LIGHTS OUT

by Alejandro Escudé

In 2014, Los Angeles cut its annual carbon emissions by 43% and saved $9 million in energy costs by replacing the bulbs in more than half of the city's street lamps with light-emitting diodes. That year, the Nobel Prize in physics went to three scientists whose work made those LEDs possible. "As about one fourth of world electricity consumption is used for lighting purposes, the LEDs contribute to saving the Earth's resources," the Nobel committee explained when it announced the award.... But that's not how Ruskin Hartley sees it. "The drive for efficient fixtures has come at the expense of a rapid increase in light pollution," he said. Hartley would know. He's the executive director of the International Dark-Sky Association, or IDA, and he's one of a growing number of people who say the dark sky is an undervalued and underappreciated natural resource. Its loss has detrimental consequences for wildlife and human health…. "We've taken a lot of the energy savings and just lit additional places," Hartley said. It's a classic example of the Jevons paradox, in which efficiency gains (such as better automobile gas mileage) are countered by an increase in consumption (people driving more often). —Phys.org, September 23, 2022. Photo Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain

There is nowhere on the Earth left for the human being.

We’re too blue and too bright, we (how to put this?)

destroy the night. It comes to me now, the cruise ship

I was on, northern Mediterranean, lightning-streaks

across the dining room windows as we ate, Titanic scene,

the ship listing to and fro. I went out to see it, to take in 

the storm and the ship’s lights were laying like a mermaid’s

gauzy hair across the tossing waves. I’d be shamed

by many others simply for recounting this trip, mocked

for excursions, games, scheduled meals. I’d think 

of Odysseus in Sicily, duping the Cyclops, hiding his 

men beneath the curly warmth of sheep. Sometimes, 

I also want to hide that way from the weaponizing shame

humanity turns against itself—more lethal than nuclear

weapons, toxic as a leaky oil tanker. We recognize

the firelight and so does the snake, the shoreline plover, 

but we choose the incandescence of daylight at night.

I have been in the center of my worldly city, lost in

absolute darkness, unable to walk my dog, a block

away the foraging lights of shark-like airliners taking

off into the gridded coordinates of the briny sky.

Shall I leap back into my Neanderthal skin yet eschew

the Sahara rat for the naked leaf? Shall I bore into

the ground, further and further, as the rich climb 

diamond-encrusted staircases into Olympus-sized

homes? My children are not guilty of the bright light!

My planet is not above me, and it isn’t below me,

and it’s certainly not flat. I eat LED light bulbs for 

a midnight snack, looking out over the shellshocked 

tapestry, basking in the sky glow, so I may light

the places within me that don’t need to be seen.

Alejandro Escudé published his first full-length collection of poems My Earthbound Eye in September 2013. He holds a master’s degree in creative writing from UC Davis and teaches high school English. Originally from Argentina, Alejandro lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children.