The very first science was astronomy. After all, the sky is a laboratory open to everyone. It also has always been an environmental domain—people inhabit the ecosystem that embraces both the stars above and the Earth below and have long endowed both realms with important properties affecting the human condition. Mastering the two domains was important to the emergence and survival of early civilizations.
Ancient humans populated the heavens with immutable figures from their environment, such as bears, rams, bulls, whales, and more. Early civilizations identified the planets as wandering deities, finding meaning in their movements. They tracked the motions of the Sun through their versions of the zodiac. They observed the equinoxes and solstices. They found portents in comets, eclipses, and meteor showers. Civilizations in present-day China, Japan, Iran, and the Americas recorded the supernova of 1054 as full of tidings for their societies.
Humanity discovered both messages and inspiration in the realm above. In the Christian tradition, it was an astronomical event of great eminence that drew the three Wise Men to Bethlehem. And Christians, Jews, Muslims, Chinese and other societies alike still time at least some of their holidays using a lunar calendar.
With the advent of agriculture, communities needed to know when to sow seed and relied on the stars to tell them. Eventually, astronomers counseled kings and queens and potentates. They calculated eclipses and enforced the calendar. In Great Britain, there is still an Astronomer Royal, a post established in the 17th century. Today the Astronomer is paid 100 pounds a year and is considered a member of his majesty’s household. The nocturnal sky is so important to today’s society that the view of the heavens is a tourist attraction in planetariums. In that regard, the irony is that for most in the audience, the night outdoors has been all but lost.
Astronomy today is a vastly more powerful science than even a century ago, when humanity didn’t yet realize we inhabit just one galaxy of hundreds of billions, all rushing away from each other in an expanding universe. Those discoveries came from data gathered by astronomer Edwin Hubble starting in 1924, working the powerful telescope at the Mount Wilson Observatory in Pasadena, California.
That great instrument and countless others throughout the world are now threatened by the pervasive light pollution that blankets much of the planet. Not only astronomy is at risk. Indeed, humanity is losing its connection to the night sky because of too much ground-based light, which reflects off atmospheric molecules to create a dim, pervasive haze that obscures all but the brightest stars. It is now all but impossible to see the Milky Way except in remote areas.
Importantly, a great deal of this light is waste—producing excess greenhouse gas emissions beyond reasonable needs for illumination. Indeed, the haze problem has worsened considerably just in the last few years, fueled in part by the lower operating cost of LED bulbs. Many buildings and facilities are illuminated all night, and citizens clamor for additional lighting to combat crime and make driving safer.
This is not just a problem for astronomers and amateur star gazers—it is a profound environmental problem that is just beginning to crest.
Many animals and plants depend on the solar cycle to orient their behavior. When night becomes day, that is a problem. Some burrowing animals avoid going out for feeding except when it’s really dark, forcing them into starvation. Many turtles use the moon to steer by when they come on land to lay their eggs. They are often confused by the lighting coming from beach houses; their spawn similarly become disoriented and end up as prey. Coral reefs bloom all at once with genetic material as a mating strategy timed to the phases of the moon—but now are often confused by onshore lighting. Many migrating birds steer by the stars, sometimes going off course because of too much light—helping to drive the plunge in avian species worldwide.
Moths, who are vital pollinators, in their brief life, time their mating to darkness; where there is too much light, pheromones change from positive to negative and romance becomes impossible. Whenever you see insects around your porch light, it is a sign that your convenience is disrupting their mating.
Scientific American explains how the loss of nighttime pollinators is important. In a 2017 experiment testing that hypothesis, scientists wearing night-vision goggles observed cabbage thistle plants. But the light haze “deterred nocturnal pollinating insects from making their rounds. . . . The plants bore less fruit, suggesting that the effects of brightening nights could eventually show up in supermarket aisles.” In the words of the magazine, “Artificial lights send the natural world a bewildering array of ill-timed signals—Wake up! Hide! Hunt! Fly this way! Change your metabolism!”
Scientists have recently calculated that the planet has lost 75 percent of its insect biomass, and researchers believe light pollution is an extinction driver for many insect species. Accompanying this loss is the vital role insects play in the planetary ecosystem, where seemingly insignificant organisms can prove essential to the health of the environment. And that is important to humanity, along with getting back the majesty of the night sky and the ability of any person to penetrate its eternal truths and mysteries by contemplation and close observation.
