Perhaps Bogard’s most challenging claim is that bright lights do little to deter crime. He cites numerous studies, including a 2000 study conducted by the city of Chicago, which have found little or no statistically significant evidence that street lighting decreases crime. Bogard adds, “The joke I heard in London is that criminals actually prefer to work in well-lighted areas because they, too, feel safer. Studies bear this out: Light allows criminals to choose their victims, locate escape routes, and see their surroundings.” Bogard’s evidence is interesting, but he misses the opportunity to strengthen his argument by engaging more with his opponents—for example, the recent case of Oakland, California attributing a spike in crime to the dimming of streetlights in 2011. 

All told, the current state of our street lighting may have less to do with our safety than with energy companies’ preference for not letting their generators stand idle at night. In a similar vein, Bogard notes that gas stations, shopping malls, and other retail establishments are not lit primarily for safety, but to attract business. Over the years, lighting has grown brighter across the board, with no single building wishing to appear dimmer and less inviting by contrast. In the words of Roger Narboni, a lighting designer in Paris, we are addicts of electric light, oblivious to the waste and ugliness we create.

But Bogard goes further than these pragmatic considerations, insightfully noting that the association of light with safety is as deeply entrenched as the fear of the dark. His book, therefore, is twofold in its methodology. On the one hand, he gives a pragmatic and journalistic account of the fate of our night skies. On the other hand, he takes us on a sensory journey from a view of dazzling constellations in Morocco to the best streets to see London’s 1,600 remaining gas lights to Austin, Texas’ famed column of bats to the surreal hours of the night shift in an emergency room. His prose steeps us in the facts and the feeling of the night many of us don’t even realize we’ve lost, and seeks to inspire us with its beauty—“I’m talking about a night sky that leaves you breathless, that makes you want to study the stars, or write poetry, or dance.”

On a deeper level, then, Bogard wants to make a case for beauty itself. In a moment of discouragement, an astronomer and fellow dark-sky advocate Bogard talks to quotes a striking passage by art historian John Van Dyke:

To speak about sparing anything because it is beautiful is to waste one’s breath and incur ridicule in the bargain. The aesthetic sense—the power to enjoy through the eye, the ear, and the imagination—is just as important a factor in the scheme of human happiness as the corporeal sense of eating and drinking; but there has never been a time when the would admit it. The “practical men,” who seem forever on the throne, know very well that beauty is only meant for lovers and young persons—stuff to suckle fools withal. The main affair of life is to get the dollar, and if there is money in cutting the throat of Beauty, why, by all means, cut her throat.

Beauty—what is it good for? Such is the utilitarian perspective the Christian understanding of beauty seeks to correct. Flannery O’Connor, by way of Aquinas, argued that art is a thing good in and of itself. We therefore ought to love beauty for its own sake—as God did in calling creation “good”—rather than trying to make use of it to serve our own ends.