I visited my son in Portland, Oregon, at Christmas and I left before dawn to come home. (It’s a long drive.) I got lost several times because I couldn’t see the route signs. In one memorable case, a street light hung directly behind the sign, so all I could see was glare.

When I got home and thought about it, I remembered something I’d heard on the radio during that trip, about light pollution. I located the recommended book and started reading. Entitled The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light by Paul Bogard, the book follows Bogard’s travels around the world, looking for the night sky. Among his first visits is the Vincent Van Gogh painting “The Starry Night.”

“Van Gogh lived in a time before electric light,” Bogard reminds us. Then he goes on with a description of what Van Gogh had seen, from a letter the painter wrote in 1888. “In the blue depth the stars were sparkling, greenish, yellow, white, pink . . .”

Amazed, I realized I’ve never seen any color in the night sky. Never even thought of it. I wonder how many of you have seen the colors of stars. ”

In doing away with darkness, what beauty do we lose?” Bogard asks.

From beauty, which he often returns to, Bogard goes on to write about “disability glare.” It’s the reason drivers, especially older drivers like me “have a tough time at night.” After describing the science behind this disability glare, he goes on to write that moving from a lighted area to a darker area actually decreases our ability to see. “If you go to darkness, the eye opens a lot, you get more focus, and even in a very dark environment you see very well.”

He admits that many people feel safer in a brightly-lighted environment, then goes on to demonstrate, with a pair of photos, how the opposite is likely to be true. He cites the case of towns and villages in the U.S. and Europe that have turned off some lights some of the time—to save energy. Instead of increased crime rates, they experienced a reduction, as much as 50 percent. That’s amazing. I suspect it’s because the bad guys don’t have so many hard shadows where they can hide.

He discusses the negative health effects of constantly lighted environments—and there are many. He interviews health professionals who research the relationship between light and disease.

“. . . exposure to light at night is a completely unnatural and alien experience,” said one of them. “. . .our brain has not evolved, ever, to see substantial amounts of light at night.”

Speaking with a sleep therapist, he hears that excessive use of night lighting “is the most important overlooked factor in our contemporary sleep and dream disorders epidemic.”

Bogard interviews lighting designers to learn what we can do to reduce light pollution, short of walking around in pitch blackness. He learns some towns and cities have embarked on major energy- and light-saving projects with wonderful effects.

Throughout the book, Bogard describes his visits both to the lightest places on Earth—Las Vegas, for example—and the darkest—like Death Valley. He asks us to imagine seeing a sky so clear it has depth, some stars closer and others farther away. Imagine noticing the colors of stars and planets. The End of Night, Paul Bogard—check it out.