I was busted by the light police. They had a point.
By: Dana Milbank
I love the night sky and am aware that the darkness is decreasing. Even in the Adirondack Park where I live you can see encroachment of lights. Some of it comes from towns, some comes from newly constructed houses. Each little bit encroaches on the ability to see the night sky.
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
The moon rises over Historic White’s Ferry, as seen from the Loudoun County side in Virginia on May 16, 2022. (Craig Hudson for The Washington Post)
Just eight weeks after I bought a place in the Virginia countryside, I was busted by the light police.
First came an email from somebody who lives across the valley from me. “Your new place has a lot of intense white, all-night exterior illumination that I don’t recall before,” he wrote. “From our front windows, it sort of looks like the scene in ‘E.T.’ where the spaceship has landed.”
I apologized, explaining that I had merely turned on the existing exterior lights of the home, which had been vacant, and therefore dark, for months. I said I would install some new bulbs that brighten only when motion is detected, and I thought the matter closed.
Two weeks later, I got another email. The guy across the valley had turned me in to the “Dark Sky Committee” of the Rappahannock League for Environmental Protection. The committee wrote to say it had been made aware of my lighting and it was prepared to send a representative to my home to “help you figure out your best options” to darken the mood.
It was an annoying welcome to my new community — but in retrospect, I’m grateful to the Dark Sky Committee. Its members have no authority (there’s no law restricting my lumens), but they were persuasive. It turns out my lights weren’t doing much harm to neighbors, but they were doing a whole lot of harm to other living thi
The New York skyline on March 24, 2020. (Jeenah Moon for The Washington Post)
That’s a shame for humanity. But it’s much worse for the insects, birds, reptiles and mammals that have had their ecosystems disrupted by the sudden change. In the evolutionary blink of an eye, artificial light has altered migration, mating, foraging, pollination and predation rhythms that developed over eons. Light pollution isn’t as severe an ecological threat as climate change or habitat loss, but it’s accelerating the decline of many animal populations.
And, unlike climate change and habitat loss, this problem has a cheap and painless fix: Just turn down the damn lights.
I asked Torney Van Acker, a retired engineer on the Dark Sky Committee, to visit my home one night for a demonstration. With my “E.T.”-spaceship lights on, we stood outside and he aimed his light meter at the zenith. Using a measure of brightness called “magnitude per square arc-second,” the brightest, Monday-Night-Football night sky is about 16 mpsas, and the darkest sky, with zero light pollution, is 22. The sky above my home scored 18.65 — what you’d expect in a brightly lit suburb.
“You’ve got a good sky,” Van Acker remarked. I felt oddly flattered — and suddenly protective of it.
This was the sky humans took for granted for almost all of our history. In 1901, the conservationist John Muir wrote that “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.”
He was wrong. Man found a way to blot out the floods of light from the stars.
“For 4½ billion years there was no artificial light at night. It’s really only in the last five human generations that we transformed that,” says Ruskin Hartley, who runs the International Dark-Sky Association in Tucson. “It’s one of the most profound transformations of our environment.”
A view from the Cedar Hammock campground on the east side of the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge picks up light pollution from the Southeast direction of the refuge on March 30, 2022, in Folkston, Ga. (Stephen B. Morton/AP)
Light pollution, along with climate change, pesticide use and habitat loss, is driving the decline of some 40 percent of insect species , with the global population of insects shrinking by an estimated 2 percent per year in what some call an “insect apocalypse.” That threatens the pollination of crops and plants and, ultimately, the entire food web. Light pollution is also contributing to the decline in bird population. The number of birds in the United States has dropped by 29 percent since 1970 , which means nearly 3 billion fewer birds in our skies, according to a comprehensive study by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and others.
“The dark places are a refuge,” says Travis Longcore, a professor at UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. But now, “you have light pollution and skyglow that is as bright as the full moon,” and that means certain animals “don’t come out to forage when they should because it’s a danger signal if it’s too bright.”
Animals find their circadian and seasonal rhythms disrupted by artificial light. Urban birds call earlier in the morning, altering the mating process. Plants produce flowers and fruit at the wrong times. And humans lose sleep because of artificial light (whether from streetlights or our digital devices), potentially contributing to increased obesity and cancer.
“There’s days of research that one could go through on how physiology is affected,” Longcore says, “but it all makes sense when you think that this planet has had day/night and lunar cycles for the whole period of the evolution of life.” Until now.
The moon is seen across from Historic White’s Ferry from Loudoun County in Virginia on May 16, 2022. (Craig Hudson for The Washington Post)
The good news is the damage could be easily reversed. The biggest share of light pollution comes from commercial sources — gas stations, strip malls and the like — followed by outdoor sports facilities. After that comes residential lights, streetlights and industrial lights. Municipalities can regulate much of that light pollution, and some already do: dimming streetlights during certain hours, requiring dark-sky-friendly exterior lights in new construction and renovations, and simply turning off lights that serve no public safety purpose.
Each of us has control over residential light pollution, which contributes roughly 10 to 20 percent of the total. I called in the light police to show me what to do. They toured the perimeter and gave me a battle plan.
Even without replacing the items, there are plenty of cheap fixes that I’ve already made: motion-detecting smart bulbs; “warm” bulbs (ideally 2700 kelvin or less) that cast a yellowish hue rather than the bluish one that contributes most to skyglow; nothing more than 1500 lumens, or about 100 watts; and, of course, turning off some lights. The last act requires me to suppress my fear of the dark and to remind myself that more illumination doesn’t necessarily mean more security. The bugs haven’t told me so themselves, but I’m guessing they feel better now, and so do I.
