“Just remember this, my girl, when you look up in the sky, you can see the stars and still not see the light.”

The Eagles, 1974

“And remember this, too: that you can miss the stars, or lose them altogether, if you refuse to see the light.”

Michael Silver, Toronto mediation arbitrator, September 2017

In the world of astronomy and cosmology, the name Mike Silver is at best a subatomic speck among names such as Nicholaus Copernicus, Galileo Galilei and Stephen Hawking.

Silver does own a telescope. And he has been known to chase the occasional solar eclipse. And like Galileo, who was condemned as a heretic for suggesting that the Earth was not the centre of the universe, Silver has, as a friend put it, “had his ass kicked for his beliefs.”

And, in the name of astronomy, he has kicked ass in return. Last August, for example, he provoked a five-star dust-up in the Gravenhurst Municipal Council Chamber by accusing the assembled politicians of persistently neglecting their legal obligation to prevent light pollution in and around Gravenhurst. In their delinquency, claimed Silver, they were ruining night-sky visibility at the nearby Torrance Barrens Dark Sky Reserve, a world-renowned star-viewing park on Gravenhurst’s northwest boundary.

What’s more, they were doing so in violation of their own dark-sky bylaw. And that is something that, during the past couple of years, Silver has become extremely sensitive about. And with good reason. The famous reserve, which Silver was instrumental in creating two decades ago, is fast losing the one glorious asset on which its heralded existence depends: a dark sky — and thus visible stars and planets.

At its founding, environmentalists hailed the reserve as a radical initiative in ecological preservation. No one had yet thought to include darkness and the clarity of the night sky among inviolable ecological legacies, such as uncontaminated soil, breathable air and clean water. “The pathetic truth,” says Silver, “is that nobody had even thought of the visible heavens as something that could be lost. Forever. And yet here we are today, clearly losing this magnificent resource.”

By the time the Torrance Barrens Dark Sky Reserve was officially dedicated in 2000, the Royal Astronomical Society had endorsed it, as had astronomers and ecologists in half a dozen countries. And Silver, as much as any amateur stargazer, had emerged as a kind of avatar of public access to the epic natural laboratory in which Copernicus, Galileo and others had sorted out the cosmos.

Silver’s pitch to Gravenhurst council last summer was supported by a dozen or more governmental agencies and ecologists, including the U.S. astronaut and environmentalist, Mark Kelly, and Kelly’s wife, the Arizona ex-congresswoman, Gabrielle Giffords. The Canadian astronomer Terence Dickinson once pronounced the dark-sky park a gem, “a kind of miracle” so close to Toronto.

“When Terence came to see the reserve for the first time, in 1999,” confides Silver, “he said to me quietly, ‘We should keep it a secret.’ I said, ‘Not gonna happen.’ We wanted people to come and see it. Use it. Hike around on it. Set up a telescope. Appreciate what it means. That was the only way it stood a chance of surviving.”

Among other things, Silver reminded Gravenhurst council that the lighting on the town’s impressive new welcome sign, on Highway 11, was in clear violation of the town’s dark-sky bylaw. “Your own sign! Your own regulations!” he pleaded. Moreover, he demanded to know why a massive McDonald’s sign on the edge of town had been granted dispensation from the bylaws when it, too, was flagrantly in violation of them.

And what about this sign? And that one? And, by the way, had there been any progress in urging the real estate giant, RioCan, to permanently reduce lighting intensity on the “insanely overlit” parking lot at its two-hectare shopping centre on the south side of town? At the moment, Silver told council, the only restriction on that lighting was a gentleman’s agreement that he had negotiated personally with a RioCan executive who promised to keep half the centre’s outdoor lights turned off. “But that,” Silver lamented, “is not a lasting solution” to curbing lighting that, at full intensity, “entirely wipes out star-viewing” at the nearby reserve.

For his troubles in excoriating council, Silver was shouted down by a pair of councillors and was all but run out of the council chamber with his supporters, as the disorderly meeting was suspended.

“Oh, they treated him abominably,” says a prominent Gravenhurst businessman who was ringside for the skirmish. “You’d have thought he was an outlaw.”

Which is perhaps not the worst thing one might think about the 58-year-old Toronto lawyer and mediator. For, in his quixotically charming and nettlesome way, Silver is indeed a bit of an outlaw — or more accurately, a scofflaw, at least when it comes to standing up for the environment. By his own account, he once “crashed” a $500-a-plate World Wildlife Fund event and seated himself beside the artist Robert Bateman, who Silver says gave him invaluable artistic advice as they dined. At the same event, he corralled the Duke of Edinburgh and the then-premier of Ontario, Bob Rae, and implored them to support his campaign to have the aforementioned Torrance Barrens (which eventually became the dark-sky reserve) designated a permanent conservation site.

