I'm from the Netherlands, one of the most light-polluted areas on the planet and had my first proper dark night only in my 30s.
It was in South Africa. We were driving with a roofed jeep on some plains in search of nocturnal wildlife. Then, the driver stopped and told us to get out. It was freezing and he prepared hot chocolate from the back of the car.
He killed his search light and it got so dark that we could not see our own hands. And then we looked up.
Holy shit. I'm not a melodramatic person but this was the first time in my life that I experienced living on a planet, connected to something far greater. I mean, I knew this to be the case, but I never experienced it. Because I normally live under the clouds and a yellow haze.
I experienced it once more in Colombia where I could see the Milky Way with the naked eye.
It's sad that an experience that should be a given has become so rare. I'm especially frustrated with all the lights that have no purpose. Nobody goes to admire the architecture of your church at 3AM at night. Nor do you have to decorate your backyard so excessively with obnoxious lights whilst you are sleeping.
For me this is an argument in support of higher density living and against suburban sprawl. If the distance between the urban artificial environment and an undeveloped “natural” environment beyond the city can be minimised, then there’ll be more opportunities for people to experience things like the above.
Maybe suburbs provide enough clarity of the night sky for most, I’m not sure. Still, the suburbs will never be the natural environment that undeveloped forests or parks could be.
I don’t remember the name but I read a book years ago that was set in a future where humans live in dense cities with everything in between returned to wilderness. I always thought it was a really compelling idea if it were possible.
You'd still have to drive quite a way out of the cities in most places, suburbs or not. The sky glow is noticeable for miles in places with any humidity.
Dense cities tends to be much brighter than suburbs. I’ve lived on a street with bright LED streetlights and even with blinds down bedrooms was uncomfortably bright at night affecting quality of sleep. Now I live in a place resembling American suburbs and enjoy relatively darkness at night.
I had this same experience when I moved from metropolitan Texas to a high altitude location in the mountains of Colorado. I would take my dog for a walk at 2am and just get stuck staring upward.
The first couple of nights, I was amazed at what I could see, but then I was a bit annoyed about this one strip of clouds that was blocking part of my view across the entire sky. The next night I realized it wasn't a cloud :). "My God, it's full of stars."
Portugal is relatively close to NL, and it has some spectacular sky viewing which isn't too remote from villages or places to stay.
Motion sensors are cheap these days, but for some reason they're still so uncommon. To me, this would be one of the easiest wins. Even if 25% of the lights were tripped at any given time, that would still be a 75% reduction from those residential outdoor lights.
Every now and then someone posts a photograph of the milkyway galaxy with all its colors and glories during a new moon. It's really frustrating to see most of the top comments calling out that it only looks so pretty because of exposure.
In reality if you manage to get to one of the few places left on earth that are truly dark sky places and you catch it during a new moon, the spectacular lights are really not that far off
Unfortunately the vast majority of internet denizens today have never truly experienced a dark sky during a new moon. An experience that just 200 years ago almost every human has had
I live in a civilized country but 45 minutes from the closest highway and far from any city, so I get to enjoy beautiful night skies. But satellites are already polluting it : (
Also, dumb question but: can't satellites be made to not emit any light and to not reflect it?
I remember that when the Starlink satellites first went up and people complained they were too visible, Starlink agreed to make future ones less so. I don't know why they didn't do that to begin with, maybe the metal is shiny by default and it's an extra cost to make it matte? Maybe it's about heat, since a matte object will absorb more from light? At any rate we're in dire need of some regulation around satellite visibility before we lose more of our night sky... oh, and flying drone billboards need to be banned before they catch on.
It's so ironic to have such incredible technology to peer deep into the cosmos, yet on a day-to-day basis we've never been more disconnected from the heavens.
"Nothing to see here, please go back to looking at your Instagram explore feed" \s
I know what you mean, I once spent a week in the Australian outback, in a desert which is considered one of the darkest place on earth.
The sky looked luminescent, I can't describe how insane it looked, it was almost totally purple and I could actually see things moving around, satellites, the space station, meteors, I could clearly make out planets, it was absolutely unbelievable.
I was sleeping in a "swag" and I could just lie there watching it for hours.
HOAs have their downsides, but I do really appreciate one of my CC&Rs: in my ~4 square mile city, we are not allowed to have exterior lights apart from ones to illuminate driveways and patios. Moreover, there are no street lights in the entire city.