In the end, Van Acker, of the Dark Sky Committee, played the good cop. “You’re one little fish in a pond,” he reassured me. “Your lights aren’t going to make much difference one way or the other. But it’s all cumulative.”
To spread the gospel, Van Acker and his committee got the Rappahannock County Park certified as an International Dark Sky Park, one of only two in the capital region (the other is Sky Meadows State Park in Delaplane, Va.) Now, they’re trying to get dark-sky friendly lighting at a massive, 761-unit housing and retail development called StoneHaven going up just across the county line, near Warrenton, Va. So far, the developers — the Lennar Corporation and Saadeh Partners — haven’t complied. (Neither developer responded to my inquiry.)
Developments such as those are lighting up rural night skies. Since the Rappahannock County Park earned its certification in 2019, the skies above it have brightened measurably, to 21.2 mpsas from 21.3.
Standing with me in the park one night, Van Acker pointed to a glow in the north: “That’s a light dome from Front Royal.” To the east, the clouds reflected the lights of Warrenton. To the south, a light dome from Culpeper. To the west, over the mountains, a light dome from Luray. A park neighbor’s floodlights and planned construction in Washington, Va., are bringing the light pollution ever closer.
The Milky Way rises above the Blue Ridge Mountains in Shenandoah National Park in 2018. (Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post)
But there’s still something special about the night skies over this piece of the Virginia piedmont. On a clear night such as this, 4,000 stars are visible. In the capital, I can see perhaps a dozen. Outside of Maine and West Virginia, it’s “about the darkest corner of the East Coast,” Van Acker tells me.
“Dark” is a bit of a misnomer. On this night, the sky bursts with starlight. In the West, Venus and the Seven Sisters dazzle. Overhead, Ursa Major and Leo sparkle. And every now and then, another Lyrid meteor streaks out of the northeast, at 29 miles per second.
When the ancients gazed heavenward, they saw much the same sky. Ptolemy mapped the same constellations. The Chinese recorded their observation of the Lyrid meteor shower more than 2,700 years ago .
Will we be among the last to see such wonders before a haze of man-made blue light conceals the night sky from future generations? We owe it to them, and to all creatures that depend on the dark, not to let that happen.
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Light is good: In some instances, it isn't. I could not believe it some time ago when i saw the first of those solar powered LED lights in the stores. Then they started popping up everywhere. I have even seen lights in graveyards
This happened to us when we lived in Missouri. Someone built a home up the mountain behind us and had numerous bright lights on the exterior of the home facing the lake. When they were turned on at night the damn place looked like a landing strip for an airport. Because it was behind us we were not directly affected except we did lose some of our beautiful dark skies. People across the lake drove over to our side to see what in the hell the lights were and they were a couple of miles away. One thing led to another and soon threats were flying and lawsuits threatened.
It was finally settled when someone shot out one light every night. The dumb asses finally quit turning them on since they figured their windows would be the next target.
I have a lake near me that I like to camp on once in a while. One time I chose to camp up near humanity where there was a view of the access road. Got all set up, kicking back, it got dark and someoneone's automatic lights came on clear across the lake. The whole place was dark except for this one glaring bright spot. The kicker was that there was no one even there, the lights just came on. Grrrr
This issue has been a reoccurring theme for night sky photographers too. It has been more and more difficult to find spots to shoot at the stars.
I used to live on top of a mountain in WV. A few of our neighbors had amateur observatories there. They weren't full-time residents - mostly drove in from the DC area. They asked that if we saw their cars there, would we please turn off our porch lights, and close our curtains so indoor lights wouldn't obscure their view. We were happy to oblige, and there was some pretty awesome stargazing to be done there - panoramic view. But the lights of Moorefield, WV were easily visible, and affected our view of the stars a bit.
I was on a houseboat trip with the maternal side of the family in the desert around 50 years ago. at night you could see every star in the sky and even some satellites as they passed overhead. my cousin and I had brought a strobe light along that we had rigged up to attract UFO's. my granny who was a bigshot with USAF accounting quickly nixed that idea. it was the same year she later admitted to me that there actually was a project blue book. the vacation highlight was that my uncle had brought a research colleague and his young wife from france along for the trip. she had no issues with nudity on the beaches. oooh la la
When I lived in northern MN the population was sparse and the natural skies were stunning. I would see the ''northern lights'' quite often.
This photo was taken at Deer Lake, MN and the temp was 20 degrees below zero.
that's 90 degrees too cold...
why is the flora green?
It's frozen in place from summer which was a Tuesday afternoon in August.
Actually, I posted the wrong heading with the photo. The other photo was of Pughole Lake just south of Deer Lake and it was taken in the winter when it was minus 20.
Looks like a field of snow lit up by the northern lights, note, some of the trees in the background are leafless, the ones that aren't are probably pines.
I'm about as north that I ever like to be. not a big fan of places where the mosquitos fly in formation and the fish bite the bait and then your hand when you try to remove the hook.
It's fall early to mid-November so the temp is more likely to be 20 degrees. You won't see below zero temp there until Dec to March.
You're a fucking whimp. Ain't no weather you cannot dress for.
gee thanks. I was a linesman year round in colorado for 12 years. bad weather days off were few and far between. I dressed for it, but pole climbing boots weren't insulated. extreme cold weather? not for me anymore...
I was only making an observation... I climb ski lifts on what seems to be only the shitiest of weather. I feel your pain
Perfect
That's a beautiful photo.
I used to see the Aurora Borealis all the time in Alaska. Of course, it was way below freezing but somebody would come into the dorm and holler down the hallway "Y'all come out here and look at the sky!"
So we would bundle up and go stare at the night sky for as long as we could stand the cold