The Spreading Darkness

Britain at night as viewed from space

As I write these words on a clear but chill evening in Copenhagen, a violent ‘superstorm’ is lashing much of the eastern half of North America. It’s not clear yet what destruction Sandy will leave in her wake but it’s being reported that around 8 million people are without power and that includes much of New York City.

But awe inspiring as that blackout is, the one that caught my eye the other day is the one that is going on in Britain – the one nobody has noticed. It was being reported on in the Daily Telegraph which, in line with its deep distaste of anything ‘environmental’ was spinning the fact that the country is turning off masses of lighting at night as further evidence of the evil do-gooding greenies under the headline ‘Streetlights turned off in their thousands to meet carbon emissions targets’. The bare facts of the matter are thus:

· 3,080 miles of motorways and trunk roads in England are now completely unlit;

· a further 47 miles of motorway now have no lights between midnight and 5am, including one of Britain’s busiest stretches of the M1, between Luton and Milton Keynes;

· out of 134 councils which responded to a survey, 73% said they had switched off or dimmed some lights or were planning to;

· all of England’s 27 county councils have turned off or dimmed street lamps in their areas.

In fairness, it was the Sunday Times that undertook the survey and the DT was just doing some churnalism, but given that the particular Murdoch organ crouches behind a paywall I doubt many people ever got to read it in the first place.

But far from this mass turn-off being the work of ‘hysterical warmists’ (as the paper insists on calling anyone who suggests that atmospheric chemistry can be altered by adding gargantuan amounts of carbon dioxide), it becomes clear that the real reason is money, or the lack of it due to rising energy costs and diminishing public budgets:

Local authorities say the moves helps reduce energy bills, at a time when energy prices are continuing to rise. Several of the big energy companies have unveiled price hikes in recent weeks, including British Gas, npower and EDF Energy - which this week said it was increasing its standard variable prices for gas and electricity customers by 10%.

And:

The Highways Agency said the full-switch off had saved it £400,000 last year, while reducing carbon emissions, and said it planned further blackouts.

Meanwhile 98 councils said they have switched off or dimmed lights, or planned to in the future.

In Shropshire, 12,500 - 70 per cent of the area’s lights - are now switched off between midnight and 5.30am, while Derbyshire County Council plans to turn off 40,000 lights at night. In Lincolnshire, some are turned off from as early as 9pm.

Leicestershire County Council expects to save £800,000 a year in energy bills by adapting one third of the country’s 68,000 street lights so that they can be dimmed or turned off at night.

Caerphilly in Wales no longer lights industrial estates overnight and Bradford dims 1,800 of its 58,000 street lights between 9.30pm and 5.30am. 

People don’t like the dark – it arouses a primeval fear within us; a fear that modern life with its 24/7 strip lighting and permanently-on TV screens was supposed to have banished. 'Keeping the lights on' is the emotional hot button used by the proponents of nuclear power and fracking to induce fear in people and browbeat them into accepting dangerous forms of energy. It's a useful binary: either the lights are on OR we go back to the dark ages and live in caves. That's what they would like us to believe.

And safety bodies are up in arms about the lights being turned off, as are city dwellers who have bought second homes in rural areas. Here’s my favourite quote from the article:

Caroline Cooney, an actress who complained to Hertfordshire County Council when the lights near her home in Bishop’s Stortford were switched off after midnight, said she faced a “black hole” when she returned home from working in the West End of London.

"My street is completely canopied by large tress and I could not see my hand in front of my face,” she said.

Mrs Cooney, who appeared in Gregory’s Girl and who has also appeared in Casualty, said it was putting people in danger and the council was effectively imposing a “midnight curfew on residents who do not want to take the risk of walking home blind”.

“When I came out of the train station it was just like a black hole,” she said.

“I simply cannot risk walking home in what is effectively pitch blackness.”

However the council told her it could not “provide tailored street lighting for each individual’s particular needs”. 

You have to laugh and I bet the council spokesperson had a bit of a giggle preparing that response. Had it been me I might have gone further and suggested a pair of night vision goggles.