It's an oasis of uncorrupted night in the unlikeliest of places: Los Angeles. You can see city lights from certain vantage points, but in most places it is pitch black. Living here feels like perpetual camping. It is wonderful, and it would be stressful for me to return to living in a place with perpetual illumination.
Yikes. Street lighting is one of the most important safety improvements, especially for people walking, as most pedestrian deaths due to drivers occur at night.
Of course, if we weren't so dependent on cars to do literally everything this wouldn't be the case, and we could safely get rid of a lot of street lighting.
Similarly, the installation of public lightening by Colbert in the XVIIIth in Paris, lowered criminality by an order of magnitude.
It also enabled women rights, since, with the ability to somewhat walk securely at night or in the early morning, comes the ability to go to the factory and work somewhere else than in the house.
I appreciate how important it was in the past, but in the era of inexpensive and powerful LED flashlights, streetlights do seem rather redundant and wasteful.
Street lights can also aggravate the problem of safety. Unfortunately most cities seem to believe that more lumens = more safety. But often times this creates more stark dark spots and makes it harder for our eyes to adjust to them
What would really improve safety the most is having more, warmer, weaker lights. One city in the UK ended up taking down their streetlights after some attacks and replacing them with christmas lights strewn across some city trees.
Not only did it look nicer, end up costing less, and was less damaging to the local ecosystem, but it also likely made the area much safer
Another approach is to have personal lighting. I regularly attend an event in one of the darker parts of Colorado where it's considered common courtesy to have a glowy something or other attached to you. There can be collisions even between pedestrians. Nobody gets hurt but it's awkward when it happens so you start to appreciate the extra cues.
I have a family member in Sedona, AZ. There are no street lights there except for a single state highway, and private always-on outdoor lighting is legally restricted to being low, dim, and shaded.
It's pleasant, and I find driving at night there easier because headlights provide more contrast when not everything is illuminated.
I'm just up the road in Flagstaff and the dark skies are absolutely one of my favorite parts of living here. Darkness is an underrated addition to quality of life.
Whereas I find nothing pleasant about my night-time drives through the suburbs of Bellevue. I spend the entire drive paranoid that someone's going to cross the street, and that I won't even see them until they are right in front of me.
Rain, darkness, tree cover, incredibly bright oncoming headlights, poor street lighting, and enough-of-a-walking-culture-that-people-might-be-walking-at-night is a great combination.
It depends. If there's a full moon out, I often walk without a light. It's wonderful. Otherwise, I use a headlamp.
> Doesn't this cause issues?
No. I think the main effect is that people finish their walks, bike rides, and so forth before dark. Obviously that's impossible for much of the year for people who work 9 to 5, but given the demographics of this community—small business owners with flexible schedules and retirees—it works for most. In particular, there is one woman from a nearby street who walks past my office window every afternoon: in the winter she walks by at 3, and in the summers she walks by around 6 with her husband.
> getting lost
I don't think this is a realistic concern for those with smart phones. Moreover, the hilly topography and lack of cycles in the road network (barring one) make it very easy to remain oriented.
At night, if there is insufficient moonlight? Yes of course. Street lights only exist in urban areas, if you're walking anywhere else in the world at night, a flashlight seems like a logical choice.
On a more serious note, it’s pretty common for UK roads to lack street lights. Particularly in more rural areas. The majority of my drive home from work is unlit.
I find a flashlight and a small pocket knife are essential every day carry. It's a quality of life issue for me, I want to be able to examine something at any time of day, plus street lights are intermittent and I walk a lot. I live in Oakland, a major city, but still insist on turning on a flashlight when I cross the street. People don't pay enough attention.
I walk through my neighborhood at night, and some houses have streetside lights, but most do not. I always bring a flashlight but typically don't use it. I do teach my kids they have to be very careful of cars, because they are too short to be seen.
I'm fond of warm, yellow hues for indoor spaces. If I were forced to choose a color for outdoor lighting, I would go for the same. However, white vs. yellow has already played out in some areas: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1993-09-30-mn-40657-...
why completly ban the exterior lights when restricting the type, direction and power of the lights is enought to qualify for a region to be designated as a IDSR by the International Dark sky Association. For pratical exterior lighting tips approuved by the IDA this page is a good resource : https://en.cieletoilemontmegantic.org/citoyens
I think the LA area’s low street light density is partially because things are so spread out that it wouldn’t be worth it. You probably still have too much light to see things like the Milky Way.
