PhotoperiodEffect.com

24. Why are you so concerned with the history, here? Let's just absorb the fact that using too much light, interrupting our nights, etc is eventually bad for us, or has at least some effect, and get on with our lives. I don't need to know the history or why we didn't figure it out sooner, or who to blame, either. Who cares? Life is lived forwards.

I wish the history weren't important. I'm as lazy as anybody, and have enough to think about, too. But if what I'm writing about here is even half right, hundreds of millions of human beings have had their lives shattered, or died terrible premature deaths utterly unnecessarily. We need not only to know why, but to remove or change from top to bottom the institutions that made that staggering death toll not just possible, but perhaps inevitable. Peer review and enforced uniformity in science did made this possible. New institutions and a new beginning for science that returns it to something closer to the original (and very different) Royal Society, and therefore not only allows scientists to safely innovate or “introduce novelties”, especially early in their careers, but insists on this, is desperately needed and could well prevent the next immense medical or technological catastrophe.

As well, this situation with artificial light precisely parallels the even greater environmental dangers that now confront us – scientific indifference and error vastly delayed our being able to recognize that problem for what it was as well, incidentally, but we haven't paid enough attention to that embarrassing episode in the history of science. Not by coincidence, both our internal and external environments are now in a terrible mess for very similar reasons, namely: a systematic failure of imagination, the neglect (and in truth, punishment) of real, innovative science or hypotheses, and the profound human inability to cope effectively with consequences with a common lagtime of decades. Perhaps, just perhaps, considering these two problems together will shock us into realizing how vulnerable we are, how little human certainty is worth, and make us act to preserve both ourselves, our societies, and the planet that is steadily growing less able to sustain either. This combined history confronts us with our frailties. It therefore has some chance, however small, of shattering our complacency long enough to cause us to invest in more solar cells and fewer large gas-fueled motor homes; or to shame us enough that we will finally pay a much higher fuel-and-energy tax that reflects the real costs of what we are continuing to do to ourselves and the environment.

That having been said, you're right. Blame doesn't matter. It wasn't the complacency of a few scientists that made this possible, but all of them - and every one of the rest of us, too, who could have asked the right questions long ago, but didn't. It would be absurd to call for executions of the heads of medical associations, the heads federal funding agencies, or the boards of directors of the drug companies who so often now set the tragically inappropriate agenda for medical research in Universities; although a few survivors of the deceased might be tempted by the thought. It's all of us, and simultaneously, we're being very nearly as blind about environmental dangers, even as we tell ourselves we're doing something by putting a few newspapers into a blue box.

This is a wake-up call not just in matters of our own health, but that of the earth, too. There can now surely be no doubt. Our very strong tendency as human beings is to ignore the fatal consequences of all technology, and our culture as it is now frequently insists on such complacency. If we do not devote ourselves to changing that, the toll from artificial light may eventually look quite small.