But I don’t think it’s such a bad thing.

In Spain, we used to live in the darkest place in Europe. We were high up in the mountains of Andalucía, on the southern flank of the Sierra Nevada. At night the stars were so clear that if you lay flat on your back it felt as if you were drifting through deep space, which – hey – you were. I had no idea, until then, that you could see tens of thousands of stars with the naked eye.

I had an astronomer friend living nearby who had a giant telescope on his farm house. As a matter of fact, it was so big it practically was his house. When he wasn’t identifying distant star clusters and taking pictures of them he was running a campaign to banish unnecessary light pollution. He had seen how the skies of Britain had been turned into warm orange fuzz, and didn’t want the same thing to happen to Spain.

Unfortunately Spain had other ideas. They positively loved installing 1000w sodium lights on the side of any building that was more important than, say, a dog kennel, making the night even brighter than the day. At least they did – I’m not sure many of them can afford so much powerful lighting any more.

In any case, my friend thought that when you blot out the stars then you lose something. Kids were growing up having only seen stars on cinema screens. That just wasn’t right, he thought. How can you love the universe you were born into if you can’t even see it?

Peak cheap energy may have its downsides, but being able to see the stars again sure isn’t one of them.

The circle of life

The coming of Spring reminds us that life is ongoing

I have just returned from a week in England on family business, which is why I'm a bit late posting this week. For anyone who wants to know how their native country is doing I'd recommend moving somewhere totally foreign and only returning once a year or less – it's a great way to get a snapshot of how things are going and enables you to see in relief some of the things that would be too incremental to otherwise notice.

A couple of posts back I put forth the opinion that the mass of rocks covered in fertile soils in the north Atlantic known as the British Isles might be one of the better places to live in the post industrial future. My post was republished on another website far more popular than this one, inviting all sorts of comments to the effect that I must be nuts to suggest such a thing and that the only safe course of action was to buy a cache of guns and move to South America/Canada/New Zealand (delete as applicable). The implicit assumption was that the stiff upper lip which we Brits supposedly possess will undoubtedly suffer a catastrophic and uncontrolled enflaccidation and the resulting blood-curdling yell we collectively emit as we unleash fifty years of post imperial angst will be audible on the Moon. Indeed, it won't just be yelling; there will be ethnic cleansing, famine and cannibalism as the zombie like hordes consume each other in an apocalyptic bloodbath befitting a 50s B-Movie.

All this seems very strange because this isn't how I envisage things panning out at all. I admit that it isn't all going to be a bed of roses, and whatever nuclear mistakes we make right now to provide cheap electricity at the expense of future generations will make life largely impossible in some areas. What I was merely suggesting was that right now there is a large enough minority with common sense to make an actual difference as things steadily tighten over the coming years. All of the enduring qualities of the everyday British folk are still present. Amongst them I would include modesty, common sense, charity, self-effacement, stoicism and wit. Of course, there are also plenty who display not a single one of these qualities, but there isn't a place on Earth where these people don't exist.

Yet as anyone who has had the unpleasant but potentially life-saving experience of becoming peak energy aware knows, as soon as you start seeing things in certain ways it becomes impossible to unsee them again. That's why, wherever I go, I tend to take make notes of 'good points' and 'bad points' when it comes to our pressing energy and societal predicaments. Here are my somewhat glib and off-the-cuff mental rough notes from my last week spent in one small corner of England:

Good points:

• Many more houses fitted with solar panels. Not sure how many, but maybe 1 in 50
• Farmers markets all over the place
• Bookshops (yes there are still quite a few) full of books on self sufficiency – in fact it seems to have entered the mainstream. I bought a book of 700 ancient recipes and another one about keeping chickens. I considered buying another about bee keeping but the lady behind the till told me it 'wasn't very good'
• The Olympic preparations are in full swing and every available advertising surface is trumpeting them – but here's the good bit – nobody seems to give a damn
• There are now more different beers brewed by local breweries than it would be possible to drink in a lifetime
• Foraging for wild food seems to be the national pastime now

Bad points:

