Do we see more clearly than before?
In Montreal, as in many other large cities, night lighting was first the business of lamplighters. Small armies of men, armed with long poles, went out at nightfall to chase the darkness from the streets. They lit, one by one, gaslights placed in lanterns.
These installations had replaced, in the middle of the XIXe century, the rare streetlamps previously powered by foul-smelling oil extracted from whales. Harpooners, like the famous Queequeg in Moby-Dick, did they know that their work was destined to pierce the night as much as the flanks of the largest marine mammals? In any case, the torches and the lamps, affirmed Herman Melville, burned on the whole earth to the glory of the hunters of whale.
The geography of our nights was radically transformed the day when, in the 1880s, the incandescence of electric lamps chased away the flickering of the fragile flame. The lamplighters were relegated to the memories of the enchanted stories of all the amateurs dazzled by the tales of the Little Prince. Remember that single lamplighter, busy lighting up his planet faster and faster? “The order has not changed,” said the lighter, aware that he was doing a terrible job. “The planet has turned faster and faster from year to year, and the instructions have not changed! So he turned on and off, over and over again, without asking himself any questions.
Never, in the history of humanity, has our nights been lit up as much as today. To the point that it becomes a real trait of society. A feature so dazzling that we hardly notice it anymore, so dazzled by it.
Yes, we are crazy about lighting. It has become Christmas all year round. Never seen.
Illuminated murals. Illuminated public buildings. Illuminated towers. Illuminated private houses. Illuminated monuments. Illuminated bridges. See the new Samuel-De Champlain Bridge. It appears, according to the seasons, in green, blue, red, yellow or white, in all its length, as if it were an absolute necessity not to miss it. It has even been written that its lights “embodie the spirit of Montreal”. In the other cities of the world, where we basically do the same thing, it is also “the spirit of Montreal” that is embodied there, I suppose?
We went crazy everywhere with night lighting. Yet we know, more than ever, how much this nighttime light pollution affects insects and animals. Humans are no exception. Excess light disturbs his sleep cycle. They would also cause other physical problems. And yet, we light up even more!
Aren’t we a bit enlightened to want to light everything up to this point?
In downtown Montreal, half a million lights have just been installed. Half a million ! These small LED lamps, deployed on large arteries, promise to illuminate the “economic recovery”. To celebrate the power that money and consumption have over our lives, nothing like an orgy of lights.
The light, the powers of money like to invest themselves in it. The commerce we make of the world has long loved to light up with bliss. In 1855, when the British and French colonial armies won the siege of Sebastopol during the Crimean War, the Bank of Montreal saw fit, to celebrate this butchery, to turn the spotlight on itself, by illuminating its head office. A century later, the Royal Bank of Canada has made light beams its distinctive sign. Since 1962, the four beams of the Royal Bank’s beacon at the top of Place Ville Marie have been sweeping the night sky of Montreal, for more than a hundred kilometers around. Many still imagine that it is lighting related to the needs of aviation. It’s just decorative lighting, supposed to give credit to a bank that now makes more than $10 billion in profits every year.
To celebrate the curious festivities of 375e Montreal’s anniversary, it was apparently necessary to urgently light the Jacques-Cartier Bridge. It was, so to speak, reproached for being only minimally so since its inauguration in 1930, as if it were a question of a deep flaw in the design. Engineers, electricians, welders, cablers worked day and night to illuminate this structure using 2,800 lights, supported by more than 10,000 fixings. Lifespan of the set: about 30,000 hours, or just under 4 years, if all this were to be used continuously. Total cost of the operation: nearly 40 million dollars. Lighting a steel structure: this is all that the 375 will have lefte Montreal’s birthday.
Meanwhile, a large part of society remains in the shadows. How many homes are disconnected each year by Hydro-Québec because the occupants can no longer pay for the light that illuminates them? Before the pandemic, more or less 50,000 homes were thus deprived of electricity each year. These numbers are thankfully down sharply, apparently due to new ways of doing things.
What do we want to see so much, by dint of lighting up our nights as if it were a priority for society? Faced with this widespread dazzling, how can we see clearly when we are told paradoxically everywhere that energy sobriety is a necessity for the future? The essential is invisible to the eyes, said the Little Prince.
Sometimes it seems to me anyway that we are not lights.