The Japanese language holds a word that Maltese life urgently needs: yūgen. It describes a profound awareness of the universe, a feeling too deep and mysterious for speech. Classical poets evoked it through one simple act: gazing quietly at the night sky. Neither English nor Maltese offers a correct translation, and that absence tells its own story. This existence eliminates any space for sentiment, much less its utterance.

Nowadays, the primary reason most of us gaze skyward is to see if rain might disrupt our plans. Daily life in Malta has become a relay race between traffic, work, screens and sleep. We rush past the heavens the way we rush past each other. A full moon on a cloudless night extends a golden invitation, and we rarely accept it. When did you last sit outdoors after midnight and simply look up? Most of us, to be honest, can trace the answer back to our childhood. Some of us remember summers before the building boom devoured our open horizons. We counted shooting stars from flat rooftops while the village slept below us. Those rooftops still stand, but the wonder at them has largely vanished.

We should feel more shame regarding these loss figures. In 2016, Fabio Falchi and his colleagues published the World Atlas of Artificial Night Sky Brightness. The atlas found artificial glow hiding the Milky Way from one-third of humanity. Sixty percent of Europeans no longer recognize their galaxy. Malta ranked third worst in the entire world, behind only Singapore and San Marino. Light pollution conceals the Milky Way across 89% of our territory. Worse still, the atlas listed the populations that cannot see the galaxy from home. Only five appear on that list, and Malta stands among them. We share the distinction with Singapore, San Marino, Kuwait, and Qatar. Each of those is a city-state or a desert petro-economy. We achieved the same result on a Mediterranean island our grandparents knew as dark.

A University of Malta study confirmed the picture in 2020 and found it worsening yearly. The Milky Way remains visible from just 12.8% of the island's area. Exclude Gozo, and light pollution smothers 96% of what remains. Birkirkara glows brightest in Malta, while Victoria and Għajnsielem lead the ranking in Gozo. The researchers quickly identified the usual suspects: brightly lit monuments, churches, shops, showrooms, billboards, and squares. They also flagged blue-rich LED road lighting as a fresh, self-inflicted wound. The Mellieħa bypass fixtures, put in place from 2018 to 2019, significantly increased sky brightness. The public allocated funds to reduce the visibility of stars.

Think about the implications for a child born in Birkirkara today. Her grandparents watched the Milky Way arch over their rooftops on August nights. She might grow up associating the Milky Way solely with a candy bar. That sentence sounds like a joke until you sit with it for a moment. An entire generation risks growing up without ever meeting its own galaxy. Children learn that the sky contains clouds, a scorching sun, and occasionally a bright moon. Nobody shows them the countless stars above the glare, keeping secrets centuries may not unlock. You cannot miss what you have never seen, and that is precisely the tragedy.

We did not lose the sky by accident. We traded it away, block by block, for the concrete boxes crowding every horizon. Development swallowed the fields, then the village edges, then the quiet coastal fringes. Each new façade demanded its floodlight, each showroom its glare, each billboard its halo. After dark, how many bays and beaches retain true darkness and authentic peacefulness? The reader will struggle to name three, and the list shortens every year. The environment that once framed our lives now chokes them, and the damage reaches upward.

Gozo still guards one precious remnant of the sky we lost. The 2002 Gozo and Comino Local Plan designated Dwejra a Dark Sky Heritage Area. A court sentence in 2019 underscored the weight of that designation. On a clear night there, the Milky Way still rises over Fungus Rock in glory. Yet the protection lives mostly on paper while the glow creeps closer. In March 2025, environmental groups voiced serious concerns about growing light pollution at Dwejra. Their proposed remedy costs nothing: switch the site's lights off at sundown. Seabirds depend on that darkness far more critically than we humans do. The cliffs host hundreds of breeding pairs of Yelkouan and Scopoli's shearwaters, alongside storm-petrels. Artificial light disorients the fledglings, which ground themselves inland instead of flying out to sea. A nation that cannot dim a few lamps for its rarest birds has lost perspective.

None of these demands heroic policies or painful sacrifices. Warmer LEDs, downward-pointing shields, and curfews on decorative floodlighting would transform our nights quickly. The 2020 study itself proposed buffer zones and curfews for monuments, billboards, and showrooms. Numerous reports preceded these recommendations, which now rest in a drawer. Various countries are now capitalizing on their dark skies, experiencing growth in astro-tourism. Gozo, with Dwejra as its crown jewel, could join them almost overnight. Visitors already cross the channel for silence, country walks and clear water. The Milky Way over the Inland Sea would give them a reason to stay overnight. The same island that markets its tranquillity as a selling point should also market its stars.

Economics does not form the core of this argument. Stand outside on a quiet, sleepless night and look up instead of inward. The vastness above has a strange way of shrinking our worries to their correct size. Problems that filled the bedroom ceiling dissolve into a canvas of ancient light. Sleep often follows, sweeter for the perspective the stars quietly provided. Our ancestors knew this free medicine and received it every clear night. We owe the younger generation the chance to know it too. They deserve the discovery that the universe belongs to them to admire and explore. The Japanese gave the feeling a name and treasured it for a thousand years. We only need to give it back its darkness. The sky above asks for nothing except a switched-off lamp and a little time. No government needs to build anything; it only needs to stop drowning the darkness. Let us grant the sky its due, before we forget what we turned off.