To view the night sky as environmental, consider the words of John Muir: “The floods of light from the stars . . . must always be wild, for man can change them and mar them hardly more than can the butterflies.” In the words of the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank: “He was wrong. Man found a way to blot out the floods of light from the stars.” According to Milbank, “Light-polluted skies cover an estimated 80 percent of the world’s population and 99 percent of the U.S. and European populations.”
Into this crisis comes a writer who some feel should rank with Rachel Carson. The book is The Darkness Manifesto (Scribner), by Johan Eklöf, a biologist from Sweden. The insect biomass decline cited earlier comes from his book, as do some of the examples above about the needs of organisms to have dark nights and clear skies. According to Eklöf, that list of organisms includes Homo sapiens.
In a review of the book, the New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik shows he has a way to pick anecdotes. For instance, in Britain one can rarely find bats in belfries anymore. The reason is that most churches shine bright lights on their steeples and bell towers all night, and the bats have left for somewhere darker.
Eklöf decries not just illuminated steeples but, according to Gopnik, especially “the ‘sky beam’ atop the Luxor Hotel, in Las Vegas. Creating forty-two billion candlepower [emphasis in original] of light every night, meant merely as a come-on to tourists and gamblers, it unintentionally excites and undoes flocks of birds, genetically programmed by evolution to fly toward bright light—and, in 2019, attracted clouds of grasshoppers, who flew toward the pseudo-Egyptian pyramid with all the horror of a pseudo-Egyptian plague.” That is an example of just deserts to a menace, but most light haze is caused by ignorance, carelessness, and pursuit of dark avoidance without care to the spillover effects.
The good news is that most of this excess light can be eliminated by best practices for cities and facilities. Street lights can be designed so no light shines upward, which sharply cuts operating costs to achieve the same advantages in traffic safety. Additionally, LED lights can be tuned to omit certain frequencies that cause the light haze bedeviling astronomers or that produce unwanted animal or plant responses, without inconvenience to the citizen, business, or municipality. Milbank advocates local campaigns to change over exterior lights for household crime prevention to bulbs that only turn on when they detect motion. The retrofit is painless and also provides energy savings.
According to Scientific American, astronomers at the Kitt Peak observatory formed the Dark Sky Association to combat this modern plague. The scientists succeeded in getting nearby Flagstaff, Arizona, to install new streetlamps and undertake other measures to help the telescope facility remain working. Such programs often save money for localities, businesses, and homeowners in addition to benefitting ecosystems and even avoiding greenhouse gas emissions and other pollutants. Sounds like an enlightened solution.
However, in a disturbing article, New Scientist reported last fall that “adverts in space are now economically viable.” The magazine notes that “companies could use constellations of satellites that reflect sunlight to Earth to create advertisements in the sky at a commercially viable cost of $65 million per mission.” The figure is the result of a feasibility study done by two experts. They claim that groups of as few as 50 satellites in low Earth orbit, each equipped with a reflector, could for a few days act as pixels to show an image. The ads would be viewable for a while after sunset for most of humanity. Imagine a corporate logo or a politician’s name. The image could be three times bigger than the full Moon.
Notice & Comment is written by the editor and represents his views.
SpaceX Launch System Allows Debris to Shower Texas Town
SpaceX’s high-profile rocket explosion on April 20 has angered environmental and civil liberty groups who are furious about the level of damage caused to the local environment in Texas. The explosion created significant pollution that impacted local communities, and could threaten endangered species on Boca Chica Beach near Brownsville, Texas. . . . .
Many people immediately took to social media to jab Elon Musk, the CEO, chairman and chief technology officer of SpaceX. While the launch wasn’t considered a complete defeat by the company (nor are explosions uncommon when testing rockets), the extreme damage caused by this one could have likely been prevented with a flame diverter, a structure that fits below a rocket launchpad that channels a rocket’s extreme heat and exhaust in a controlled way. The lack of a flame diverter scorched the landscape and plant life near the rocket pad, as post-launch pictures reveal. —Salon.com
Even now, with the sea level around Boston about a foot higher than it was a century ago, major storms have caused flooding in the Green Line near Fenway Station and at Aquarium Station on the Blue Line. But as seas rise another 1.4 feet by 2050, as NOAA has projected, even a relatively mundane storm—the kind that hits every two years—could cause massive damage to the T, inundating vast portions of the system. —Boston Globe
