On seeing (and not seeing) the Milky Way

Student Ethan Smallwood delivered this speech about the night sky as his culmination of the Climate Leadership Retreat in Martha’s Vineyard in July 2025. Read about our upcoming retreats in California and Martha’s Vineyard and how to apply.

I have seen the Milky Way almost three times in my life. Once, on Martha’s Vineyard, beautifully accompanied by tall grass and folk music, good people and good conversation. I saw it once, too, on the side of I-70 near the Kansas-Colorado border, a respite from days on the road driving from the hills of Tennessee to the hills of California. That time the tall grass was replaced with brambles, bottles, and the other common features of congestion in the concrete arteries of this nation. The folk music was replaced by the echoes of folks in their trucks and tractors, backfiring the tones of industry and breaking AM radio across the flatlands and concrete deltas of the Great Plains.

That third time, though, stands alone. In the dunes of Joshua Tree, I saw no signs of us on the ground: No lights from big-rigs broke the viscous dark and there was no tall grass — only grass whose distinction makes no sense when there are no lawns for forty miles. On the horizon, I saw mountains punching up into the sky, casting rigid shadows on the ground, constantly in some kind of combat with the unyielding light of the white new moon.

I wanted to look up and see the Milky Way, as I thought I ought’ve before, sprawling like a divine flower, blue and purple that seats us like a throne — wearing pollen crowns. I didn’t see anything. Not that time. I looked up and saw us. There were lines of satellites that danced their arc across the sky, like an invading army of ants belligerent up some abandoned table. I saw, too, the clouds of light and nightly haze born from Los Angeles and Palm Springs so many miles away. There were stars spattered across the sky, and far more than I could often see, but the Milky Way withheld itself; a hidden tapestry forced into unceremonious retreat by the light and living hunger of humanity. 

Beyond just the pollution of our light, we, too, see it fit to inflict upon our night sky the same punishments we abandon on the side of the interstate; we gift to it the various carcasses and detritus of our lives and ambitions — we demand, by light, for the sky to watch us, to see us. It closes its eyes to us in response. We know now, more than ever, what comes of this great demand. We see the stars die before us in the sky, not through a cessation of their light, but an infliction of ours. Our satellites and planes dart across the sky as strobes of private enterprise, inflicting themselves on a view that is the birthright of all humanity. Where has the sky fled to?

That is not the question posed to us, instead we are asked to think of rocket ships and radical efforts at escape. They ask us “why not flee to the sky?” There is no second plan, nor second planet — it is not our sky to lose. It is the sky of our children, and theirs, just as it was our fathers’, and theirs. This is our planet — but not just ours. We are momentary caretakers in a cosmic race against our own self-destruction and the twin belligerents of entropy and time. It is our command to conserve what has been conserved for us. Do not let the blazing eyes of the divine set upon us; do not let the sky go black; do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Want more? Read another student piece, about the future of transportation.