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  Amateurs are responsible for important discoveries about the Milky Way from the last half century, plus some Hubble Telescope equipment that has let us see far beyond it. We have to thank for this movement the so-called International Geophysical Year of 1956 and a Smithsonian initiative called Operation Moonwatch, which for two decades mobilized everyday men, women, and children to help plot the first artificial satellites. What this did for the hobby is encapsulated by this 1958 Popular Science headline: “Suddenly, Everybody Wants a Telescope.”

  The RASC naturally benefited and saw subsequent membership surges following Apollo 11 and Halley’s Comet in 1986. Then, with the amateur-assisted discovery of the Hale-Bopp comet, in 1995, the 4,000-person group soared to 5,000.

  That was also the year my parents bought into a growing phenomenon called the Internet, which helped make Hale-Bopp history’s most widely observed comet. Observatories’ websites tracked it and published daily images; fan sites counted down to its perihelion. In San Diego, Heaven’s Gate thought its approach to the sun meant it was prime time for a suicide pact, but in High Prairie, Alberta, 10-year-old me only thought to spend his savings on a cherry-red telescope from the Sears catalogue.

  On April 1, 1997, Hale-Bopp slowly scraped the sky with a green tail bright enough for any land mammal to see. But my only memory of my brief brush with amateur astronomy is feeling ripped off by that cheap telescope. Maybe it was just snowing that night, can’t remember, but I definitely never touched it again.

  I wasn’t alone. The RASC’s executive director told me membership tanked after Hale-Bopp. But it has bounced back with a renewed interest in astrophotography, thanks to cameras and telescopes being better and cheaper than ever. On their first night out, amateurs capture images orders of magnitude better than professionals did in the 1970s. At the Edmonton chapter, Ling has also witnessed a membership surge, and gender within the historically male-dominated hobby is balancing out. But he said members are of a certain age. “One thing that’s really obvious is it’s lacking youth.” In 1967, 14-year-old Ling’s dad lied to the RASC in order for his underage son to qualify for a membership; now it’s rare to meet members under 40. “Nerds these days are into gaming.”

  If amateur astronomy was struggling to be relevant to young people, it didn’t show at the family-friendly Dark Sky Festival. The second night was blessed with clear skies, and the disappointment of yesterday turned into hour-long lineups at the entrance gate. I roamed around with a red headlamp and my neck craned to the cosmos, knocking into people equally captivated by the perfectly starry night. We whispered our sorries and bounced between information booths and telescopes manned by interpreters who talked of the value of darkness not just to astronomy but to life itself.

  A Parks Canada interpreter and amateur astronomer whose exuberance was fit for children’s television struggled to control his volume as he explained to me how artificial light confuses animals’ circadian rhythms and effectively leaves nocturnal creatures jet-lagged. That would be a problem for, say, beavers, which are slow, clumsy, and basically defenseless, hence why they work under the cover of darkness despite having crappy eyesight.

  I noted the term scotobiology—the study of the effects of darkness on biological systems—and wished to learn more about it. I requested a phone call with the interpreter through Parks Canada’s communications bureau. It took over four weeks to get approved. Public relations was weirdly nervous and repeatedly asked for my questions in advance. By the time we finally connected, the interpreter’s exuberance was overtaken by reticence and scripted explanations to questions I hadn’t asked. Apparently embarrassed, he admitted that he was literally reading media lines provided to him. (So much for new prime minister Justin Trudeau’s unmuzzling.)

  I thanked him for trying and suggested he just email me the interview, since Parks Canada had already conducted it for the both of us. We proceeded to have a friendly chat about his hobby and Cree cosmology, but when I asked again about scotobiology he clammed up. “Scientists believe there is some impact from light on nocturnal animals. Parks Canada is not doing any scientific monitoring on this at the time.” He paused. “That is the media line I was given.”

