59. The Challenge of Light Pollution

Our abuse of the natural world is causing problems which grow more terrifying with every passing day.  

Understandably, climate change and the physical destruction of entire ecosystems attract the most attention. 

But we face another environmental threat - one which is insidious and fast-growing, yet still widely ignored. 

Light pollution.

The world we inhabit was, until modern times, governed by strict astronomical laws. Day followed night, and the night was always dark - except when the moon was full. This celestial regime shaped the behaviour and biological rhythms of (almost) every living thing on the planet. 

The coming of electric light changed everything - and continues to do so. In many places true darkness now never comes. And while we may welcome that change because some of our deepest fears are associated with darkness, all that new light is causing immense damage. 

There is overwhelming evidence of the destructive effects of artificial light on the animals (and plants) with which we share the planet. 

To give just a few examples, it is likely that billions - yes, billions - of migratory birds die when they are drawn to brightly lit buildings. And even that number is dwarfed by the number of insects that suffer a similar fate. Then there are the countless, doomed turtle hatchlings that are lured away from the sea by artificial light.  

Light pollution is a major but little-noticed factor in the massive problem of biodiversity loss. 

Moreover it is increasingly clear that by banishing darkness we are also damaging our own health and well-being.

Exposure to artificial light at night is associated with a host of physical and mental disorders including diabetes, depression and even some forms of cancer.

And we are suffering other, less tangible but important injuries.

The darkness that once permitted everyone on the planet to see thousands of stars, as well as the glowing ribbon of the Milky Way - our home galaxy - has been obscured by the halo of artificial light that surrounds every town and city. The arrival of the LED has only made matters worse.

Most people living today will never see the night sky in all its glory. 

The facts are not in dispute.  In some countries (France, for example) governments are already taking practical steps to address the problems of light pollution. In the US there are many cities that have taken steps to reduce the glare of outdoor lighting.

But the British government rejected an amendment to the recent Environment Act that would have added the reduction of light pollution as a target. 

Low public awareness is a major obstacle, coupled with the common assumption that more light must be better, and a widely held (but questionable) belief that it always improves our security.  

Few people realise that the worst effects of light pollution can be reduced or eliminated by taking a few simple, inexpensive steps - such as installing lights with warmer colours, shielding them so that they don’t not spill upwards into the sky, and using motion sensors so that they only come on when needed. 

The best solution of all - just turning unnecessary lights off - has the great additional benefit of saving both energy and money.  

Often it is enough to draw someone’s attention to the problems. I recently persuaded the British Army to remove some outrageously bright lights from a military base in the middle of Chichester Harbour (a nature reserve on the South Coast of England) simply by having a conversation with the senior officer in charge. 

In the UK, the Council for the Protection of Rural England’s (CPRE) annual ‘star count’ has helped people become more aware of the problem of ‘skyglow’ - and it’s good news that several Dark Sky Parks have been designated in the UK.  

But while some UK charities take an interest in light pollution, none treats it as a priority. Because all their efforts are small and fragmented, progress in tackling the problem has been painfully slow.

 Much more needs to be done. 

 So here are a few ideas: 

Why don’t British environmental charities devise and adopt a code of conduct in relation to light pollution? 

Why don’t those same charities ask all their grant recipients to follow a similar code of conduct? Perhaps they could offer extra funding for this purpose. 

A good way of raising public awareness in the UK would be to establish an annual prize in recognition of outstanding achievements in tacking light pollution. Who would like to take this on? 

Above all, policy change is needed. Will one of our leading environmental charities launch a campaign to get the government to regulate light pollution? 

Yes, it’s a big challenge, but it’s also an urgent one.  

51. The night sky and the problem of light pollution

I spent the month of July sailing from Southern Greece to Northern Spain - a 2000 nautical mile voyage in a 14-meter yacht.

It was the first time I’d been out of sight of land since the start of the COVID pandemic.

As we headed across the Ionian Sea to Siracusa, I saw a red sun disappear beneath the horizon with the briefest wink of green light. The so-called ‘green flash’ - so rarely seen that some doubt its reality!

On watch that night I was treated to the sublime spectacle of a truly dark night sky, unpolluted by artificial light - stretching from horizon to horizon.

The arch of the Milky Way glowed above us and the occasional meteor briefly slid across the sky. Jupiter and Saturn rose slowly in the east, Antares glowed low in the south, Arcturus descended towards the western horizon, and Cassiopeia looked down on us from her throne in the northern sky.

A mysterious rain fell from that cloudless sky - a rain of wonder and peace - and I felt a strange, spine-tingling joy.

Among all the many precious things threatened by our reckless and greedy commitment to what economists and politicians call ‘growth’, is the darkess of the night.

Most of us now live in towns and cities where artifical light veils all but the brightest stars. And the plague is spreading ever wider. The night we see is quite different from that with which all our ancestors were familiar. Different, and profoundly impoverished.

Yet unlike many of the environmental problems we face, light pollution is relatively easy to fix.

