This piece was written as an assignment about “Place and Positionality in the Anthropocene” for an Environmental Justice class. By Mayumi Liz de Andrade Miyazato.
A piece of the firmament embedded in the foot of the mountain range
| Mairiporã, paraíso aqui na terra/ És um pedaço do céu incrustado ao pé da serra | Mairiporã, paradise here on earth/ You are a piece of the firmament embedded in the foot of the mountain range — Campos, Athos (Mairiporã’s anthem) |
The Cruzeiro do Sul (Crux) was the first constellation I learned to identify in Mairiporã’s dark sky. It consists of five main stars resembling a kite (although Europeans determined it was a cross), making it easy to recognize even among hundreds of other celestial dots. When I was 5, my father used to take me to our garden in the middle of the night just to contemplate this constellation. We took two chairs from the kitchen without my mother noticing and sat outside, looking up into the infinitude of the cosmos. Some crickets accompanied us, breaking the silence with their nightly serenades to the fireflies. Like me, they loved living on the hill, surrounded by the Atlantic Forest, and with one of the most beautiful views of the sky in Mairiporã.
Mairiporã is a town in the north of São Paulo’s Metropolitan Region, located in Serra da Cantareira (Cantareira Mountain Range). It is one of the only places that still conserves part of Brazil’s remaining Atlantic Forest. It is also the place I grew up in. Like many Paulistanos, my parents moved to Mairiporã to escape the fast-paced, anthropocentric, and “permanently polluted world” (Liboiron et al. 2018) of São Paulo. I was only one year old at the time but already coughed like a smoker. So leaving the big city was urgent. Coming to Mairiporã, my parents found a good place to raise me. In the high altitudes of Serra da Cantareira, air contamination could not reach my lungs.
Mairiporã is famous for its parks, waterfalls, and hikes in the woods—a true piece of heaven in the mountain ridge. Travel websites usually pitch it by highlighting “Nature close to São Paulo” (Temporada Livre 2020): a refuge from the vast Paulistana concrete island. For me, there was no other place that reflected this paradise better than the small forest in the wasteland next to my home. I lived in the high part of Mairiporã, on a small hill with few neighbors around. The trees that shared the space with me and my parents usually bent over the walls in my house, bringing into the backyard bromeliads’ smells, crickets, spiders, geckos, and a bunch of fireflies that camouflaged with the stars.
Thanks to the dynamism surrounding me, I grew up intercalating between paying attention to the ground and observing the cosmos. Mairiporã is close to the sky, making any kid discover early the white dots that populated the darkness. But as days passed and I grew older, the stars started to disappear slowly, one by one. The night was becoming bright and orange, until it turned into an eternal twilight. Mairiporã was growing with me, progressing at the cost of the evening and the Cruzeiro do Sul beautiful sight.
During the time I lived on the hill, Mairiporã experienced a boom in its socioeconomic demographics. Its population grew 30% from 2000 to 2010 (IBGE 2011) and maintained this trend during the last ten years (Vasconcelo 2021). Such expansion raised the amount of pollution from electric lighting, a hallmark of the Anthropocene (Ditmer 2021), and a side effect of urbanization. Slow and silent, light pollution advances by the inappropriate or excessive use of artificial light by building exterior and interior illumination, advertising, commercial properties, offices, factories, and streetlights (IDA 2017). It disguises itself as development, enlightening the darkness in the name of security and beauty while it disrupts biological cycles and disrupts living beings’ connections to the night.
