Washed away in a sea of light

Washed away in a sea of light

New England, awash in light pollution • NASA (Public Domain)

Originally published 15 February 1999

A few weeks ago I was with a group of stu­dents from MIT and Salem State Col­lege under clear dark skies at the Caribbean Marine Research Cen­ter in the Bahamas.

The Cen­ter has an island to itself with few lights. Far away to the south one could just make out the faint glow of George Town on the island of Great Exu­ma, but over­head the night was jet black and filled with stars — so many stars it was dif­fi­cult to make out the pat­terns of the constellations.

I point­ed out famil­iar things — Ori­on, the Pleiades, the North Star, the bowl of the Big Dip­per peek­ing over the hori­zon. I also showed the stu­dents things they had nev­er seen before. The win­ter Milky Way flow­ing at Ori­on’s back. The Bee­hive in Can­cer, a blur of light from a clus­ter of stars too faint to see indi­vid­u­al­ly. The Dou­ble Clus­ter in Perseus, anoth­er blur, elon­gat­ed, the light from two adja­cent star clus­ters. The zodi­a­cal light stream­ing ver­ti­cal­ly from the west­ern hori­zon, sun­light reflect­ed from dust in the inner solar system.

Ear­li­er that evening we had watched a 30-hour-old moon, eye­lash thin, kiss the hori­zon with its wispy arc.

These things were com­mon­place to our ances­tors. Beau­ti­ful things. Hints of the majesty and com­plex­i­ty of the uni­verse. As we watched we tried to imag­ine our­selves whirling on our mul­ti­ple jour­neys — on the spin­ning Earth, orbit­ing the sun, in a spi­ral­ing galaxy, and rac­ing out­wards from the Big Bang.

For most of the his­to­ry of the human race, the night sky inspired reli­gion, mythol­o­gy, time­keep­ing, nav­i­ga­tion, sci­ence, and math­e­mat­ics. To a gen­er­al­ly unap­pre­ci­at­ed extent, human cul­ture is a prod­uct of our atten­tion to the stars.

That’s all gone now for many of us. The night sky has been washed away in a sea of arti­fi­cial light.

Imag­ine lis­ten­ing to a live string quar­tet out­doors in Times Square at rush hour; that’s the aur­al equiv­a­lent of look­ing at the night sky from the envi­rons of a city or suburb.

Light pol­lu­tion is espe­cial­ly trou­ble­some for astronomers. Their abil­i­ty to peer deeply into the uni­verse is com­pro­mised by arti­fi­cial light. And much of the harm­ful light serves no use­ful pur­pose for the com­mu­ni­ties that pro­duce it.

Go to the web­site of the Inter­na­tion­al Dark Sky Asso­ci­a­tion and look at satel­lite pho­tographs of the night­time Earth from space — lit up like a Christ­mas tree. The east­ern Unit­ed States, in par­tic­u­lar, shows up in the pho­tos as a sprawl­ing lumi­nous blotch. The light direct­ed upwards does noth­ing use­ful on the ground. It does, how­ev­er, scat­ter through the atmos­phere and shroud the plan­et with a bale­ful glow that obscures the stars.

The Inter­na­tion­al Dark Sky Asso­ci­a­tion tries to edu­cate the pub­lic on eco­nom­i­cal­ly-advan­ta­geous light­ing alter­na­tives that accom­plish a required pur­pose — busi­ness, trav­el, secu­ri­ty, esthet­ics — while being min­i­mal­ly intru­sive where light is not want­ed or need­ed. They esti­mate that wast­ed, upward-direct­ed light costs this coun­try a bil­lion dol­lars a year.

They make this anal­o­gy: “If we had a water sprin­kler sys­tem that wast­ed much of its water by scat­ter­ing water every­where — onto the street, through our neigh­bor’s win­dows, and upward to encour­age evap­o­ra­tion — we’d not tol­er­ate it for long. If togeth­er we wast­ed a bil­lion dol­lars a year this way, we’d declare it a nation­al disaster.”

Some of this coun­try’s major astro­nom­i­cal facil­i­ties, includ­ing the world’s fifth largest tele­scope, are locat­ed on Mount Hop­kins in Ari­zona, 40 miles south of Tuc­son. In 1972, Tuc­son was the first major city to cre­ate an out­door light­ing code to reduce street­light glare and sen­si­bly restrict com­mer­cial and res­i­den­tial light­ing. Since that time, city res­i­dents and astronomers have lived in rel­a­tive harmony.

This alliance was threat­ened recent­ly by a devel­op­er’s pro­pos­al to build 6,000 homes and a large com­mer­cial dis­trict on a for­mer ranch at the base of Mount Hop­kins. After a heat­ed bat­tle between devel­op­er and astronomers, the Pima Coun­ty Board of Super­vi­sors last month turned down the proposal.

For the moment, the obser­va­to­ries are pro­tect­ed, but no one in the astro­nom­i­cal com­mu­ni­ty is hope­ful about the long term. Our view into the uni­verse will not be safe until all of us rec­og­nize that wast­ed light is depriv­ing us of some­thing impor­tant to the human spir­it — knowl­edge and expe­ri­ence of the uni­verse that spawned us.

Dur­ing the next few weeks, Venus, Jupiter, Mer­cury, Sat­urn, and the moon will put on a spec­tac­u­lar show in the evening sky, includ­ing a mag­i­cal con­junc­tion of the two bright­est plan­ets on Feb­ru­ary 23 [1999]. Cocooned in our wrap of arti­fi­cial light, few of us will even be aware that some­thing spe­cial is going on. If our neigh­bors and munic­i­pal author­i­ties assault­ed our sense of hear­ing the way they frus­trate our vision, we would be up in arms. Some­how, we accept light pol­lu­tion as a mat­ter of course.

The stu­dents who vis­it­ed the Caribbean Marine Research Cen­ter were deeply aware of the need to keep the sea and atmos­phere free of chem­i­cal pol­lu­tants. How­ev­er, like most of us, they had not giv­en much thought to one of the most per­ni­cious pol­lu­tants of all — wast­ed light that sep­a­rates us from the majesty of night.

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