Does City Life Have to Mean Life Without Stars?

I remember the first time I went camping. I was 12 years old, and my swim team went on a rafting trip to the Delaware Water Gap. We got into camp in the dead of night, and I was blown away by the brightness of bodies in the night sky. I’d grown up well inside the nimbus of artificial light surrounding New York; what I remember most vividly is the feeling of disorientation as I stared up at the jam-packed firmament, streaked by the fluid, wispy smoke of the Milky Way, all of it animated from time to time by the fiery trail of a meteor. That looks so fake. Are those really all stars? How could there be so many up there, and how could I not have known about them until now? The unpolluted night sky, to me, was a revelation.

Filmmaker Ian Cheney had the opposite experience. Growing up in rural Maine, he saw the unfiltered night sky as a friend, a familiar, map-like indicator of home. It was only after he’d moved to New York as an adult that he started thinking about his connection to the night sky, and what happens when we as a species lose the reality of night - indeed, of darkness - in our daily lives. In a new documentary that's making its way across the country, The City Dark, Cheney takes a thought-provoking and lively look at the disappearance of darkness across our planet and the disruption of our natural cycles of light and dark.

Cheney, who won the Peabody Award for his 2007 documentary, King Corn, started pondering the curious loss of darkness in our 24/7 consciousness when he heard that the world population had tipped from being a majority rural population to a majority urban one.