Eighty percent of Americans can’t see the Milky Way from home. Childs goes looking for what’s left of the actual night — sleeping out in the desert without a light, tracking how animals use darkness, sitting with astronomers and with people fighting to keep the sky over their towns dark. He’s good on what artificial light does to migrating birds, to insects, to us, and better on what happens to your own head after a few nights with no screen and no moon. The dark reads as a place in this book, one that’s being paved, and one you can still get to if you drive far enough.
The Wild Dark: Finding the Night Sky in the Age of Light