It’s not difficult to turn off the many lights that serve no useful purpose, and it’s easy to shield those that we really need so that their light isn’t wastefully poured into the sky.

Light pollution is a serious threat to the welfare of many of the creatures with which we share the planet - from migratory birds and insects, to amphibians, crustaceans, reptiles and even plants. And there’s a strong body of evidence that it’s bad for our health too.

Of course reducing light pollution would also save a great deal of money as well as reducing energy consumption and CO2 emissions.

The UK Parliament is currently considering a new Environment Bill which contains a number of key targets. Bafflingly, however, reducing light pollution is not yet among them.

The UK charity Buglife has been working hard, in collaboration with others, to change that, but they need all the help they can get.

If, like me, you want to see light pollution reduced, why not lend Buglife your support? You can do so by joining as a member or by writing to your MP (if you live in the UK) to support their proposed amendment to the Envirnoment Bill.

You might also be interested in supporting the impressive work of the excellent US-based International Dark Sky Association.

41. Christiane Ritter on the Polar night - and the glory of the sun

In 1934, a young Austrian artist - Christiane Ritter - did something a bit crazy. She left behind her comfortable home and went to live with her husband and another man (both hunters), in a tiny hut at Gray Hook, on the northern shores of Svalbard - just 600 nautical miles from the North Pole. They spent the whole winter there and she wrote a remarkable book about the experience which, in translation, is called A Woman in the Polar Night (translated by Jane Degras and published by Pushkin Press). First published in German in 1938, it really deserves to be better known.

The hut at Gray Hook (follow the link to explore panoramic view)

Just to give you a taste, here’s a powerful passage about the psychological effects of the long Polar night - and dreams of the glorious, returning sun:

Now everything around us is quite dead; even the battering of the storm has ceased. A heavy mist weighs on everything; the hut is shrouded in stillness and darkness. It seems to me as if only now has the real night fallen, and slowly my courage begins to seep away. Perhaps the sun will never come back again. Perhaps it is dark all over the world.

My husband calms my fears. Again and again, on little scraps of paper, he marks the course of the sun, which since 23 December has been on its way back to us…. But I am in despair. All his explanations tell me only how far away the sun is. There is no glimmer of light to show that it is coming nearer, and although 78 days of darkness have already passed, there are still another 54 days before, for the first time, the sun will peep for a few seconds over the southern horizon…

The days pass uneventfully, without any real work, without a consoling glimpse into the reality of the world. At night we lie down, neither tired nor wakeful, encompassed by the unending darkness and the profound quiet.

Surrounded by this boundless deadness and rigidity of everything physical, one's living senses begin slowly to go their own way. More frequently and more brightly as the winter is prolonged, a strange light spreads before the inner eye, a remote and yet familiar vision. It is as though here, in this apartness, we develop a particularly sharp awareness of the mighty laws of the spirit, of the unfathomable gulf between human magnitudes and eternal truth. Outside of time, everything is annihilated. The imprisoned senses circle in the past, in a scene without special dimensions, a play in which time stands still.

Often I see the flowers and trees of the distant sun world, but I do not see them as I used to see them. They are glowing with colour and piercingly beautiful. Their most secret meaning lives in their growth and their colour. But the people who live under the sun seem distant and small to me. With bent heads they are running round in circles, the circles of their anxieties and troubles. Only a few of them see the glory of the sun.

30.Darkness matters much more than you might think...

We’re only just starting to realise that our love affair with artificial light at night (ALAN) is bad not just for us, but also for many of the creatures with which we share this planet. Including, for example, the sandhopper.

But before I talk about the problems facing this remarkable crustacean, let me sketch in a bit of background about light pollution.

Paris was the first European city to introduce street lighting. That was in 1667, during the reign of Louis XIV - The Sun King. Very soon other major cities across Europe followed suit. (I’m not sure about Asia - I suspect that Edo was pretty well lit too and maybe even earlier than Paris. Does anyone know?)

Streetlights in those days were pretty dim - just candles or oil lamps. While they made nocturnal city life easier and perhaps a bit safer, they didn’t have much effect on the visibility of the night sky. In the countryside, the nights remained as dark as they had always been.

Things changed with the arrival of gas and electric lights in the 19th century. Cities could now be brilliantly illuminated. More light seemed to be an unqualified good, and few resisted its encroachments. Today of course we have many other kinds of lighting - like LEDs and fluorescent tubes.

ALAN is spreading rapidly across the face of the earth.  Everywhere you go, there are brilliantly lit office buildings, factories, airports, docks, military installations, car parks, apartment blocks and even private houses.

But ALAN is not restricted to built-up areas - it extends outwards along the roads that connect the cities and towns where we live. You can’t even escape it completely on the open ocean, where oil rigs, ships and fishing boats are often lit up like Christmas trees.

The problem is not just the direct glare of the lights themselves.

There is also the phenomenon of ‘skyglow’ caused by the scattering of light from clouds and dust in the atmosphere.