  In fairness to the interpreter, scotobiology is a very new science. But it’s an accepted fact that the last century’s combined urban sprawl and electrification is screwing with ecosystems. The research is apparently off-base for Parks Canada, but amateurs and professionals waste no time telling me about whole flocks of birds that’ve smashed into floodlit smokestacks, and sea turtle hatchlings that are primed to follow moonlight from sand to sea but instead walk inland toward their deaths. “Every nocturnal creature in the world is attuned to light no stronger than the full moon,” said Ling. But it might not be limited to nocturnal creatures. “Light increases hormones in chickens and makes them produce more eggs, so is that why girls reach puberty faster?” he wondered. “It may not be all the hormones in the beef.” Ling’s tendency to blame artificial light for human predispositions isn’t exactly junk science. Diabetes, obesity, and certain cancers—preliminary study after preliminary study correlates them with excess light. And yes, one accepted theory for why girls are developing breasts and pubic hair earlier is excessive exposure to light. (Another is absentee fathers, so make what you will of this.)

  The dark science has roots in Canada. At a 2003 symposium called “Ecology of the Night,” scotobiology (from the Greek skotos, meaning “darkness”) was added to the scientific lexicon. University of Ottawa instructor Robert Dick, who in fact coined the term with biologist Tony Bidwell, remembers attending as an astronomer amongst psychologists, entomologists, and ornithologists. “I went there to talk about the impact on the night sky and they were talking about the impact on biological systems. I was astounded. After a few years of study, I realized darkness had nothing to do with astronomy and everything to do with biology.”

  A common ground was established. Astronomers would now leverage scientific research to clear the skies, and scientists could leverage astronomers’ well-established light-pollution-abatement committees for their causes. After all, health concerns are far more alarming to governments than the argument that, as Ling put it, you’re robbing us of our heritage. But what’s most convincing is cost savings. So across North America, in cities as large as Calgary and Toronto, new bylaws and policies are effectively replacing energy-wasting, halo-casting, upward-facing streetlamps with clearer, softer, downward-facing LED bulbs. A mass relighting of the Western world is well underway.

  Dick consulted Ottawa on its 1990s lighting policy before founding his own dark-sky-friendly company for amber lights that don’t spoil nighttime vision. He doesn’t just sleep with very thick blinds; he takes a self-made amber flashlight to the washroom at night to avoid the shock of white light. To say he’s concerned about the effects of artificial light is an understatement. He warns against Big Light’s less-than-honest salesmen and compares their denial of adverse health effects to the tobacco industry.

  He’s particularly worried about blue light, the wavelength ironically emitting from the same anti-light-pollution LED bulbs that cities are adopting en masse, as well as whatever you’re probably using to read this. During the day blue light boosts moods and reaction times, but too much of it after sundown can reduce your melatonin, a hormone that sets your internal clock and may be responsible for the aforementioned health problems. As if it wasn’t enough that staring into my smartphone for hours every night was distracting me from the night sky, it was now trying to kill me. I suppose I could invest in orange-tinted, Bonoesque glasses that block blue light, like Alister Ling recommended. He also bought a pair for his teenage daughter, but she refuses to wear them. “She’s too headstrong to take my advice,” he told me. “I don’t get it.”

  It’s easy to want to call anti-light-pollution activists Luddites and remind them of the incredible access we now have to outer space via our digital one. After all, it was the instantly gratifying Internet
that formed my own interest in cosmology and humanism.

  As dust collected on my cheap cherry telescope, I spent countless hours exploring the Web, which was starting to feel as infinite and ever-expanding as the universe itself. That’s where I latently discovered Carl Sagan, which led to astronomers Phil Plait and Neil deGrasse Tyson, a pompous detour into Richard Dawkins territory, before I fell in love with Chris Hadfield’s Twitter, like just about everyone else.

