AP English Language — Mixed Skills II — Drill 6

The following text is adapted from a modern essay on light pollution and the loss of the night sky. On a clear night in the mountains above the town where I grew up, you can see the Milky Way. I know this because I have stood there and seen it. I also know that most of the children growing up in that town have never seen it, because most of them do not go to the mountains, and from the valley below the light never gets dark enough. This is not, properly speaking, a metaphor. It is a description of what light pollution has done to the night sky — and to the relationship between human beings and the universe they inhabit. Light pollution is the only form of pollution that is simultaneously deliberate, reversible, and almost entirely unaddressed by the major environmental movements of the past century. We do not choose to emit carbon dioxide as an end in itself; it is a byproduct of doing things we value. We do not choose to contaminate water; it is a consequence of industrial processes we have failed to adequately regulate. But we do choose to illuminate the night. We choose it every time a parking lot is lit to one hundred times the level necessary for safety, every time a skyscraper leaves its lights on all night, every time a suburban street is lit by fixtures designed to cast light in every direction including upward. The light is intentional. The waste is a choice. What we lose is harder to quantify than carbon emissions or parts per billion of arsenic in drinking water, but it is not nothing. Ecologists have documented the disruption of nocturnal species whose navigation, reproduction, and predator avoidance depend on darkness. Migrating birds, drawn to lit buildings, die by the hundreds of millions each year. Sea turtle hatchlings, orienting toward the brightest horizon — which should be the ocean's reflected starlight — crawl instead toward beach resorts and parking lots and die. The darkness is not empty. It is habitat. There is another loss that is harder to put in an ecological report. Human beings evolved under skies that were dark at night, and they used those skies. They navigated by them, organized their calendars by them, told stories about them, and looked at them in a way that produced, across every culture and every century, the same recognizable response: a sense of scale, of smallness, of connection to something larger than the immediate. This is not mysticism. It is a description of what the night sky has historically done to human attention and human imagination. We have turned it off. I am not arguing for the extinguishing of cities or the end of nighttime safety. I am arguing that the loss is real, that it was chosen, that it is largely reversible, and that its reversibility has barely registered in the environmental conversation. The stars are still there. We have simply decided, without quite deciding, that we no longer need to see them.