Then I realize I can also hear faraway vehicles zooming along a highway beyond the trees.

The caretaker of one property in Melbourne Beach found hundreds of dead hatchlings piled beneath a single mercury-vapor lamp.

Many of these deaths could be avoided simply by replacing steady lights with blinking ones.

Sensory pollution is the pollution of disconnection. It detaches us from the cosmos.

“The thought of light traveling billions of years from distant galaxies only to be washed out in the last billionth of a second by the glow from the nearest strip mall depresses me to no end,”

About 40 percent of humankind is permanently bathed in the equivalent of perpetual moonlight, and about 25 percent constantly experiences an artificial twilight that exceeds the illumination of a full moon.

This often ignored phenomenon is called sensory pollution—human-made stimuli that interfere with the senses of other species.

Much of the devastation that we have wrought is by now familiar. We have changed the climate and acidified the oceans.

or red light, which doesn’t seem to.

Lights reshape animal communities, drawing some in and pushing others away, with consequences that are hard to predict.

mosquitoes bite me through my shirt, attracted by the smell of the carbon dioxide on my breath.

High-pitched sounds quickly lose energy in air, so bats must scream to make calls that are strong enough to return audible echoes.

From inside the Shiterator, I can hear the chirps of other roosting bats. As the sun sets, they start to emerge.

Over time, the school children of Austin bought in.

Folks were starting to come up with plans to exterminate the bats, to get them out of the bridge because they… everybody knew that they were dangerous and a threat to human health and safety.

At the time, people considered it their moral duty to feed them.

They were captured in the wilderness, brought into the city, and placed on a single tree, almost as if they were animals in a menagerie or a zoo.

are only there because we put them there.

In fact, squirrels were considered so elusive, the very wealthy liked to keep them as exotic pets

The formula will account for squirrels that were double-counted and ones no one managed to find, and then finally spit out a number that the world has been waiting for – the squirrel abundance number – the total population of eastern grey squirrels in Central Park, give or take.

how different languages divide up the color spectrum differently.

Controlled by humans and highly portable

(three-eighths of an inch) between every one of these columns. They were measured again and again – different hives, different times, different colonies – and it’s always three-eighths of an inch.

But it’s only in the last 30 years that pollination services, like the kind that John provides, have become such an enormous part of American agriculture.

John brings 13,000 hives over 1,500 miles to the Central Valley.

You can actually hear it before you even walk into the orchard (bees buzzing).

Lighter Later Campaign wasn’t just about moving the clocks up one hour in the winter, that campaign actually proposed that we double Daylight Saving Time in the summer.

across the entire territory and that’s China. Roman Mars: Huh. One timezone across the entire country.

So the railroad used the train network to keep track of time.

lightly tap on their customer’s window panes until they woke up.

So one hand is for locals — they’re still on the local time — the other is for people traveling in and out of the city.

For that matter, why not simply leave nature as it was? Why interfere with organic processes, adding shrubs here, thinning trees there?

The giddy impulse you feel, upon arriving at the Great Lawn or Sheep Meadow, to burst into a full-out sprint—that is by design.

It was understandable, the compulsion to tame and sterilize nature. Since the dawn of civilization, human beings had viewed the natural world with suspicion, if not terror. In the Bible, the word wilderness connotes dread, danger, bewilderment, chaos.

we have landscaped the entire world to suit our needs.

The cemetery problem, he felt, was an expression of a profound, universal desire that cities were neglecting to meet: the desire for public parks.

In A.D. 536, known as the worst year to be alive, one of Iceland’s volcanoes exploded, and darkness descended over the Northern Hemisphere, bringing summer snow to China and starvation to Ireland.

“There is famine in [our] house; we will all die of hunger. If you do not quickly arrive here, we ourselves will die of hunger. You will not see a living soul from your land.” This letter was sent between associates at a commercial firm in Syria with outposts spread across the region, as cities from the Levant to the Euphrates fell.

In fact, 3,200 years ago, an entire network of civilizations—a veritable globalized economy—fell apart when minor climate chaos struck.

By geologic standards, the climate has been remarkably stable ever since, until the sudden warming of the past few decades.

By 5,000 years ago, as humanity was emerging from its unlettered millennia, the ice had stopped melting and oceans that had been surging for 15,000 years finally settled on modern shorelines.

Beneath the Mediterranean today, hundreds of dark mud layers alternate with whiter muck, a barcode that marks the Sahara’s rhythmic switching from lush green to continent-spanning desert.

It’s easy to forget that the Earth—cozy, pastoral, familiar—is nevertheless a celestial body, and astronomy still has a vote in earthly affairs. Every 20,000 years or so the planet swivels about its axis, and 10,000 years ago, at civilization’s first light, the Earth’s top half was aimed toward the sun during the closest part of its orbit—an arrangement today enjoyed by the Southern Hemisphere.

The doomed vestiges of mile-thick ice sheets that had cloaked a third of North American land were retreating to the far corners of Canada, chased there by tundra and taiga. The roughly 13 quintillion gallons of meltwater these ice sheets would hemorrhage, in a matter of millennia, raised the sea level hundreds of feet, leaving coral reefs that had been bathed in sunlight under shallow waves now drowned in the deep.

It takes some doing to escape this cycle, but with CO2 as it is now, we won’t be returning to an ice age for the foreseeable future

As it turns out, we live on an ice-age planet, one marked by the swelling and disintegration of massive polar ice sheets in response to tiny changes in sunlight and CO2 levels.

The planet seems to respond far more aggressively to small provocations than it’s been projected to by many of our models.

When there’s been as much carbon dioxide in the air as there already is today—not to mention how much there’s likely to be in 50 or 100 years—the world has been much, much warmer, with seas 70 feet higher than they are today. Why? The planet today is not yet in equilibrium with the warped atmosphere that industrial civilization has so recently created. If CO2 stays at its current levels, much less steadily increases, it will take centuries—even millennia—for the planet to fully find its new footing.

But humanity’s ongoing chemistry experiment on our planet could push the climate well beyond those slim historical parameters, into a state it hasn’t seen in tens of millions of years, a world for which Homo sapiens did not evolve.

Today, atmospheric CO2 sits at 410 parts per million, a higher level than at any point in more than 3 million years. And humans are injecting more CO2 into the atmosphere at one of the fastest rates ever.

During the entire half-billion-year Phanerozoic eon of animal life, CO2 has been the primary driver of the Earth’s climate.

At some points in the Earth’s history, lots of CO2 has vented from the crust and leaped from the seas, and the planet has gotten warm.

CO2’s crucial role in warming the planet has been well understood.

Of more immediate interest today, a variation in the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere of as little as 0.1 percent has meant the difference between sweltering Arctic rainforests and a half mile of ice atop Boston.