Swiss Review 6/2019

Swiss Review / November 2019 / No.6 10 Sciences MARC LETTAU One thing is for sure: the Ottenleue- bad hamlet on a sunny mountain slope in the municipality of Guggis- berg (BE) is not exciting. It may have been in the past. A health spa was opened there in 1886, i.e. a slightly in- famous wellness and pleasure facility. However, the thriving, sensual bath- ing culture of that time has com- pletely disappeared. Nowadays, it is truly unspectacular oncemore: a few farms and weekend homes, grazing cows, and circling birds of prey. Oc- casionally, you can hear a dog bark- ing. Sometimes a mushroom picker wanders past. he peaks of the Bernese-Fribourg alpine foothills tower over the southern horizon. Gantrisch, Bürglen, Ochsen, Kai- seregg. This pre-alpine world forms the Gantrisch Nature Park. Take the fuse out The only thing which stands out in Ottenleuebad today is the large num- ber of small observatories. On moon- less nights, the area seems to attract stargazers, and their numbers will probably increase further. That is be- cause, although the nights have al- ready been quite dark up to now, they have been a shade darker since 30 Au- gust 2019. That was when Guggis- berg’s mayor, Hanspeter Schneiter, unscrewed the electrical fuse of Ottenleuebad’s few streetlights with- out further ado. As they say in the area, it was “as dark as the inside of a cow” afterwards. The Milky Way is visible to the naked eye Schneiter made it dark because the sparsely populated, remote region had seen the light. The night is disap- pearing everywhere, but not in Ot- tenleuebad where you can still see the Milky Way on clear nights. That is no longer possible in the Swiss ur- ban areas because of the omnipresent artificial light. The night-time dark- ness has therefore become something special in areas where it still exists at all. For this reason, large portions of the Gantrisch Nature Park have been designated a star park, i.e., an area where the night is protected. Those in charge at the Gantrisch Nature Park have been planning the very first Swiss star park for years (see “Review” 5/2016 for further informa- tion). It has not been an easy road, says project manager Nicole Dahin- den: “You first need to understand the importance of the night.” How- ever, now she is excited by “the dark heart” of the star park, i.e. the 100 square kilometres of the large core zone in the central area of the Nature Park that is well shielded by the mountains. The light comes from the outside As Dahinden knows, a dark heart does not remain that waywhen everything around it depends on illumination. The star park, this little Swiss cham- ber of darkness, cannot become even darker by itself: “Light enters the park from the outside.” So, cities in particu- lar have to combat light pollution. Turn off the light and be lit up by the stars Switzerland has its first star park, an area where special care is taken to preserve the darkness of the night. This is much more than a romantic project.