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Is artificial light poisoning the planet?
- a1pulley 4y agoHOAs 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.
- Zak 4y agoI 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.
- vkou 4y agoWhereas 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.
- LeifCarrotson 4y agoSo slow down until you can safely stop when an obstruction appears at the limits of your low beams. The speed limit is a maximum speed allowed for driving in clear weather in the daytime, not a minimum for driving in rain in the dark.
- a1pulley 4y agoI came here to say the same as the sibling comment. Why not slow down? That is what happens in my city: residents drive slowly because they don't want to hit a neighbor.
- vkou 4y agoWhen I slow down driving through trickier areas in Seattle in that situation, most other drivers understand why I'm doing that. I do that in the suburbs, and everyone loses their shit.
- stephencanon 4y agoThat’s a them problem, though, not yours to worry about.
- wcarron 4y agoI'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.
- hammock 4y agoWhat part of LA is this?
- a1pulley 4y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_Hills,_California https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_Hills,_California
- rqtwteye 4y agoVery wealthy area
- Animats 4y agoSomewhere in LA, a burglar is probably reading this.
- a1pulley 4y agoIf I were inclined to rob houses, I would find the challenge and risk of robbing houses here quite interesting. Apart from the fact that all roads in go through manned gates, this is the most republican city in SoCal. In translation: most of us have a lot of guns.
- RangerScience 4y agoVery off-topic, but the Astra Lumina night walk at the gardens near you is actually really nice, if you haven’t been.
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago> there are no street lights in the entire city. 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.
- hnlmorg 4y agoCars are usually equipped with headlights. ;) 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.
- justincormack 4y agoI live in a small village with no streetlights, and lovely views of the stars. It is very dark here at night, was a real shock coming from the town, I used to walk around where I was previously, that was not well lit but the amount of ambient light was actually quite high. Very different here.
- cld8483 4y ago> Do people walking on foot carry torches? 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.
- antisthenes 4y agoOP clearly stated they have an HOA. If you have an HOA - you live in an urban area. So I'm not sure what your comment alludes to. If I live in such a place, I expect to be able to walk on sidewalks without a flashlight.
- a1pulley 4y ago> If I live in such a place, I expect to be able to walk on sidewalks without a flashlight. We don't have any sidewalks. People either take trails adjacent to roads or walk on the roads themselves. Everyone is aware that pedestrians and equestrians are first class citizens, so residents drive slowly. That's not true for some delivery drivers and domestic workers, but we find the risk-reward tradeoff reasonable enough to have left the lighting provision in our CC&Rs for the last eighty years. Sometimes, expectations are at odds with the realities of what is tolerable in terms of safety, good for local flora and fauna, and pleasurable for ourselves.
- aeharding 4y ago> there are no street lights in the entire city. 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.cfm 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.
- eastbound 4y agoSimilarly, 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.
- aziaziazi 4y agoSome studies found no evidence for an association between crime and switch off or part-night lighting [0] [0]https://jech.bmj.com/content/69/11/1118.short?g=w_jech_ahead_tab https://jech.bmj.com/content/69/11/1118.short?g=w_jech_ahead...
- eastbound 4y agoWe’ll need more and more of those studies as we switch off those lights to save energy. If it was possible to VC-fund them, that’s where I would put most if my money.
- RobotToaster 4y agoI 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.
- TSiege 4y ago
- cryptonector 4y agoYellow street lighting is not as polluting as LED street lighting. Bring back yellow lighting!
- a1pulley 4y agoI'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-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1993-09-30-mn-40657-...
- adgjlsfhk1 4y agoThis is only half true. bluer LED lights only need half as much light to get the same visibility.
- cryptonector 4y agoThe yellow lights were never brighter than the blue lights. And the hue matters.
- nick__m 4y agowhy 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 https://en.cieletoilemontmegantic.org/citoyens
- cvccvroomvroom 4y agoIt'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. (Don't forget absurd housing costs.)
- opportune 4y agoI 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.
- dkarl 4y agoWithin 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.
- Forge36 4y agoThe "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.
- iamdbtoo 4y agoThe 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.
- mistrial9 4y agothis is typical of a lot of urban property in the USA. Yet as a child I remember many kinds of bugs, crawling and flying. Now there are literally none when I look for them, on several occasions. Bird population is low, too.
- fl0ps 4y agoCrickets. I miss the sound of crickets.
- lotsofpulp 4y agoIt could be that they experienced a lawsuit where not having sufficient lighting or having unlit areas where people can be expected to walk resulted in an injury, and they or the insurance company had to cough up some money. When those kinds of lawsuits happen, everyone goes into cover your ass mode.
- dustractor 4y agoI 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..."
- thefaux 4y agoSadly we all too often collectively choose to hurt ourselves rather than raise others up.
- xnx 4y agoLight 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.html https://www.space.com/16577-milky-way-galaxy-nyc-blackout.ht...
- Gigachad 4y agoLight 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.
- squeaky-clean 4y agoOther 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.
