Moths to a Flame

Six years ago I moved to the Netherlands from the Caribbean. Back home I always felt an innate connection to the natural world around me; the textures, movements, and smells of the sky and sea fascinated me. I was very aware of what I was leaving behind when I decided to come to a Western European country, I would always keep my island abode close to my heart. Growing up in the tropics I thought that it would be hard to forget the proximity to nature that comes with island life. About a year after moving to the Netherlands I went back to visit my family during the summer break. Up until this time I had been thinking of all the wonderful properties of home that I could not embrace in a Dutch context; nostalgia had impeded my forgetting about nature – or so I thought. Taking a walk one summer night while visiting my home island I found myself looking up at the sky realizing that I had forgotten about the stars! Five years later in his lecture Know Darkness at Sonic Acts Festival 2015 Paul Bogard made me realize again that I completely forgot about having forgotten about the stars. It seems that in my own removal from nature the first thing that escapes the mind are the stars -as I had not forgotten about anything else. We are surrounded by so much artificial light that a naturally luminous night is more often than not taken for granted. Bogard invites our photo-consuming society to enjoy light in moderation and to learn true darkness in order to bridge the gap between the universe and ourselves. His maps indicating the distribution of light pollution show that we have taken a most common human experience and turned it into one of the most rare spectacles on the planet: a class one starry night sky on the Bortle scale. What does this mean for our collective cultural imaginations? What would Vincent van Gogh have painted over the Rhone today? Currently stars seem to be either a fairytale in childish stories or of astronomical significance in science and technology. Let us think about our gluttony with regards to our inherent taste for nocturnal light!