Each star is a living story. Massive convection currents of superheated gas tell an epic drama, with starspots serving as punctuation, coronal loops extended figures of speech, and flares emphatic passages ringing true in the deep silence of cold space.

Each planet is a poem, written out in the bleak, jagged, staccato rhythm of bare rocky cores or the lyrical, lingering, rich rhymes of swirling gas giants.

Then there are planets bearing life, multitudes of self-referential literary devices that echo and re-echo without end.

Ken Liu, Bookmaking Habits Of Select Species

Dark skies are an increasingly rare and vulnerable resource. Two-thirds of Americans can no longer see the Milky Way from their backyards.

Light pollution blots out constellations that humans have observed, charted, told stories about, and navigated by for thousands of years.

Light pollution also impacts nocturnal wildlife, disrupting bird migration and altering the feeding patterns of nocturnal animals, like salamanders, bats, and owls.

Zion Interpretive Sign

The bat-moth story began with the evolution of bat sonar, an exquisite ultrasonic system for tracking prey through the night sky.

Moths evolved ears tuned to the high frequencies of bat echolocation and counter with evasive action through directed turns, loops, spirals, drops, and power dives.

Some bat species responded by moving the frequency and intensity of their echolocation cries away from the peak sensitivity of moth ears, and the arms race was on.

Tiger moths produce anti-bat sounds. Do the sounds advertise moth toxicity, similar to the bright coloration of butterflies? Do they startle the bat, giving the moth a momentary advantage in their aerobatic battle? Do they jam the bat’s sonar?

The answer is yes. They do all and more in different situations and in different species.

William Conner & Aaron Corcoran, Sound Strategies

Thinking in terms of stories does not isolate human beings from the starfish and the sea anemones, the coconut palms and the primroses. Rather, thinking in terms of stories must be shared by all minds, whether ours or those of redwood forests.

What is a story that it may connect its parts? And is it true that the general fact that parts are connected in this way is at the very root of what it is to be alive?

I offer you the notion of context, of pattern through time. And context is linked to another undefined notion called meaning. Without context, words and actions have no meaning at all.

This is true not only of human communication in words but of all communication whatsoever, of all mental process, of all mind. Including that which tells the sea anemone how to grow and the amoeba what he should do next.

Gregory Bateson, Mind And Nature