- Gigachad 4y agoNo doubt there are some benefits to reducing light pollution, but I find it interesting how this topic gets HN in almost universal agreement that we need to ban street lighting and mandate people turn their home and office lights off, while suggesting that maybe we do something to slow the trend of mega SUVs or maybe mandating particulate filters on diesel vehicles is some kind of horrific authoritarian overreach.
- 4y ago
- stuaxo 4y agoThis is good - when I was arguing for this about 5-10 years ago, people seemed in favour of eradicating darkness entirely.
- dorchadas 4y agoSadly, they still are and it's super depressing.
- nosianu 4y agoAnd just a few minutes after reading this submission I see this article about "The Dark Sky [Scottish] Town": https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/dark-sky-moffat-scotland 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-skies-in-the-texas-hill-country https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/where-to-find-dark-ski... They also have an.. unusual "Courses" section for online courses.
- DarkNova6 4y agoAre there any hard facts and clear causations why this is a bad thing? I've been hearing about it for years, but have yet to see evidence why it would be. And no, I'm not interested in correlations.
- giraffe_lady 4y agoCorrelation comes much much earlier in understanding effects, especially complex large scale long term ones like this. If we always wait for concrete undeniable proof, we will never avoid harmful choices, but only understand them after the fact. And correlations are not orthogonal to causations. They can be spurious, but often they are not. Categorically dismissing correlations is as naive as categorically accepting them. The distinction you're making is more a type I error vs type II error. Which is a valid orientation but doesn't put you on the higher intellectual plane the tone of your comment is trying to claim.
- Shaggy2000 4y ago[flagged]
- vlunkr 4y agoSo is artificial light poisoning the planet? I think they made some interesting points but they didn't even really quantify what that means.
- mistrial9 4y agothe implied topic is the effect on insect populations, and on human psychology due to lack of rest time and other potential side-effects.
- auntienomen 4y agoIt's poisoning us. Most of us live in cities now or in densely populated suburbs, and have no clue what we've lost in the night sky.
- Gigachad 4y agoHow is this poisoning us? What health affects are associated with not seeing the stars?
- adolph 4y ago". . . as their rhodopsin becomes superfluous, they may well create descendants who, in even middling darkness, are as blind as, it turns out, bats are not . . ." To say that there is a link between continued usage and inheritance of a genetic characteristic is Lamarckism. Lamarckism, also known as Lamarckian inheritance or neo-Lamarckism, is the notion that an organism can pass on to its offspring physical characteristics that the parent organism acquired through use or disuse during its lifetime. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamarckism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamarckism
- pard68 4y agoI live in one of the darkest locations in the USA. We are nearly tied with some places out west in the desert. Still have not gotten over the night sky. You spend enough years out here seeing it every night, expecting it to eventually be something you take for granted, and then realize why so many ancient peoples were fascinated and in love with the stars.
- dorchadas 4y agoCan I ask where you're at? I'm a certified teacher, and since it's math/physics I can easily transfer it to any other state. Really debating moving somewhere dark if I move back to America, just so I can have the sky.
- steve_adams_86 4y agoI 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.
- depereo 4y agoI 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.
- hackernewds 4y agoBesides 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.
- steve_adams_86 4y agoI 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.
- fleddr 4y agoI'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.
- maegul 4y agoFor 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.
- kupopuffs 4y agoIf you want a low-light suburb, check out Irvine, CA on the eastside. Sometimes it's so dark at night, it's scary.
- maegul 4y agoIt’s curious the talk of low light suburbs. Not sure how I feel about them. My instinct is that they’re an anti pattern because of the safety concerns and I’m sure many would have the same thought, but I’m sure there’s more nuance to them than that and the sources of actual safety or danger one has in a suburb.
- cvccvroomvroom 4y agoDefine "poison." "Alter" yes, "kill with a foreign substance" not really. Light and sound pollution are mostly city things. Light pollution is mostly an issue for nearby optical observatories.
- RoadieRoller 4y agoI 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.
- davidkuennen 4y agoThat sounds lovely. Coming from the countryside in Germany we did something similar as children. The night sky sure is awesome.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- tommywg7 4y agoThe International Dark-Sky Association is a really great resource if you're interested in taking more action, like using dark-sky friendly lighting in your home/business/hoa https://www.darksky.org/get-involved/ https://www.darksky.org/get-involved/
- tpmx 4y agoNo.
- c_o_n_v_e_x 4y agoPart me wonders whether this (LED lighting being bad for us) explains the feeling that society is collectively losing its marbles.
- jononomo 4y agoAlthough I'm a white American, I attended high school in the Himalayan foothills of India. One time, when I was 17, we went on a camping trip and slept out under the stars, miles from the middle of nowhere, at an elevation of probably 9,000 feet. It was 1992. I remember lying in my sleeping bag on some hillside, looking up at the Milky Way, and then a meteor shower happened and I saw a dozen shooting stars. I only vaguely understood then what a mystical experience I was having.
- amriksohata 4y agoI feel stuff like this makes us less and less aware of our journey and existence and curiosity, modern life with the electrification of light, whether our tablets or TVs, and our skies, we are being put more and more into a bubble where we just do rather than question. Covered by maya (illusion), imagine our ancestors sky gazing and being able to daily see the cosmos.