And I gotta say anecdotally, one of my top-10 most stressful driving experiences was trying to navigate Gardena at night, because they not only have few streetlights, but seem to use ineffective reflective strips as well.
It's still LA, where driving is war between the insane, the jerk, and the insane jerk.
And earthquakes, forest fires, fresh water insecurity, neglect of the unhoused, and people who wouldn't get the South Park episode about the pretense of a personal brand.
I recently got into astronomy with my kids and it has been particularly eye-opening how severe light pollution is.
It's very strange to be in a relatively dim city (Victoria, BC) and not being able to see things it seems like I should be able to see. I know their apparent size in the sky and that my scope can magnify them enough to physically see them, but not enough light is coming through to out-shine the atmosphere above me.
It's a bit unsettling to imagine how bad it is in large cities. There must be so many things in the sky that people can't see with the naked eye that I take for granted. And yet, there are so many things I can't see either.
The more I learn to appreciate the night sky, the more it saddens me. I'm both eager and a bit anxious to see a truly dark night sky; I'll both become more aware of how bad the pollution really is, yet I'll get to see space even better than before.
I had the same experience with the ocean. Visiting places rich with life, such as protected area which have had plenty of time to recover, reveals just how barren and burdened the ocean is right outside my home. Fewer plants and animals, less diversity, more sediments from industry/runoff/sewage treatment, etc. What a crazy thing to do to such crucial and beautiful things we depend on.
I moved near to a dark sky reserve and we now experience an amazing night sky. We have to be a bit more careful with our own lights but it's been very worth the effort.
Besides not being able to see stars in the night sky, what other loss is there? Artificial light seems a worthy tradeoff for being able to function for 8 additional hours a day.
I don't agree that these are the only possible states. I think we can still have artificial light for an extra 8 hours, but we can be more responsible with with how we use it. At the moment it seems typical in many places to install lighting without much thought about how it effects others, or how that light finds its way into the sky.
At the micro scale, why does my neighbour have two flood lights in their back yard? They actually have the narrowest lot in the city; it's something like 21 feet across. In effect it's similar to having these lights in _my_ back yard. The neighbour past them also has a large, bright light installed and facing directly at my yard perhaps 30 feet away. Other neighbours nearby have similar lights which don't interfere with my yard so obviously, but certainly inhibit seeing the night sky. The result is that there's one corner of my yard where a telescope isn't flooded with light (even with a shroud), and I'm limited to looking into the sky past trees and buildings. I still enjoy it, but I could have so much more clarity and visible sky without those lights shining in my yard.
At the macro scale, the highways and urban areas around me make little effort to direct light down; it's extremely diffuse in all directions, illuminating the sky directly rather than indirectly. There are thousands of bright signs, street lights, and other sources of light which no one has made an effort to reflect their light downward. Studies show that doing so makes a substantial impact on light pollution, and it should by all means be the law to reduce this pollution like any other, but where I live it appears to be on no one's minds.
I'd also make the case that seeing the night sky is an important activity for human beings, similar to "touching grass" or going on a walk in the woods. It's a primordial thing, part of countless cultures' stories, a source of deep and long-lived questions about our origins (religious or otherwise), and practically an engine of human discovery via sheer inspiration. Do we really want to live without a connection to that? Is it good for our kids to grow up rarely if ever seeing the arms of the Milky Way, Pleiades' glowing gas and dust, or the same of the Orion Nebula?
These asterisms and other cosmic formations are stunning spectacles we're constantly deprived of. They reveal the wonder of the universe and spur our minds. If you live in a polluted city and rarely get to leave though, you're out of luck. How many young bright minds are never hooked by this sense of awe and wonder, and thus, never reach for the sciences? How many people of lower socioeconomic status will literally never witness something as fundamental as the clear night sky?
Similar to being on a mountain in winter at 7am as the sun rises, seeing the sun shine and glow along the ice and snow, seeing an expanse of glaciers, mountains, forest, and a huge open sky – these things are becoming privileges, but they were once integral experiences and part of our connection to the universe and the earth from which we're all made. If you have no religion, at least you could have that.
