• By DANNY HEITMAN
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: Nov 13, 2009 - Page: 1D

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If you tuned in for this column a few weeks ago, then you’ll know it included a few words for the beauty of darkness, a feature of the late-night landscape that isn’t what it used to be.

Or at least that’s what Verlyn Klinkenborg had concluded in “Our Vanishing Night,” a National Geographic article from last year that’s been anthologized in a new book, “The Best American Essays 2009.”

Klinkenborg’s main point:

As our suburbs grow, and the lights of development bring more and more illumination to the countryside, night itself might become a thing of the past.

Gone will be the pitch-dark blackness in which star-gazers get a clear view of the sky.

And if true darkness goes the way of the dodo bird, all sorts of animals might lose a critical cue they need for mating and migration.

Human health might be affected, too.

Klinkenborg mentioned that better lighting design can help by focusing more artificial light downward, rather than upward and into the sky, where it bleaches out the blackness that makes night so special.

But the problem of light pollution is nothing new, as reader John Charrier kindly reminded me by sending along “Whither Darkness,” an essay in “All My Meadows,” a collection of thoughts on country life published by Patricia Penton Leimbach in 1977.

“It’s clear to me that the dark-loving night person is an endangered species, and I happen to be one of them,” Leimbach wrote back then.

“I can’t help resenting all the electricity wasted pushing back the peaceful dark.”

Leimbach’s long-ago comment came back to me last weekend as my 8-year-old son and I joined other Cub Scout families at an isolated campground between Lafayette and Alexandria.

At a remove from the city lights, the stars of the sky had a digital clarity, each pinpoint thrown into high definition against a canopy of velvet black.