When we fill the skies with artificial light and outshine the stars, we forget our place in the cosmos, according to award-winning photographer and filmmaker Harun Mehmedinovic.
Mehmedinovic travels to America’s most pristine dark-sky preserves to show the majority of Americans, many of whom cannot see the natural night sky from their homes and have never seen the Milky Way, what they’re missing.
“It makes you realize how little you are and how temporary your time on Earth is. It gets you to be more humble,” he said in a phone interview. Mehmedinovic spends much of his time in the nation’s most beautiful places, experiencing the world the way our ancestors did.
“There’s a lack of perspective,” he said, referring to the urban and suburban life that places us in surroundings of our own making. When you’re instead amid the stars and a landscape formed over millions of years, you are small. But it’s a good feeling, not diminishing, Mehmedinovic said.
Human problems also become small. “Being out in nature gives you that sort of spiritual dimension, where you’re able to come to understand that nothing is as bad as it seems. It kind of nourishes you in a way,” he said.