• Nearly everyone seems to have a smart phone and is glued to it constantly
• Huge cars have yet to go out of fashion and the roads are jammed with wobbly-chinned women sitting behind the wheels of giant road-eating SUVs, staring impassively at their GPS traffic-jam-avoidance display units and listening to celebrity drivel on commercial radio channels
• Supermarkets still maintain their Faustian grip on the nation's soul
• Thousands of fields are planted up with rape (canola). It might look pretty and yellow but at the end of the day it's just an industrial cash crop used for biodiesel and just contributes to further ruining the soils
• The national waistline shows no sign of stopping its relentless expansion

My daughter and I visited a farm when we were there. It was beautifully situated high up on the South Downs – an ancient landscape and one of the last areas to submit to the tide of Christianity (and holding onto its Wyrd animist religions long past other places in the British Isles). It is lambing season and my six-year-old daughter and I watched as one was born in a lambing shed. There was something remarkable about witnessing the birth of a struggling tiny creature and the quiet dignity of the ewe as she endured the labour. No less impressive was the devotion and care of the young shepherds who confessed that they had had no more than a few hours of undisturbed sleep for the past week.

It was great to visit a working farm and see the pride with which it was held by the farmer and his family. Equally as interesting to me was wandering around the land and unearthing various pieces of farm machinery from the days before efficiency drives rendered them obsolete – but which the farmer was loath to get rid of, possibly because of some nagging fear that they might one day be put into service again. Real farmers don't take anything for granted. I found a hand cranked butter churn, a corn thresher and something called an oil cake breaker (below left) which I have no idea of. 

I even found this old telephone box, which I'd probably volunteer to re-erect in a post mobile phone future.

From the vantage point of this family run farm high up on the Downs we were able to see for many miles right down to the English Channel, which glistened silver in the mid-afternoon sun. There we could just make out before the shoreline the spire of Chichester Cathedral, which rose like a tiny spike in the vast rolling landscape which seemed otherwise devoid of all human life.

But visiting a farm wasn't the real reason we were in England. Down below I knew, near the cathedral in the dull blur of grey which represented the furniture of humanity, my father lay in a hospital bed, having by now entered the last stage of his life. I had visited him some hours before with my sister and we had given him a photographic book of 1950s American cars. In his prime, at more or less the age I am now, he had lived in Canada and the US and owned at different times several Buicks and Plymouths and other huge gas-chugging automobiles fitted out with leather interiors, white wall tyres and chrome trimmings. Now, enfeebled and fogged by dementia and the drugs that the doctors keep pumping into him in an effort to prolong his life, it was all he could do to run his finger over the pictures and mutter unintelligibly, enchanted for an instant by the memories of all those years ago. His eyes became misty as he gazed at those defunct cars, driven by smart-looking carefree young men with neat hairdos and neat girls in the passenger seats. He was once one of those young men with my mother, herself long since gone, riding beside him.

We looked at the book together for some minutes, him holding it in his trembling hands, and the nurse sat nearby in case of any incident, making cheery noises about his progress and coming up with practical suggestions for how we could enliven his mind. But soon it was time to go and my father shuffled off clutching a trolley handle and supported by the nurse on one side. He said goodbye to me, but I'm not certain he knew who I was.

Now, as I looked at the verdant landscape around me, the newborn lambs and duckling and chicks, and indeed at my own young daughter, it seemed imperative not to be weighed down with heavy thoughts of decay and doom – thoughts that are so prevalent today. Life is a continuous circle, a never ending loop. We are born, we live, we fade and then we die. It is as inevitable as the rising and setting of the sun, but it doesn't stop life being worth living. Yes, we may be at the end of the industrial age, but life will go on. Those shiny cars that my father experienced the good fortune to enjoy for a while won't be coming back, and indeed the memory of the things we take for granted today will fade until they too will be nothing but causes for reminiscing by old-timers. And then even the memories will be extinguished like a waning and flickering candle in the night, only to be replaced by new things that people value - who knows, they might even be less destructive things. We can only hope.

It's not an ending. It's just a new beginning that we can but barely imagine.