One of the sad consequences of ALAN is that most people on earth can no longer enjoy the wonder of a dark night sky with its thousands of stars - and they will never see the Milky Way.

Big cities generate so much light that the skyglow above them can sometimes be detected a hundred miles away or more. It is the most widespread form of light pollution and apparently now affects 23% of the earth’s surface between the latitudes of 75 degrees North and 60 degrees South. That includes many of the most important areas of biodiversity around the world. And it continues to spread rapidly.

Of all the many serious environmental problems we face, ALAN is actually the easiest to solve.

Better designed lights, properly shielded, pointing in the right direction, and only as bright as they need to be, would make a huge difference. Steps like these would not be expensive to implement. They would also save energy and reduce costs in the long run. (For more information about light pollution and how to combat it, visit the excellent website of the International Dark-Sky Association.)

In recent years scientists have begun to pay attention to the effects of ALAN, both on us humans and on other animals, as well as plants.

ALAN certainly has a disruptive effect on the internal clocks that govern many natural processes - including our own sleeping patterns.

It is a well-known menace to turtle hatchlings, as well as migratory birds. It may also be implicated in the decline of many insect species.

And now it looks as if ALAN is also making life difficult for the poor little sandhopper.

These animals live on sandy beaches and, as I explained in Incredible Journeys (Chapter 10), they are remarkable navigators.

In the evening they make their way to water’s edge to chomp on seaweed. In the morning they retreat up the beach and bury themselves in the damp sand to avoid getting dried out by the sun. Since they can easily get drowned, it’s important that they don’t go the wrong way.

Amazingly, sandhoppers have not one but two celestial compass systems that help them steer in the right direction - whether up or down the beach. One is based on the light of the moon and the other on the sun.

A new study (unfortunately locked behind a paywall) from D. Torres et al. looks at how skyglow affects the navigational ability of sandhoppers on the coast of the island of Anglesea, Wales.

They report that skyglow - though much weaker than direct light pollution - nevertheless disrupts the sandhoppers’ lunar compass system, making it harder for them to navigate safely at night.

Since many other animals use the stars and the moon to help them orient at night, it is a sure bet that ALAN is not just causing trouble for sandhoppers.

Torres et al. conclude that ‘a renewed focus on the ecological impacts of artificial skyglow is urgently needed’ in order to understand how it is affecting the world around us.

Yes indeed.

And in the meantime, please do think about how you can reduce your own light footprint!

6.The author of the ‘The Call of the Wild’ on celestial navigation…and the dangers of pride!

Jack London

https://www.falseart.com/jack-london-the-snark/

As readers of my first book, Sextant, will know, I’m not only interested in how non-human animals navigate. I’m a navigator myself and a devotee of celestial navigation - a skill seriously threatened by our increasing (and by now almost exclusive) reliance on electronic navigation aids, notably GPS.

So here’s an entertaining anecdote drawn from the author and adventurer Jack London’s account of his long trans-Pacific cruise in his yacht the Snark.

London and his friend, Roscoe, sailed from San Francisco in 1908 – heading first for Honolulu – without yet knowing how to use a sextant, which was a problem because they had no other way of determining their position!  So they simply taught themselves.

Roscoe was the first to try his hand:

‘…when we got out to sea and he began to practise the holy rite, while I looked on admiringly, a change, subtle and distinctive, marked his bearing.  When he shot the sun at noon, the glow of achievement wrapped him in lambent flame.  When he went below, figured out his observation, and then…announced our latitude and longitude, there was an authoritative ring in his voice that was new to all of us.  But that was not the worst of it.  He became filled with incommunicable information.

‘By an understandable and forgivable confusion of values, plus a loss of orientation, he felt weighted by responsibility, and experienced the possession of power that was like unto a god…The act of finding himself on the face of the waters became a rite, and he felt himself a superior being to the rest of us who knew not this rite and were dependent on him for being shepherded across the heaving and limitless waste, the briny highroad that connects the continents and whereon are no milestones. So, with the sextant he made obeisance to the sun-god…’

At first London deferred to Roscoe, but quite soon he rebelled.  Roscoe, he reflected, is a man like myself.  ‘What he has done, I can do.’  So he decided to learn for himself how to handle a sextant – a task that he found not too difficult.

‘The mystery was mystery no longer. …and yet, such was the miracle of it, I was conscious of new power in me, and I felt the thrill and tickle of pride… I was not as other men – most other men: I knew what they did not know, – the mystery of the heavens, that pointed out the way across the deep….No medicine man nor high priest was ever prouder…I was a worker of miracles. I forgot how easily I had taught myself from the printed page. I forgot that all the work (and a tremendous work, too) had been done by the masterminds before me, the astronomers and mathematicians, who had discovered and elaborated the whole science of navigation…’

Eventually the Snark made her first landfall, just as planned:

‘ “That island is Maui”, we said, verifying by the chart. “…We’ll be in Honolulu tomorrow. Our navigation is all right.” ‘

[Quotes from The Cruise of the Snark by Jack London]