours are a glare of blue light from screens, the hum of fluorescent office ceilings, and the perpetual orange glow of city streets that erases the stars. We have forgotten that darkness is not merely the absence of light, but an ecological condition and a psychological necessity. Consider the turtle hatchlings on Florida’s beaches