I don't think everyone needs to have these things to be whole or that they're subhuman for having missed out. I just think so many people would benefit greatly from it, both tangibly and intangibly. The more we disconnect from nature, the more it seems to harm us. The clear night sky is akin to looking into our past, the stellar nursery of where we were all created.
That may not be as practical or useful as 8 hours of artificial light, but I don't care much about more light when it only means another 8 hours of grinding at things I don't feel enriched by or connected with. There needs to be a balance in there somewhere.
Light pollution is an interesting "gateway drug" to broader environmental awareness. With coordinated effort, the effects and benefits can be witnessed immediately. A broad power outage in NYC in 1977 resulted in the Milky Way being visible from the Bronx: https://www.space.com/16577-milky-way-galaxy-nyc-blackout.ht...
Light pollution seems like the least important from of pollution imo. We currently have cars all over the place spewing out extremely dangerous carcinogens in the air killing a large number of people. I just can't bring myself to care about seeing some stars when we are killing people and animals, poisoning the dirt, and warming the planet irreversibly.
Other forms of pollution are worse, but light pollution does harm animals. When baby turtles hatch they instinctively look for bright lights lower on the horizon and go towards it. Because naturally, that will be the moon reflecting off the ocean. Bright beachfront buildings are even brighter than the reflection of the moon leading them to wander away from the ocean
Moths and frogs are also attracted to lights. Migratory birds rely on seasonal cues such as changes in the amount of light. The OP article also mentions in the intro that it is reducing bat populations in areas.
Within the last five years, my street got much brighter, from one relatively dim streetlight in the middle of the block to multiple much brighter poles. I don't think we had a safety issue before, but many people prefer it this way, saying they feel safer. (Safer than what?)
I think we have to accept that we poison everywhere we live, and strive to concentrate ourselves in a small enough area that the planet can tolerate us. Of course, there's a chance we're poising ourselves as well, and the lack of outside darkness has some effect on us, but certainly on my block that's a minority concern.
The "feels safer" is an interesting argument. From what studies I could find the more light has the opposite impact on safety. IE: The more light at night the less safe you actually are/more crimes occur.
Motion sensing lights outside my house certainly did nothing to improve safety for me, for the barest extra convenience of not having to remember to turn the porch light on before leaving when expecting to come back after dark.
They were likely detrimental, especially when considering the extra paranoia when I'm sitting there stoned trying to watch a movie and the light keeps ticking on outside. I got fed up with it and unscrewed the bulbs enough to not turn on, and so far my landlord hasn't complained about me doing so.
The owner of my building has installed flood lights that are on all night and effectively remove any darkness from the outside. The main reason given was for safety, despite there never being a safety issue, and trying to convince them that the opposite is true has been difficult, to say the least.
Could you link them? That's an interesting conclusion. Is there any correlation drawn, or even speculation as to the cause for this? Perhaps criminals need some light as flashlights draw too much attention?
> "I think we have to accept that we poison everywhere we live, and strive to concentrate ourselves in a small enough area that the planet can tolerate us."
That may be true in a broader sense, but I think when it comes to outdoor lighting, it's a matter of changing the current prevailing policies that a lot of people don't like even if they're acting purely from selfish motives. I think the problem is that whenever you get a disagreement between someone who wants it dark so they can sleep and see the stars and someone who wants more light because they're afraid of crime or getting run over by a car at night, the latter almost always win.
There's some logic to that -- if someone's house gets robbed or you have a car accident the consequences are immediate and verifiable. If it happens a lot there'll be clear statistical trends. Whereas if someone can't sleep as well it's kind of a vague complaint that can be ignored, because the impact is spread out over the whole population and you can't really measure it. Everyone's lives are just a little bit worse and most people wouldn't even realize it or be able to recognize or articulate why. If you're a risk-averse mayor or president of the local HOA, of course you'd approve more lights, unless there's an organized effort to prioritize reducing light pollution.
They were being transitioned out during my university years. First year all the lights on campus were that cool, single frequency yellow, by senior year there was just one, stuck in a lonely corner of campus, buzzing it's familiar call. I think the single emission spectra was a big part of the appeal. The complete lack of color left things somewhat eerie, but in a distinctly nonthreatening way. Just an alien peace.
I agree, and I think society is beginning to wake up to this as suburbanism falls out of fashion. We structurally cannot all live in idyllic rural settings and conveniently be near urban centers.
