Skyglow

By David Cross

This photograph comes from the UK Campaign for Dark Skies. Taken with a super wide angle lens on a clear night, it shows the glow of light reflected off moisture and pollution in the atmosphere over Southern England.
As a key point of connection between contemporary visual culture and industrial consumerism, electric light is so widespread that it has the familiar effect of an ideology.
The detractors of environmentalism have often tried to associate the movement’s aims with poverty or loss. Just as the idea of light carries connotations of reason and understanding, the idea of darkness is linked to ignorance and superstition. Yet such dichotomies are misleading, and may be redundant. Whether we view the stars with the gaze of an astronomer or astrologer, the accidental illumination of the night sky is the result of an excess that is obscuring our wider vision.