That was 1992, and at the time the 2,000-hectare Barrens were not everybody’s idea of a landscape worth protecting. Located off District Road #13, west of Torrance, about 200 kilometres north of Toronto, the arid rockscape was, and remains, the unreconstructed Golgotha of the Muskoka Lakes: domes of parched granite, skeletal stumps, bogs the colour of old blood. It is a place seemingly better suited to spiders, snakes and fire ants than to the average Muskoka vacationer in search of a shady pine and a tall double gin.

When the film director David Cronenberg wanted a freakish visual setting for a driving scene in his 1993 movie, Naked Lunch — “wanted a total geophysical scab,” noted the actor Peter Weller, who starred in the film — he chose a tortuous rural road that hooks and humps across the Barrens.

“To me, the Barrens have always been one of the most beautiful landscapes on Earth,” says Silver, who has a cottage on nearby Clear Lake.

It was in that rhapsodic spirit, in 1993, that Silver went to work with numerous others to bring the rarefied ecology of the Barrens under environmental protection. “It was a fantastic community effort,” says Silver, citing a host of Barrens backers that included the provincial government, various cottaging associations, ratepayer groups and local municipalities.

However, by the time the Barrens were officially declared a conservation area in 1998, a strange thing had happened. Visitors to the area who lingered beyond sunset, or camped out overnight, had begun to notice something that a sprinkling of locals had known for decades but had never thought to mention, let alone publicize: that when the sun and moon are down, and the flashlights and fires have been extinguished, the Barrens can be preternaturally, even spookily, dark. Which of course makes the stars and planets and meteor showers gloriously visible.

“Because there are no trees to speak of,” says Silver, “you can get up on one of those granite whalesbacks and get a 360-degree view of the night sky. On a clear night, it’s just a gorgeous natural planetarium.”

Word spread. Before long, people were coming to the Barrens specifically to see the stars.

For Silver, the possibility of preserving that darkness — “perhaps making a kind of park of it” — became another obvious ambition-stoker. “A few years prior to that,” he says, “for reasons I had no control over, I’d been turned down for partnership in the law firm where I’d been working. It was an extremely discouraging time for me. One day when I was more or less on bottom, I remember thinking, ‘Well, it doesn’t look like I’m going to achieve anything professionally in this life. But I’m damn well still going to achieve something personally — to do the world some good!’ ”

Silver embarked on the new preservation idea with the guidance of Toronto architect Peter Goering from the Muskoka Heritage Association, and the support of an expanded array of municipalities and agencies, including the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources. The lot of them were quickly fixated on having the Barrens recognized as the world’s first dark-sky reserve, a place where the wonders of the night sky would be formally protected against the exponentially expanding encroachments of 21st-century light pollution. “Against the very thing that is going on in Gravenhurst right now,” says Silver.

Far from being a detriment to this radical new version of Muskoka night life, the park’s aridity, its crusted granite, its prickly mosses and bog muck were, in their way, its greatest intrinsic assets.

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Had this uniquely desolate landscape not (to quote the novelist Irvine Welsh) “been shat into creation” by the Wisconsin glacier, which dragged its weary tail north some 10,000 years ago, the territory today would be just another paradise of white pine and shoreline. And boat ramps and parking spots and septic fields. And power lines and transformers. And of course a gazillion glowing watts’ worth of electric lights. In other words, typical Muskoka cottage country. But because of the terrain, cottage builders have left the Barrens to the warblers, wasps, and garter snakes — and, at night, to the fireflies and stars.

For me all of this is personal. My ancestors are from Bracebridge and Bala, and my family has always kept a cabin within a few kilometres of the Barrens. When I was a child during the 1950s, my dad would take my sisters and me over to the Barrens during the annual Pleiades meteor shower in mid-August. We’d lie on a blanket on the granite and watch the shooting stars and search for the constellations, and gaze into the Milky Way.

Eventually, I took my own kids to the Barrens to see what my dad often referred to as “The Greatest Show on Earth.”

Beyond a lasting sense of wonder, the legacy of these outings is an appreciative if partial awareness of the enigmas of time and space, and of the contribution of the stars to our scientific and cultural riches. Pythagoras realized in 500 BC that the mathematics of Earth and the mathematics of the galaxies are one. David Thompson’s first map of North America during the early 1800s was devised from the particulars of the heavens. Van Gogh’s Starry Night, one of the dreamiest and most disturbing of paintings, is said to convey the mysteries of the human heart as the artist perceived them while locked in the asylum in Saint-Rémy during the days before his suicide.

