Given the harmful effects of light pollution, a pair of astronomers has coined a new term to help focus efforts to combat it. Their term, as reported in a brief paper in the preprint database arXiv and a letter to the journal Science, is “noctalgia.” In general, it means “sky grief,” and it captures the collective pain we are experiencing as we continue to lose access to the night sky.
The lack of fireflies aren’t a rural/urban thing, I don’t think. I’ve always lived in suburbs of a mid-size city and definitely remember fireflies swarming around as a kid, too.
I only moved about three years ago, so it’s definitely a rural/suburban thing. However, the suburbs have waaaaay less fireflies than a decade ago.