  But for amateur astronomers and dark-sky advocates, who heavily rely on the Web for recruitment and public outreach, this is a supplement, not a substitute, for the real thing—a glittering sky versus a glowing red iPad screen. Virtual Hubble images and viral space videos lunge at me like comets, but all the while my real view of the universe disappears and with it . . . what exactly? Standing under Jasper’s skies—or on the Davis Strait mountains or in a field outside my hometown—I was overtaken with a daunting and yet calming sensation that I couldn’t quite pinpoint. Ling said it was a sense of my own insignificance, but whatever it was, its absence feels quite significant.

  On the last night of the Dark Sky Festival, the press got thirty minutes with Chris Hadfield before his keynote address. I asked him, given that more people now lived in cities than not, was he concerned that humans were losing touch with the sky?

  The colonel smiled with a smugness that only someone who’s spacewalked could possess. “Not much,” he said, “because I’ve seen the whole world. Everyone who writes about overcrowding lives in a city. It’s quite comical. But most of the world is empty. And most of it is dark at night.”

  MICHELLE NIJHUIS

  The Parks of Tomorrow

  FROM National Geographic

  Assateague Island National Seashore, which sits on a 37-mile-long sliver of land just off the coast of Maryland and Virginia, is gradually shuffling west. Over centuries, as hurricanes and nor’easters drive sand from its Atlantic beaches across the island and into its bayside marshes, the entire island is scooting closer to the coast.

  “It’s neat, isn’t it?” says Ishmael Ennis, hunching against a stiff spring wind. “Evolution!” He grins at the beach before him. It’s littered with tree stumps, gnarled branches, and chunks of peat the size of seat cushions—the remains of a marsh that once formed the western shore of the island. Later buried by storm-shifted sand, it’s now resurfacing to the east, as the island shuffles on.

  Ennis, who recently retired after 34 years as maintenance chief at Assateague, has seen his share of storms here. This national seashore, in fact, owes its existence to a nor’easter: In March 1962, when the legendary Ash Wednesday storm plowed into Assateague, it obliterated the nascent resort of Ocean Beach, destroying its road, its first 30 buildings, and its developers’ dreams. (Street signs erected for nonexistent streets were left standing in a foot of seawater.) Taking advantage of that setback, conservationists persuaded Congress in 1965 to protect most of the island as part of the National Park System. Today it’s the longest undeveloped stretch of barrier island on the mid-Atlantic coast, beloved for its shaggy feral ponies, its unobstructed stargazing, and its quiet ocean vistas—which have always been punctuated, as they are on other barrier islands, by impressive storms.

  Scientists expect that as the climate changes, the storms will likely strengthen, sea levels will keep rising, and Assateague’s slow westward migration may accelerate. Ennis knows the island well enough to suspect that these changes are underway. Assateague’s maintenance crew is already confronting the consequences. On the south end of the island, storms destroyed the parking lots six times in 10 years. The visitors’ center was damaged three times. Repair was expensive, and after fistsize chunks of asphalt from old parking lots began to litter the beach, it began to seem worse than futile to Ennis.

  A tinkerer by nature—he grew up on a small farm on Maryland’s Eastern Shore—he realized the situation called for mechanical creativity. Working with the park’s architect, Ennis and his coworkers adapted the toilets, showers, and beach shelters so that they could be moved quickly, ahead of an approaching storm. They experimented with different parking-lot surfaces, finally arriving at a porous surface of loose clamshells—the kind often used on local driveways—that could be repaired easily and, when necessary, bulldozed to a new location. “It was a lot of what we called ‘Eastern Shore engineering,’ ” Ennis says, laughing. “We weren’t thinking about climate change. We did it because we had to.” He lowers his voice, mock-conspiratorially. “It was all by accident.”

  Accidental or not, these modest adaptations were the beginning of something broader. The seashore is now one of the first national parks in the country to explicitly address—and accept—the effects of climate change. Under its draft general management plan, the park will not try to fight the inevitable: it will continue to move as the island moves, shifting its structures with the sands. If rising seas and worsening storm surges make it impractical to maintain the state-owned bridge that connects Assateague to the mainland, the plan says, park visitors will just have to take a ferry.

