Date: November 18, 2009

Title: Astrophilia in the City that Never Sleeps

Podcaster: Ian Cheney

Organization: Wicked Delicate: www.wickedelicate.com

Description: Filmmaker Ian Cheney fell in love with the night sky in rural Maine, but now he lives in New York City — and deals with the consequences. With over half the world’s population living in cities, and only a dozen or so stars visible above his own Brooklyn apartment, Ian finds himself asking a simple question: do humans need the stars? In this podcast, Ian Cheney explores the concept of “astrophilia,” and describes the process of developing his feature documentary about light pollution and the disappearing dark.

Bio: Ian Cheney grew up in New England and received bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Yale University. He co-created, co-produced and starred in the Peabody Award-winning feature documentary KING CORN, released theatrically in 50 cities and broadcast nationally on PBS in 2008. He also directed the award-winning feature documentary THE GREENING OF SOUTHIE, which aired as the 2008 Earth Day anchor broadcast on The Sundance Channel. He is the co-founder of Wicked Delicate, a documentary film and advocacy project based in Brooklyn, NY, and a contributing blogger on the Huffington Post.

Today’s sponsor: This episode of “365 Days of Astronomy” is sponsored by Claire Weston, and is dedicated to the person who made her pause long enough, to look beyond. You used the sky as a blackboard to teach about the wonders of perception. “An adventure out of this world” Thank-You ‘G”

Transcript:

Hello, this Ian Cheney, I’m a documentary filmmaker, an astronomy enthusiast, and a resident of America’s largest city — New York, New York.

From the rooftop of my small Brooklyn apartment, I have what New Yorkers might call an unobstructed view of the sky. I can see the Statue of Liberty across New York Harbor, the port of Bayonne, the Verrazano Bridge to Staten Island, the lights of downtown Brooklyn, and the skyscrapers of lower Manhattan. On a good night, if I lie on my back on the asphalt roof for a few hours, I can count a thousand or so airplanes, a hundred helicopters, and several dozen things called, if I recall correctly, stars.

There was a time in my life when I had a very different view of the sky. I grew up spending much of my childhood in rural Maine, where the only skyscrapers were towering white pine trees, and the buzzing sound in the sky wasn’t helicopters, but dragonflies or the quiet whirring of bats. When the ocean fog didn’t roll too far inland, I could lie on my back in the tall grass and watch the stars roll across the sky, dreaming of becoming an astronomer.

But then the stars went away. Or, more accurately, I went away — first to college in Connecticut, and then looking for work in Boston and New York City. As the stars faded from my view, my dream of becoming an astronomer faded as well.

But one night, not long after moving to New York, I clambered up on top of my Brooklyn roof after a particularly long day at the office to see what I could see. I’d long since given up on waiting for it to get dark in New York — it never really gets dark — but as I let my eyes adjust to the pseudo-dark, I found myself getting some of that old Maine feeling back. The stars — the mere sight of a dozen of them – actually changed my mood. Suddenly I felt my shoulders relaxing, my imagination expanding, the stars coming closer and closer — only the sudden rumble of the B61 bus reminding me that I wasn’t floating up into the atmosphere, but standing in the cold atop an old brick building in Brooklyn.

Still, it was enough to make me wonder: what had I lost in moving from the starry skies of rural Maine to the orange haze of New York City?

In environmental science there’s a theory called Biophilia, popularized by Harvard professor EO Wilson and Yale professor Stephen Kellert, and it goes something like this: because human beings evolved, over thousands of years, in close relationship with the natural world, we have a subtle but palpable attraction to greenspace and living things — an attraction embedded in our genes. The implication of the theory is that we derive benefits — some intangible, others actually measurable – from interactions with the natural world. That, on some level, we need it.

It has always made plenty of sense to me, as someone who enjoys a walk in the woods or even the presence of a potted plant on my windowsill. Nature is a refreshing, invigorating force, especially in an artificial landscape like New York City, where a visit to a public park can be like a glass of cold water on a hot summer day.

But what about the stars? What do the stars do for us?

There are many well-known arguments about the scientific benefits of a dark night sky: countless advances in astrophysics and cosmology have depended upon our ability to see the stars; and it certainly doesn’t hurt to be able to detect earth-killing asteroids hurtling towards us from outer space. But it’s harder to put into words what we derive from a night spent out in the grass looking up at the stars, dreaming and wondering.

I have begun to wonder whether there might be such a thing as Astrophilia. A subtle but very real human attraction to the stars, and the night sky. Or, put another way, some kind of innate human need for a view of the stars.

Astrophilia would suggest that our view of a dark night sky calls up something in us that we cannot even quite name, let alone measure, place on a graph, or assign a dollar value. Astrophilia would suggest that in connecting to the stars, we somehow become more complete as human beings.

I’ve traveled extensively over the past several years, exploring this question in a documentary film about light pollution and the disappearance of dark night. In conversations with astrophysicists, cosmologists, ecologists, and many others, I’ve collected stories and testimonies about the human relationship to the stars. And it seems like Astrophilia is everywhere. The struggle to curb urban light pollution is often pursued in the name of traffic safety, or energy conservation, but just as often I found people trying to express something deeper, something more fundamental — something they could not quite name.

Of course, I cannot claim these anecdotes as scientific evidence. But the idea of Astrophilia is being tested, in a way, all across the world, in real time: not long ago, it was revealed that now more than half of all humans on the planets live in cities, and 2/3 of us live under skies polluted by artificial light. Just as urban planners struggle to preserve islands of nature in the form of city parks, street trees, and window boxes, so too might we begin to imagine the benefits of improving our lighting in even our brightest cities — to preserve our view of what stars we city-dwellers are still lucky enough to see.

End of podcast:

365 Days of Astronomy
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The 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast is produced by the New Media Working Group of the International Year of Astronomy 2009. Audio post-production by Preston Gibson. Bandwidth donated by libsyn.com and wizzard media. Web design by Clockwork Active Media Systems. You may reproduce and distribute this audio for non-commercial purposes. Please consider supporting the podcast with a few dollars (or Euros!). Visit us on the web at 365DaysOfAstronomy.org or email us at info@365DaysOfAstronomy.org. Until tomorrow…goodbye.