And yet, in a few weeks I’ll be objecting, in person, to a floating sauna on a lake in Te Anau. Not because I dislike saunas, but because it will bring light. Small, tasteful light, no doubt. But light in a place where darkness still has integrity and the aurora shines inspirationally.
Once you start thinking about light, you notice it everywhere.
Drive past Macraes at night, and it glows — a tight cluster of industry pressed into the hills. By day, it’s harder to romanticise: a vast rearrangement of the land. A scab, if we’re honest. But one we accept, because it produces something tangible.
At night, though, it extracts something else.
Darkness.
And darkness is something we don’t value properly.
From Middlemarch, I sometimes leave an all-sky camera running. The result is never just stars. There’s a faint green sheen — airglow — the atmosphere quietly shining. Sometimes an aurora drifts through. None of it shouts. You have to wait. You have to notice.
Tourism brings light. Industry brings light. Satellites now stitch faint lines across the sky. All of it makes sense, individually.
Progress usually does.
But the night sky doesn’t argue its case. It doesn’t invoice. It doesn’t employ.
What it offers is harder to measure: perspective. A sense — brief but real — that we are part of something vast and ongoing.
Is it selfish to argue for that?
Maybe. I’m not entirely comfortable doing it.
But I do wonder if we are too quick to trade something irreplaceable for things that, in the end, are not. We are very good at counting what we can extract, sell, or book. We are not as good at counting inspiration.
And yet it’s inspiration that quietly shapes who we become.
The lights will continue to spread. They always have. This isn’t about turning them off.
It’s about choosing where they go.
Because once the dark is gone, it doesn’t come back.