Near my home, Mairiporã’s urban expansion impacts came through a country house settlement on the hill’s top. There, lights produced a barrier that suppressed constellations in the sky and spread much beyond the limits of the new building. Fireflies became scarce, as they use their lights to reproduce, but artificial illumination blinds their partners and traps them in solitude (Thancharoen 2008). Crickets also stopped singing, once the non-differentiation of daytime and evening confused them, making them easy targets for predators (Botha 2017). Bromeliads too blossomed earlier in the day, disseminating their smell only for dusk. Inside my home, no one was safe either. Brightness invaded our bedrooms, so sleeping was almost impossible. My mother became too irritated to let me borrow the kitchen chairs, and my father became too exhausted to go outside with me and contemplate the cosmos. The magical nights in my garden became desert. No Cruzeiro do Sul. No fireflies. No crickets. No perfume. No night at all.
Whenever I think about the Anthropocene, I remember the death of the darkness in Mairiporã’s sky. Light pollution is one of the million types of “slow violence” (Nixon 2011) that characterize this new geological “epoch” and, I would say, the most neglected one. Because it is linked to the idea of development, it is naturalized in urbanization as a necessary and inevitable evil. Instead of looking for solutions to mitigate it, we just accept it as part of the new landscape, as it spreads quietly and progressively through our towns, disturbing the ecosystems and our sleep health. Twenty years have passed since I moved to Mairiporã and the city started to grow, but only now people are including light pollution as a topic in public discussions (Prefeitura Municipal de Mairiporã 2021).
From one of the highest places in Serra da Cantareira, Mairiporã seems to have stolen all the stars for itself. Now, it literally resembles a piece of the firmament embedded in the foot of the mountain range. I would not call it “heaven” though.
Mairiporã seem from Pico do Olho D’Água (1180 m of altitude), one of the highest spots in Serra da Cantareira. Photo by Richard Mandelsohn.
Bibliography
Ditmer, Mark A, David C Stoner, and Neil H Carter. “Estimating the Loss and Fragmentation of Dark Environments in Mammal Ranges from Light Pollution.” Biological conservation 257 (2021): 109135.
Thancharoen, Anchana, Marc A Branham, and James E Lloyd. “Building Twilight ‘Light Sensors’: To Study the Effects of Light Pollution on Fireflies.” The American biology teacher 70, no. 2 (2008): e6–e12.
Campos, Athos. “Hino De Mairiporã.” Câmara Municipal de Mairiporã, August 19, 2020. http://mairipora.sp.leg.br/index.php/a-camara/hino-de-mairipora.
Vasconcelos, Caê. “Premiado em Cannes, Jovem Diretor Cobra Preservação da Serra da Cantareira.” Folha de S.Paulo, August 19, 2021. https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/cotidiano/2021/08/premiado-em-cannes-jovem-diretor-cobra-preservacao-da-serra-da-cantareira.shtml.
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Temporada Livre. “Natureza Pertinho De São Paulo: Conheça Mairiporã!” TemporadaLivre, July 23, 2020. https://www.temporadalivre.com/blog/natureza-pertinho-de-sao-paulo-conheca-mairipora
International Dark-Sky Association – IDA. “Light Pollution.” International Dark-Sky Association, February 14, 2017. https://www.darksky.org/light-pollution/#:~:text=The%20inappropriate%20or%20excessive%20use,brightness%20that%20causes%20visual%20discomfort.
Liboiron, Max, Manuel Tironi, and Nerea Calvillo. “Toxic Politics: Acting in a Permanently Polluted World.” Social Studies of Science 48, no. 3 (June 2018): 331–49. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312718783087.
Botha, L. Michael, Therésa M Jones, and Gareth R Hopkins. “Effects of Lifetime Exposure to Artificial Light at Night on Cricket (Teleogryllus Commodus) Courtship and Mating Behaviour.” Animal behaviour 129 (2017): 181–188.
Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2011.Prefeitura Municipal de Mairiporã. Audiência Pública: Plano Plurianual (2022 – 2025). Prefeitura Municipal de Mairiporã do Estado de São Paulo, 2021. http://www.mairipora.sp.gov.br/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Audi%C3%AAncia-PPA-2022-2025-MAIRIPOR%C3%83-final-ALTERADO-21-09-21.pdf
Kate Yeo 
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