We also have to acknowledge that human population is highest it's ever been and there needs thus increasing reasons and motivations to damage and poison this planet and harm the lives of every other specie just trying to survive.
I currently live in the US. Back in India where I am originally from, we have house roof tops which are flat. Most of us would spend an hour or more on the roof top, after dinner, staring at the sky and talking. Sometimes we wave and talk to the neighbor from the roof top. This I would say is a routine thing in most households after dinner. I miss that dearly in the US.
I grew up in a rural area where most people opted out of the light that the electric company installed for every customer who got service. Whenever I visited a city it infuriated me to see tens of thousands of lights and my parents would explain the 'safety' issue and that it prevented thefts. Nine year old me could only think, "well if people are gonna steal, why not spend the money you use on that electricity to buy them homes and maybe they won't want to steal..."
> This Scottish Dark Sky Town Decided To Go Even DarkerÜ
> Moffat’s annual experiment in switching off artificial lighting has had unexpected results.
Below the article there are links to some other articles about similar places, for example "Fredericksburg is one of Texas’ newest Dark Sky Communities, which makes stargazing here out of this world." -- https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/where-to-find-dark-ski...
They also have an.. unusual "Courses" section for online courses.
Readit News
It was in South Africa. We were driving with a roofed jeep on some plains in search of nocturnal wildlife. Then, the driver stopped and told us to get out. It was freezing and he prepared hot chocolate from the back of the car.
He killed his search light and it got so dark that we could not see our own hands. And then we looked up.
Holy shit. I'm not a melodramatic person but this was the first time in my life that I experienced living on a planet, connected to something far greater. I mean, I knew this to be the case, but I never experienced it. Because I normally live under the clouds and a yellow haze.
I experienced it once more in Colombia where I could see the Milky Way with the naked eye.
It's sad that an experience that should be a given has become so rare. I'm especially frustrated with all the lights that have no purpose. Nobody goes to admire the architecture of your church at 3AM at night. Nor do you have to decorate your backyard so excessively with obnoxious lights whilst you are sleeping.
Maybe suburbs provide enough clarity of the night sky for most, I’m not sure. Still, the suburbs will never be the natural environment that undeveloped forests or parks could be.
The first couple of nights, I was amazed at what I could see, but then I was a bit annoyed about this one strip of clouds that was blocking part of my view across the entire sky. The next night I realized it wasn't a cloud :). "My God, it's full of stars."
Portugal is relatively close to NL, and it has some spectacular sky viewing which isn't too remote from villages or places to stay.
You can see the structure of the Milky Way sometimes.
Even satellites and planes look like absurd neon signs out in the country.
In reality if you manage to get to one of the few places left on earth that are truly dark sky places and you catch it during a new moon, the spectacular lights are really not that far off
Unfortunately the vast majority of internet denizens today have never truly experienced a dark sky during a new moon. An experience that just 200 years ago almost every human has had
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bortle_scale
Must be quite something.
I live in a civilized country but 45 minutes from the closest highway and far from any city, so I get to enjoy beautiful night skies. But satellites are already polluting it : (
Also, dumb question but: can't satellites be made to not emit any light and to not reflect it?
I know what you mean, I once spent a week in the Australian outback, in a desert which is considered one of the darkest place on earth.
The sky looked luminescent, I can't describe how insane it looked, it was almost totally purple and I could actually see things moving around, satellites, the space station, meteors, I could clearly make out planets, it was absolutely unbelievable.
I was sleeping in a "swag" and I could just lie there watching it for hours.
It's an oasis of uncorrupted night in the unlikeliest of places: Los Angeles. You can see city lights from certain vantage points, but in most places it is pitch black. Living here feels like perpetual camping. It is wonderful, and it would be stressful for me to return to living in a place with perpetual illumination.
Yikes. Street lighting is one of the most important safety improvements, especially for people walking, as most pedestrian deaths due to drivers occur at night.
https://safety.fhwa.dot.gov/provencountermeasures/lighting.c...
Of course, if we weren't so dependent on cars to do literally everything this wouldn't be the case, and we could safely get rid of a lot of street lighting.
It also enabled women rights, since, with the ability to somewhat walk securely at night or in the early morning, comes the ability to go to the factory and work somewhere else than in the house.
What would really improve safety the most is having more, warmer, weaker lights. One city in the UK ended up taking down their streetlights after some attacks and replacing them with christmas lights strewn across some city trees.