  When Congress passed the act creating the National Park Service in the summer of 1916, it instructed the agency to leave park scenery and wildlife “unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.” The law did not define unimpaired. To Stephen Mather, the charismatic borax magnate who served as the first director of the Park Service, it meant simply “undeveloped.” Early park managers followed his lead, striving both to protect and to promote sublime vistas.

  But the arguments began almost as soon as the agency was born. In September 1916 the prominent California zoologist Joseph Grinnell, writing in the journal Science, suggested that the Park Service should protect not just scenery but also the “original balance in plant and animal life.” Over the next few decades wildlife biologists inside and outside the agency echoed Grinnell, calling for the parks to remain “unimpaired,” in ecological terms. But the public came to the parks for spectacles—volcanoes, waterfalls, trees you can drive a car through—and preserving them remained the agency’s primary concern.

  In the early 1960s, secretary of the interior Stewart Udall—who would oversee the addition of nearly 50 sites to the National Park System, including Assateague—became concerned about the agency’s management of wildlife in the parks. He recruited University of California wildlife biologist Starker Leopold, the son of famed conservationist Aldo Leopold, to chair an independent study.

  The Leopold Report proved hugely influential. Like Grinnell, it called on the Park Service to maintain the original “biotic associations” that existed at the time of European settlement. In the decades that followed, the Park Service got more scientific. Park managers began setting controlled fires in forests where natural wildfires had long been suppressed; they reintroduced species that had vanished, such as wolves and bighorn sheep. The focus, though, was less on restoring ecological processes than on recreating static scenes—on making each park, as the Leopold Report recommended, into a “vignette of primitive America.” In time that vision took on what Yellowstone historian Paul Schullery describes as an “almost scriptural aura.”

  And yet, as Leopold himself later acknowledged, it was misleading. The notion of presettlement America as primitive ignored the long impact Native Americans had had on park landscapes, through hunting and setting fires of their own. It ignored the fact that nature itself, left to its own devices, does not tend toward a steady state—landscapes and ecosystems are always being changed by storms or droughts or fires or floods, or even by the interactions of living things. The ecological scenes the Park Service strove to maintain, from a largely imagined past, were in a way just a new version of the spectacles it had always felt bound to deliver to visitors.

  “The Park Service has had a tacit agreement with the American public that it’s going to keep things looking as they’ve always looked,” says Nate Stephenson, an ecologist who studies forests at Sequoia, Kings Canyon, and Yosemite National Parks. “But time does not stop here.”
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  From the 1980s on, scientists gradually came to accept that a new sort of change was underway. The glaciers in Glacier National Park were shrinking, wildfires in Sequoia were getting larger, and coastal parks were losing ground to rising seas. Shortly after the turn of the century, researchers in Glacier announced that by 2030 even the park’s largest glaciers would likely disappear.

  In 2003 a group of researchers at the University of California, Berkeley began to retrace the footsteps of Joseph Grinnell. In Yosemite and other California parks, the zoologist had conducted fanatically detailed wildlife surveys, predicting their value would not “be realized until the lapse of many years, possibly a century.” When the Berkeley researchers compared their own Yosemite surveys and other data with Grinnell’s 90-year-old snapshot, they noticed that the ranges of several small mammals had shifted significantly uphill, toward the ridgeline of the Sierra Nevada. Two other once-common mammals, a chipmunk and a wood rat, were almost extinct in the park. The pattern was clear: climate change had arrived in Yosemite too, and animals were migrating to escape the heat.

  For a while the Park Service avoided talking about the subject. To acknowledge the reality of human-caused climate change was a political act, and the Park Service doesn’t discuss politics with its visitors. At Glacier the interpretive signs made only a passing reference to rising temperatures. Rangers avoided talk of causes. “We were very constrained,” remembers William Tweed, former chief of interpretation at Sequoia and Kings Canyon. “The message we got from above was basically, Don’t go into it if you can help it.”