Editorial of January 18, 2024
Turn Off Your Lights and Look Up
The holidays are gone, it’s getting colder, the winds are howling, it snows more and ice is threatening our lakes. It’s time to turn off the festive lights of the past few weeks and get on with 2024. It’s also time to think about lights.
Although there is mention of shocks and electric fish as early as 2750 BCE, in Ancient Egypt, electricity probably began for us with Benjamin Franklin’s extensive research in the mid-18th century, part of which included an experiment with a kite, a damp kite string, a metal key, and a storm-threatened sky that revealed the electrical nature of lightning. But it was during the 19th century that electricity came into its own in the U.S., expanding even more with our fast-developing 20th-century industrial economy. Today, electricity is a massive consumer of fossil fuels, leading to serious environmental concerns and an increasing number of demands to figure out how to control its damage to the climate. Some answers lie in solar, wind, and hydropower; others lie in less and better lighting and light fixtures, light timers and sensors, and a reevaluation of existing lighting plans (some of which may even result in no further need for lighting).
Light pollution—caused by inefficient and/or unnecessary use of artificial light at night, both indoors and out—represents perhaps the most drastic change human beings have made to their environment. Not only is it unhealthy for us, disrupting sleep and circadian rhythms, causing anxiety, headaches, and low melatonin production, and risking diabetes, obesity, and breast cancer, but it also disrupts entire ecosystems, affecting many animals, a large number of which are nocturnal, including migrating birds, who depend on a dark sky to navigate, amphibians, insects, mammals, and plants. A side effect of our industrial modernization, light pollution is most severe in the densely populated areas of the U.S., Europe and Asia. In fact, about 83 percent of the world, including 99 percent of Americans and Europeans, live under light-polluted skies, called skyglow, an orange smog-like occurrence that is caused by the over-illumination of the sky by light that is emitted directly upward, mostly in cities, shopping centers, and stadiums. Skyglows cause the sky to be five to 10 times brighter than a naturally dark nighttime sky. Eighty percent of us here in North America cannot see the Milky Way.
Many cities and towns now have light-pollution abatement programs and have begun to install properly spaced down-cast lights, full cutoff fixtures that measurably reduce the chance for light to escape above the plane of the horizontal and thereby contribute to skyglow. These lights save energy as they are better focused, preserve the flora and fauna by reducing excess light, reduce crime and increase safety by more adequately illuminating areas, and reduce health risks.
Here in Otsego County, we are a lucky part of the 20 percent who can still see the moon and the stars in our gigantic dark night sky. From the fields, the lakes and even from our windows, we can see the Milky Way, multiple galaxies, Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites, eclipses of the moon and, in August, the Northern Lights.
It would be noble of us to share our exquisite night sky. The International DarkSky Places Program, founded in 2001, encourages communities, parks, and protected areas world-wide to preserve and protect dark skies and the nocturnal environment through responsible lighting policies. There are upwards of 200 DarkSky Places—parks, sanctuaries and reserves in 22 countries and on six continents—with protected land, a zero light-pollution policy set by the government, and starry night skies. These places remind us that the night sky serves just as much importance to our culture and history as our day-time sky.
Many DarkSky parks, sanctuaries and reserves in the U.S. are in the south, midwest and west; there are only three in the northeast; there are none in New York State.
Let’s look into it.