http://earthscience.files.wordpress.com/2006/12/worldlightmap.jpg
In college I was once in a desert field ecology class (distribution requirements.. it was not my major.. now I kind of wish it was), and I found myself bumping through Tuscon with a van full of stinky but amiable Co-Ed's late one night. Somehow it left an impression on me that Tuscon felt surprisingly small for the population I knew it to have, kind of, well, natural... and I remember someone mentioning or knowing there were some observatories up on Kit Carson Mountain, so I gazed up and had a look as we drove by on what must have been good ol' I-10. I never knew much about astronomy, but my dad had been in the Navy, and knew how to navigate by the stars, had even studied it in college. He used to occasionally teach me a constellation or two. Given this small family preoccupation, I liked to pick out little details like knowing the observatory was there, and file them away.
Fast forward a few years, and I am a Municipal official of sorts (everyone makes mistakes in life!), and something crosses my desk about a new type of Light Fixture that the state government wants me to set up a demonstration project for. I have to find a place to put something like 7 so called "Full Cut Off Lighting Fixtures". There was so much jargon in government that my brain took it in stride (it's a street lamp!), since I was learning about everything from the constitutional law to street plows. I read the description that the state legislature had passed, something kind of exotic and progressive called Dark Sky Legislation, to mitigate a so called Light Pollution Phenomenon ("What won't they think of up in the capitol! Good for them, my brothers in utopic striving!" I thought to myself, in all earnestness.), and I think my brain was about to move on to other business as I moved further down the description, when I found the allegation that flooding street lamps have not only social consequences, but health consequences as well, and that people sleeping in rooms with too much light from street lamps can suffer from hormonal imbalances, mental health issues, and even circadian rhythms and menstrual cycle disturbances, and that it can be a contributing cause or the cause of their cancers and other infirmities directly or indirectly. Realizing that I work in politics, it might make sense that I fixed on one important thing: this might be something else to blame my girlfriend's moodiness on when I am in the doghouse again.. hot dog!
Now since my girlfriend lived in another city, I did the right thing and told the state where to stick it, aka the main road from the more pastoral side of town, where I knew a few of the people to be the my boss's supporters, one kind of cute as a matter of fact (like I said, my girlfriend lived in another city..), but also a place where it felt like rural blended into urban in a small town way, and where this allegedly nice lighting would shine down and bounce around instead of just flooding, highlighting at night a few of the nicer old wooden homes that created a small town feel despite the state highway plowed through there on what used to be an old wagon track. Done, onto next business, with me understanding that pretty soon anytime we had to put up a new street light or replace an old one, this law said it had to be 'Full Cut Off'. Send it by internal mail to public works... next order of business..
Back to Tuscon via a New Yorker Article I read a few years later while waiting for a check up in a doctors office. I never feel sophisticated enough for a New Yorker subscription, but whenever one was around in my eager ambitious youth, I would learn as much as I can about how the literati think, in case I might have a chance to impress one enough to get invited to their parties. As I sat there waiting for Dr. Feelgood, I stumbled upon this, and I don't remember if I stole the magazine or sat there long enough to finish it (might have been all the light in my apartment screwing up my REM!), but finish it I did:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/08/20/070820fa_fact_owen
Now I know his town wasn't my own, since ours was founded in the dignified year of 1712, not some newfangled 1779 (dang interlopers), so I knew he wasn't my neighbor, but his article addressed so many of my experiences, from the dark Arizona nights, that feeling of natural security I felt driving through Tuscon that I would never feel throttling down the interstate just in nearby Phoenix, to my sleepless nights in hotel rooms with floodlit parking lot's outside, to New England Municipal lighting dilemmas, to that feeling that floodlit areas actually tend to be seedy and feel, well, dangerous, that this article was like a star lit pathway for my thoughts amid subconscious suspicions. And the realization that someone out there had an understanding of this, terminology, and an exotic sounding society of all things made me quite intrigued:
http://www.darkskysociety.org/
and the even more influential International Dark Sky Association
http://www.darksky.org/
they even have a scale, the Bortle Scale:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bortle_scale
http://www.skyandtelescope.com/resources/darksky/3304011.html
And here is a map that corresponds to the scale, similar to the satellite photo on top of the world, but color coded:
http://www.inquinamentoluminoso.it/download/mondo_ridotto0p25.gif
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| Bortle Scale Map of US |
some of the ones in places you don't expect, like north of the Falkland Islands, or in northern Russia, are National Gas Flares on oil rigs.. yup.. just being burned and wasted so they an get to the oil underneath it.. it's a dirty little secret people don't talk about because coal and oil are so much worse than natural gas.
My contribution to this fight was quite small, just an order to install those 7 odd lights in a row on the State highway, no biggie, but armed with this information, as I crawl a third world neighborhood or stand atop Mona Loa by it's raft of observatories on an impromptu high altitude camping trip (right next to the highest observatory.. had a funny talk with a physicist out to get some air at 3am as I stomped my feet to stay warm in his pretty celestial parking lot, he taught me what the laser was for I kept seeing dart into the sky from his dome), noticing how subtle Kona and Hilo look from on high, since the island of Hawaii is quite commited-ly dark sky to aid the observatories, in addition to being well ahead in a few other national measurements of lifestyle and environmental care as a county. This article doesn't just let me understand government or science, it helps me understand why I feel scared in certain places, disoriented, miserable, tired driving at night through urban areas, when the gross yellow halon glow of a cheap light makes me feel like I am about to stumble onto a group of Tijuana Thugs, or some weird playing of something from my Silence of the Lambs imagination.. here is some basis to it.. and it helps me also interpret that some places aren't going to be bad.. they just look bad because of the crappy lighting and the disorienting effect of my not being able to see the sky. Sometimes I wake up in the morning to quite a nice place I might not have expected, since almost every town looks kind of crappy and intimidating when you arrive at night because of the inattention to these very details, and the norming factor of he lowest common denominator of street light, now a global phenomenon.
