It's a book about darkness, or what happens when there's less or no true darkness due to all the artificial light these days. The book is a bunch of short chapters, usually each on one particular topic. One chapter might be about how the lights from cities are screwing things up for baby sea turtles, whose instincts tell them to head for the brightest light. For a very long time, that's been the moon reflecting off the sea. Now it's big city lights.
Or Eklof might discuss how the human body reacts to shifts in light, the way natural light has decreasing amounts of blue in it as the day ends. And so your brain starts getting ready for sleep, and usually suppresses hunger, because if early Man went looking for a midnight snack, they were likely to become one instead. Now, between interior lighting and screens of our various devices (which pump out lots of blue light), our brains don't get the signal it's time for sleep at night. So we don't sleep, or we try but there's still too much light coming in through our windows for us to sleep well. And that fucks us up in a host of other ways.
The last part of the book discusses examples of cities or other places that have tried to reduce artificial light, or make it less intrusive. Light poles lower to the ground, covered so the light doesn't bleed into the sky. Hospitals that shift the wavelengths their interior lights put out depending on time of day to mimic natural light from the sun. Vineyards working to make themselves more bat-friendly, which also takes care of a lot of insect problems. There's a piece about China planning to build artificial satellites in geosynchronous orbits above certain cities, to act like extra-bright moons removing the need for artificial lights on the surface at night. That sounds a) completely nuts, b) likely to have a whole host of other problems, and c) probably will not be taken at face value by other countries.
The book is broadly organized, but with all these brief chapters - none longer than 6 pages - feels more like a collection of disparate essays than a single work. My experience was a chapter would begin, then end just as I was getting into the topic. Then he'd start talking about something else. Maybe it was closely related; instead of talking about how streetlights are having deleterious effects on the bats that avoid light (because all their prey are in places they don't go), talk about how certain moths rely on twilight as a mating time, and now the skies are too bright for them to attract mates. But sometimes the next chapter is about bioluminescence deep in the ocean, or how sensitive a giant squid's eyes are.
I feel like I should appreciate his brevity, but it left me feeling dissatisfied. I was expecting more depth, or maybe more of the type of philosophical musings about the importance of darkness that we get in the last section of the book.
'When the insect sonic generator was tested on moths under streetlamps, however, the moths were seemingly deaf and had no reactions whatsoever. It seemed as if light misled their auditory system. But moths react differently to dangers depending on whether it's light of dark. Birds are the main threat during the day and bats at night.'
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