Africa really is the Dark Continent!

[The Great Quail]

Arne Eeyore Petersen writes,

>And the people who go wow, see all the pretty lights and swoon over the
>light pollution are the same people who used to admire billowing
>smokestacks and see them as symbols of "progress", whatever that may be.

And, uh, you are currently using a computer and sucking down 
electricity from the grid, in what may or may not be a house with 
electric lights, because, ah....?

I for one find the composite image lovely. Lights make things 
beautiful -- Christmas trees, sunsets, artillery exchanges, Grateful 
Dead shows, the unscrolling land seen from an airplane at night.  In 
the right mind-set, you can even look at an oil refinery at night, 
lit in a sodium haze, and see a fey wonderland. It's partly a 
function of aesthetics, and does not necessarily and fully equate to 
a political/moral stance about the beauty of progress. Nor would I 
accept your moral/environmental equation that billowing smokestacks 
equal light pollution. I for one find the canyons of New York at 
night just as beautiful as a waterfall in a deep forest.

So I have to ask, with respect: Why must you see everything 
exclusively from a political viewpoint? Must all beauty meet some 
sort of "progressive" criteria? I am not saying that you couldn't or 
shouldn't use this image for political purposes -- illustrating, 
perhaps, light pollution, or the lack of so-called "progress" in the 
Third World, or as proof of a NASA conspiracy to make us all believe 
the sun has somehow been blotted out. It does, however, seem 
*willfully* joyless and almost pointlessly critical.

Just my opinion,

--Quail