Not only did it look nicer, end up costing less, and was less damaging to the local ecosystem, but it also likely made the area much safer
Are you not carrying your phone with you? Well, "it would be a shame if something happened to you."
It's pleasant, and I find driving at night there easier because headlights provide more contrast when not everything is illuminated.
Rain, darkness, tree cover, incredibly bright oncoming headlights, poor street lighting, and enough-of-a-walking-culture-that-people-might-be-walking-at-night is a great combination.
Doesn't this cause issues?
Sounds like it would turn 20 minute walk into a dangerous excercise. Do people walking on foot carry torches?
This sounds really crazy from road safety perspective
I don't mean crime, i mean getting lost and collisions.
It depends. If there's a full moon out, I often walk without a light. It's wonderful. Otherwise, I use a headlamp.
> Doesn't this cause issues?
No. I think the main effect is that people finish their walks, bike rides, and so forth before dark. Obviously that's impossible for much of the year for people who work 9 to 5, but given the demographics of this community—small business owners with flexible schedules and retirees—it works for most. In particular, there is one woman from a nearby street who walks past my office window every afternoon: in the winter she walks by at 3, and in the summers she walks by around 6 with her husband.
> getting lost
I don't think this is a realistic concern for those with smart phones. Moreover, the hilly topography and lack of cycles in the road network (barring one) make it very easy to remain oriented.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safety_reflector
At night, if there is insufficient moonlight? Yes of course. Street lights only exist in urban areas, if you're walking anywhere else in the world at night, a flashlight seems like a logical choice.
You excluded crime from your comment, but I want to say that anecdotally, places where there are street lights are where the street crime happens.
[1] https://thefifthestate.com.au/innovation/lighting-innovation...
Losing the Dark - Flat Screen Version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dd82jaztFIo
On a more serious note, it’s pretty common for UK roads to lack street lights. Particularly in more rural areas. The majority of my drive home from work is unlit.
I find a flashlight and a small pocket knife are essential every day carry. It's a quality of life issue for me, I want to be able to examine something at any time of day, plus street lights are intermittent and I walk a lot. I live in Oakland, a major city, but still insist on turning on a flashlight when I cross the street. People don't pay enough attention.
And I gotta say anecdotally, one of my top-10 most stressful driving experiences was trying to navigate Gardena at night, because they not only have few streetlights, but seem to use ineffective reflective strips as well.
And earthquakes, forest fires, fresh water insecurity, neglect of the unhoused, and people who wouldn't get the South Park episode about the pretense of a personal brand.
(Don't forget absurd housing costs.)
It's very strange to be in a relatively dim city (Victoria, BC) and not being able to see things it seems like I should be able to see. I know their apparent size in the sky and that my scope can magnify them enough to physically see them, but not enough light is coming through to out-shine the atmosphere above me.
It's a bit unsettling to imagine how bad it is in large cities. There must be so many things in the sky that people can't see with the naked eye that I take for granted. And yet, there are so many things I can't see either.
The more I learn to appreciate the night sky, the more it saddens me. I'm both eager and a bit anxious to see a truly dark night sky; I'll both become more aware of how bad the pollution really is, yet I'll get to see space even better than before.
I had the same experience with the ocean. Visiting places rich with life, such as protected area which have had plenty of time to recover, reveals just how barren and burdened the ocean is right outside my home. Fewer plants and animals, less diversity, more sediments from industry/runoff/sewage treatment, etc. What a crazy thing to do to such crucial and beautiful things we depend on.
At the micro scale, why does my neighbour have two flood lights in their back yard? They actually have the narrowest lot in the city; it's something like 21 feet across. In effect it's similar to having these lights in _my_ back yard. The neighbour past them also has a large, bright light installed and facing directly at my yard perhaps 30 feet away. Other neighbours nearby have similar lights which don't interfere with my yard so obviously, but certainly inhibit seeing the night sky. The result is that there's one corner of my yard where a telescope isn't flooded with light (even with a shroud), and I'm limited to looking into the sky past trees and buildings. I still enjoy it, but I could have so much more clarity and visible sky without those lights shining in my yard.
