The Symbolic Quest Behind Today’s Cities of Light— and its Unintended Ecological Consequences

Abstract

The symbol of light has commonly represented human desires for goodness, order, truth, perpetual abundance, and the transcendence of earthly limits. Modern practices of artificial light cultivation remain associated with a symbolic promise to banish darkness and its corollaries-lack, death, ignorance, disease, and chaos. In today's global and increasingly urbanized world this association is most notably emblematized in the modem city, which is lit up at night in a technologically brilliant display that ironically also conveys the deepening ecological disaster of anthropogenic climate change. Responding to German philosopher Hans Blumenberg's essay 'Light as a Metaphor for Truth', this article seeks to uncover the ways that technological figurations of light transform an ancient association with freedom into dangerous practices of fuel fetish and over-consumption. Increased awareness of such habits of overconsumption could help to decrease urban light pollution and the ecological danger that it signifies.

Afterword: the utopian dreaming of modernity and its ecological cost

“…Berry planet as co-created, evidence of enormous inventive power but also dangerous hubris, a set of cultural marks that reveals the abstract nature of modern technologies, which act upon the planet as if from above yet are capable of destroying so much in the same dream. This power is paradoxical in its attempt to manifest transcendence even as it acts in denial of our dependence upon the earth (Berry 2013). But it also reveals something much more humble, a tradition we continue to perpetuate regardless of our sociopolitical affiliations -that of the human proclivity to leave our mark as story.…”