Don't be afraid of the dark

Be­fore bed I go out­side with the dogs, look up at Venus, Jupiter and the con­stel­la­tions and count my lucky stars. I mean, my cir­ca­dian rhythms are as good as they can be for a 56 year old with a blad­der than won't let me sleep in an un­in­ter­rupted eight hour stretch.

How are your cir­ca­dian rhythms, by the way? What - no­body has ever asked you be­fore?

Dur­ing the seven years prior to our move to the Pri­o­rat in 2001 my cir­ca­dian clock was all over the place and I was not in good shape. I was the night ed­i­tor on a daily news­pa­per in Eng­land, never cer­tain when I would trun­dle home along de­serted city high­ways il­lu­mi­nated kilo­me­tre after kilo­me­tre just for me.

Now you may be think­ing body clock here, which is def­i­nitely re­lated but not the exact point. Cir­ca­dian rhythms are what hap­pens to you as a di­rect con­se­quence of light and dark­ness – men­tal, phys­i­cal, and be­hav­ioural changes that af­fect you and most liv­ing things, in­clud­ing plants and even tiny micro-or­gan­isms.

This is a vital sleep-pat­tern and health issue that I pre­dict will be­come a widely un­der­stood term any time now as we hu­mans are forced to stop and re­cal­i­brate. It is an­other step on the jour­ney to find out what re­ally makes us tick... or not. Have a search on the web.

The vast ma­jor­ity of peo­ple are now get­ting the mes­sage that our life pat­terns and gen­eral short-sighted he­do­nism are not good for our world or our­selves, but change is eas­ier said than done, isn't it? How can we in­di­vid­u­ally act to make a dif­fer­ence when the is­sues are so com­plex, po­lit­i­cal and be­yond our con­trol?

We all know a house­hold some­where that is per­ma­nently lit up like a Christ­mas tree or oil re­fin­ery. Are these the res­i­dences of peo­ple with money to burn, who don't care about en­ergy sup­ply and per­haps are scared of the dark? They have al­most cer­tainly never seen the mes­mer­iz­ing Milky Way.

I used to be, afraid of the dark that is; when I was about six. Young chil­dren are un­der­stand­ably re­luc­tant to end the day. Mak­ing friends or at least learn­ing to live with the dark hours is one of life's salu­tary, ed­i­fy­ing lessons. I'm just not sure it is taught any more, with grim con­se­quences.

Light ad­dic­tion is a bea­con to our com­plex fail­ings and it is blind­ing us to the dam­age being done.

What must the rest of the Uni­verse think when the in­evitable in­tel­li­gent life sees Earth sud­denly beam­ing like this? You don't have to go back many gen­er­a­tions to find the shadow side of Earth in com­plete dark­ness. Have you seen one of the “night” maps of our planet now, show­ing the wealthy coun­tries puls­ing with ar­ti­fi­cial light?

Here in the Pri­o­rat, as in other re­mote parts of Cat­alo­nia and Iberia, we have the best plan­e­tar­ium of all, where soft vil­lage light­ing is beau­ti­fully min­i­mal and we are spared the over­lap­ping spheres of re­flected, re­fracted glare of over-lit cities, sub­urbs and in­dus­tries. It grows dark yet we can see far more, into in­fin­ity.

But the truth is that nearly all of night-time Eu­rope is, like much of Amer­ica, a neb­ula of light, and there is now sig­nif­i­cant sci­en­tific re­search sug­gest­ing that light pol­lu­tion can have last­ing ad­verse ef­fects on both human and wildlife health. Yes, your cir­ca­dian rhythms. It is, with­out doubt, out of con­trol, per­va­sive, costly en­vi­ron­men­tal pol­lu­tion. Ar­ti­fi­cial life ex­tends a pro­duc­tive day and al­lows longer recre­ation, but where it is ex­ces­sive it not only af­fects we hu­mans – they now say the cir­ca­dian cycle af­fects up to 15 per cent of our genes - but plays havoc with the rhythms of na­ture it­self.

So do some good and turn out the light if you don't need it. If we all flick more switches we can sim­ply and in­stantly im­prove well-being. If the politi­cians wise up we can sig­nif­i­cantly cut en­ergy waste overnight.

Then maybe two hun­dred mil­lion urban Eu­ro­peans might get their first glimpse of the Milky Way.