At the macro scale, the highways and urban areas around me make little effort to direct light down; it's extremely diffuse in all directions, illuminating the sky directly rather than indirectly. There are thousands of bright signs, street lights, and other sources of light which no one has made an effort to reflect their light downward. Studies show that doing so makes a substantial impact on light pollution, and it should by all means be the law to reduce this pollution like any other, but where I live it appears to be on no one's minds.
I'd also make the case that seeing the night sky is an important activity for human beings, similar to "touching grass" or going on a walk in the woods. It's a primordial thing, part of countless cultures' stories, a source of deep and long-lived questions about our origins (religious or otherwise), and practically an engine of human discovery via sheer inspiration. Do we really want to live without a connection to that? Is it good for our kids to grow up rarely if ever seeing the arms of the Milky Way, Pleiades' glowing gas and dust, or the same of the Orion Nebula?
These asterisms and other cosmic formations are stunning spectacles we're constantly deprived of. They reveal the wonder of the universe and spur our minds. If you live in a polluted city and rarely get to leave though, you're out of luck. How many young bright minds are never hooked by this sense of awe and wonder, and thus, never reach for the sciences? How many people of lower socioeconomic status will literally never witness something as fundamental as the clear night sky?
Similar to being on a mountain in winter at 7am as the sun rises, seeing the sun shine and glow along the ice and snow, seeing an expanse of glaciers, mountains, forest, and a huge open sky – these things are becoming privileges, but they were once integral experiences and part of our connection to the universe and the earth from which we're all made. If you have no religion, at least you could have that.
I don't think everyone needs to have these things to be whole or that they're subhuman for having missed out. I just think so many people would benefit greatly from it, both tangibly and intangibly. The more we disconnect from nature, the more it seems to harm us. The clear night sky is akin to looking into our past, the stellar nursery of where we were all created.
That may not be as practical or useful as 8 hours of artificial light, but I don't care much about more light when it only means another 8 hours of grinding at things I don't feel enriched by or connected with. There needs to be a balance in there somewhere.
Moths and frogs are also attracted to lights. Migratory birds rely on seasonal cues such as changes in the amount of light. The OP article also mentions in the intro that it is reducing bat populations in areas.
I think we have to accept that we poison everywhere we live, and strive to concentrate ourselves in a small enough area that the planet can tolerate us. Of course, there's a chance we're poising ourselves as well, and the lack of outside darkness has some effect on us, but certainly on my block that's a minority concern.
They were likely detrimental, especially when considering the extra paranoia when I'm sitting there stoned trying to watch a movie and the light keeps ticking on outside. I got fed up with it and unscrewed the bulbs enough to not turn on, and so far my landlord hasn't complained about me doing so.
After six months of higher crime rates, we switched them back on.
So I suspect its a variable thing, based on location and existence of other lighting.
That may be true in a broader sense, but I think when it comes to outdoor lighting, it's a matter of changing the current prevailing policies that a lot of people don't like even if they're acting purely from selfish motives. I think the problem is that whenever you get a disagreement between someone who wants it dark so they can sleep and see the stars and someone who wants more light because they're afraid of crime or getting run over by a car at night, the latter almost always win.
There's some logic to that -- if someone's house gets robbed or you have a car accident the consequences are immediate and verifiable. If it happens a lot there'll be clear statistical trends. Whereas if someone can't sleep as well it's kind of a vague complaint that can be ignored, because the impact is spread out over the whole population and you can't really measure it. Everyone's lives are just a little bit worse and most people wouldn't even realize it or be able to recognize or articulate why. If you're a risk-averse mayor or president of the local HOA, of course you'd approve more lights, unless there's an organized effort to prioritize reducing light pollution.
They were being transitioned out during my university years. First year all the lights on campus were that cool, single frequency yellow, by senior year there was just one, stuck in a lonely corner of campus, buzzing it's familiar call. I think the single emission spectra was a big part of the appeal. The complete lack of color left things somewhat eerie, but in a distinctly nonthreatening way. Just an alien peace.
Deleted Comment
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/dark-sky-moffat-scotla...
> This Scottish Dark Sky Town Decided To Go Even DarkerÜ
> Moffat’s annual experiment in switching off artificial lighting has had unexpected results.
Below the article there are links to some other articles about similar places, for example "Fredericksburg is one of Texas’ newest Dark Sky Communities, which makes stargazing here out of this world." -- https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/where-to-find-dark-ski...
They also have an.. unusual "Courses" section for online courses.