At night, when I was a boy, you could look south from Clear Lake, across the Torrance Barrens, toward the town of Gravenhurst, into a sky as black as ink. The same view, today, even on a clear night, is a kind of electro-misted haze, variably greenish, yellowish, pinkish, and devoid of stars. On many nights, you can’t see the Milky Way.

During the months following the creation of the dark-sky reserve, local governments, cottaging associations and conservation agencies flocked to support it, aware that it would draw healthy attention and a stream of respectful visitors to Muskoka. The reserve would also be a kind of model for a refreshing ecological future.

Because Gravenhurst was the closest significant town, its commitment was crucial both to the spirit of the reserve and to the particulars of keeping artificial light earthbound and at levels that would not interfere with star watching. Plans for all new developments would have to show appropriate lighting to gain council approval. Signs would have to be lit from above. Internally lit signs were out.

And initially, Gravenhurst rose to the occasion. When the extensive waterfront development called Muskoka Wharf came into being in 2006, the hundreds of outdoor lights chosen for the project were “full cutoff,” meaning that all illumination was prevented from escaping upward or outward. The intensity of the lights was modest. Mike Silver was an adviser on the choice of those lights. He says, “Compared to today, it just seems so ironic that the town was quite happy back then to let me influence these important choices. And we were all very proud of the results.”

A subsequent initiative to replace the town’s streetlights began the gradual installation of some 800 lamps that town planner Scott Lucas says are fully compliant with international standards of dark-sky lighting.

Then in 2009, the town passed its multi-part dark-sky bylaw. “The problem with it,” says Silver, “is that there’s never been adequate enforcement. When there’s a violation, the town often just looks the other way. So we’re still getting all sorts of light pollution.”

When he scolded council over its delinquency last August, Silver cited half a dozen signs that he says violate the bylaw, including the major sign at McDonald’s, as well as a pair at Harvey’s and Swiss Chalet. Lucas contends that the latter two signs are exempt because they were installed before the bylaw was passed. “Which is simply not true,” says Silver. The McDonald’s sign is exempt, says Lucas, because it sits within 200 metres of a district highway. “Which is technically true,” says Silver, “but McDonald’s was perfectly aware of the bylaw and its intent when they put the sign up; they applied for the exemption.” Silver says the message to everybody is that “big corporations don’t have to pay attention to the environment.”

As for the lighting on the town’s stylish new welcome sign on Highway 11 — lighting that for years pointed straight skyward — Lucas accepts that the lighting should have been changed when the sign was renewed a year ago. In response to protest, it has indeed now been changed.

What still rankles Silver more than anything is the excessive lighting in the parking lots at the huge RioCan shopping centre on Gravenhurst’s south side. Lucas insists that the centre’s full-cutoff lighting is fully compliant with the centre’s original site plan agreement with the town. But Silver vehemently denies it. Whatever the case and technicalities, when the lights went on nearly a decade ago, the explosion of reflected light was an all but ruinous assault not just on the Barrens but on the spirit of the town’s erstwhile support for the reserve.

“When I saw it,” says Silver, “I just thought immediately, we’re finished. You could hardly see a star at the reserve, 10 kilometres away.” Silver places little lasting confidence in the private agreement he made several years ago with a company executive to keep half the lights off. “I’m so grateful for the agreement,” he says, “but the very nature of it should be all the evidence anybody needs of the precariousness of the reserve’s existence. I’ve asked the town to formalize it; I don’t know why they won’t.”

Asked in a recent email if the town was as committed as ever to the values and existence of the Dark Sky Reserve, Gravenhurst Mayor Paisley Donaldson declined to comment, passing the question along to Scott Lucas. Nor did she respond to a 2017 letter from Mike Silver, in which he pleaded for understanding from the town. And she was not in attendance for Silver’s presentation to council last August.

“The reserve has had support and understanding from the Township of Muskoka Lakes, from the District of Muskoka and from all sorts of other agencies, including the ministry of natural resources,” says Silver. “But without a genuine commitment from Gravenhurst, it’s all for nothing.”

Reflecting recently on the reserve’s decreasing likelihood of survival, Silver said, “For every person who’s not onside, there’s somebody who is. Unfortunately, there are also a dozen who couldn’t care less. The big apathy. I know if we could get them out there on a clear night, they’d be blown away. They’d be with us forever.”

When it was suggested to Silver that certain Gravenhurst council members might benefit from an evening under the stars, he says, “We should all be getting out there. When you’re up on those rocks in the dark, gazing at the immensity of the night sky, a lot of what bothers us on Earth can suddenly seem pretty small, pretty solvable.”

Another good reason to preserve the view.