Thankfully, the solution to this is following behind the pollution, and it ain't dilution. In places with progressive leadership, people are caching on, and I have noticed Full Cut Off lighting creeping in on highways and in towns from Europe to Ecuador to even the Baja Peninsula. In some places they are federal projects, where this kind of advanced concept is most likely to have registered first, but there are places where I don't expect to see it and I do, small towns, remote places, and it's quite inviting when I stumble off a bus or try to find a hotel late some night. It means to me someone is thinking, someone cares about my well being, they aren't just mollifying the public with flood lighting to address a real or imagined crime problem that almost makes the situation feel worse.
And dare I get through a post without discussing real pollution, because lighting takes energy and energy often takes pollution. There was the argument that most Full Cut Off Fixtures are by nature more efficient, since they have mirrors and need less power to bounce down and around, but some years ago when a guy named Mark Begich was Mayor of Anchorage, Alaska, before he became the Senator from Alaska (Alaskans might tell you, perhaps accurately, that he sold out to the unions to get the job, and that if Uncle Ted had never been besmirched he wouldn't even be there, but Alaska has more of a progressive soul than the old codger Sourdoughs want to admit! They are problem solvers. ) and when Begich became mayor, he did what the climatically challenged Alaskans do well.. he tried to innovate, and he started to find that although LED lights were starting to come on, no one had made them available for municipal lighting, and they solved two problems for him.. they made a lot of sense to the bottom line, since they use a lot less energy, especially when it is cold and those hot bulbs have to use a lot of energy just to burn, but also, he wanted to make Anchorage look a lot less ghetto for the long winter nights, almost 20 hours at their peak, that 'ragers have to endure, and it's not just people that you have to worry about: Moose and Brown Bears have ticked off kills within the city limits in my memory. But he is fighting a deeper endemic problem as well, the persistent urban problems in 'Anchor Town' associated with natives with emotional and substance abuse issues who drift into the city from there remote villages with now way of sustaining themselves, Tongan and Samoan gangs that took to dealing and tribalism to deal with displacement and breaks from fishing, and the long standing struggles of Anchorage with Prostitution since the pipeline days when cash was easy, where streetwalkers have became a norm to replace the pressure on the massage parlors of old that the city finally shut down, in places like Spenard and the ghettos of the East Side of town.
http://www.treehugger.com/interior-design/anchorage-alaska-to-install-16000-led-streetlights-will-save-360000-per-year.html
http://www.triplepundit.com/2009/02/alaskas-lighting-revolution-sustainability-is-more-than-kilowatt-hours/
The story I heard was that Begich actually had to work with this company Cree to get lamps that would work for the city, they actually were involved in pushing the design forward.
http://www.creeledrevolution.com/revolutionaries/city-anchorage
The white light they give off, while perhaps still bothersome in creating eternal daylight, was of a healthier, whiter glow, and didn't give off that alarming amber glow, and started to make Anchorage feel cozy again, like it's far flung cousins on the Alaska frontier, and to start changing it's reputation from 'Alaskas Bus Stop', to a place to live in it's own right. If there is no other more appropriate measurement, I can tell you that home values in Anchortown are up up up.
And let's tie in some Disney-fied struggling sea creatures to wrap up as well... to end on an even higher note than the stars we are shooting for, the fuzzy good feeling we get by helping a pelagic in need.. so it turns out that Sea Turtles and their breeding are amongst the most affected by light pollution, a bit like the brown bag rule,... if they see it, they get disoriented, since their biological clock for laying eggs is set to the moon and tides, and they will crawl back out to ocean instead of laying on their chosen beach. More and more of the world's shorelines are developed, and with people, rich and poor alike, comes alarmist, somewhat ineffective as we heave learned, stay away criminal lighting, if they can afford it, and it is considered one of the factors suppressing sea turtle numbers, along with plastic that turtles mistake for jellyfish, and poaching, and driftnets, and god knows what else (living to 120 ain't so easy anymore!). So it has become a new concern, and a crusade in many a beach community (I have noticed that the surfier it is, the more progressive, but the limo liberals are chiming in as well, and its a good tune..) to try to make their beaches as dark as possible. Here's a responsible little rule from a hip little beach community in South Carolina, which even restricts it's self to mating season in case flood lighting the beach at other times of year is your thing:
http://follybeachnow.com/folly-beach-info/beach-information
Unlike Lebowki's gold brickin' ass, sea turtles are welcome in Folly Beach, and nothing says welcome to an amorous female sea turtle like low light and slapping sea waves... take note fellas..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COiIC3A0ROM
Saving Turtles With Sea Turtle Lighting in Florida
http://seaturtlelighting.net/
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