Fighting light pollution

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MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Tuesday, September 9th. Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. Coming next on The World and Everything in It: When the stars disappear.

Have you looked up at night and realized you can’t really see anything? For most Americans, the Milky Way is invisible. Not because it’s gone—but because we’ve washed it out.

REICHARD: Some advocates say it’s time to flip the switch on light pollution. WORLD’s Jenny Rough reports.

DIANE KNUTSON: They have to have night. They have to have darkness to find each other.

JENNY ROUGH: Diane Knutson is talking about fireflies or lightning bugs. They mate by flash signal.

KNUTSON: You might have a long flash, a break, and then a long flash. And those are the males out above, flashing at the females. The females are in the grass flashing back if they see a signal that they like.

Knutson is the former board president of DarkSky International. That’s an organization that works to restore the nighttime environment to communities. She says light pollution can cause real problems for fireflies.

KNUTSON: If it’s too bright they can’t find one another. And they don’t leave their place, so they just die out.

Of the 18 threatened firefly species in North America, researchers linked 17 to ALAN, artificial light at night.

It’s not just fireflies that are at risk. Sea turtle hatchlings become disoriented by coastal lights and struggle to navigate their way to the ocean. A research project on coastal ecosystems found coral reefs in the Red Sea and Persian Gulf are spawning outside their reproduction times, drastically reducing their chances of survival.

KNUTSON: Songbirds, they’ll sing to the sky glow, thinking it’s the sun rising at 2:00 a.m., when it’s nighttime, because they can’t differentiate the difference of artificial light and natural light sources.

Even vegetation becomes confused.

KNUTSON: You’ll see flowers and trees that are impacted if they’re under a streetlight. So with trees they might not lose their leaves in the right season. Maybe one side of the tree is de-leafing, getting ready, and the other side is not. There’s flowers that only bloom at night. And we have night pollinators. So if the flowers aren’t blooming and opening at night, the pollinators can’t get to them.

Our excessive use of lights and screens affects our own circadian rhythms. It’s a major contributor to sleep deprivation.

So, Knutson is on a mission to help communities reclaim the night sky.

She loved stargazing as a child.

KNUTSON: Looking up at the stars at night, wondering where we belong and what our role is or place in the universe. And it offered a real broader perspective of wonder and joy.

It brought to mind Psalm 19.

KNUTSON: God declares his knowledge in the heavens. It’s such a powerful way that he can communicate to us and connect with us. So just enjoying that gift he gives us of beauty.

But the night sky is disappearing from our view. Knutson noticed the seriousness of the problem when she worked at Wind Cave National Park in South Dakota. During night sky presentations—

KNUTSON: We could see the light pollution from Rapid City over 60 miles away.

Knutson defines “light pollution” as light that does not originate from the sun, moon, stars, or other natural sources. On a clear night—we should be able to see about 45-hundred stars. In a city, it’s more like 30.

That motivated her to make personal changes in her family—

KNUTSON: We use the off switch a lot.

—and raise awareness in her community. When she ran a business in Rapid City, she purposely used timers and dimmers. And didn’t feel the need to advertise at 3:00 a.m.

KNUTSON: Our signage would not be lit up at night.

Business and commercial lighting aren’t the only culprits. The trend of landscape decorating contributes to the problem, too.

KNUTSON: People are decorating the sides of their houses with light, their trees, their flower beds, their gardens, their yards, just to dress it up with light.

Knutson recommends turning off those lights. Or using motion sensors. Well-placed lighting helps, too. Beams aimed where needed to serve a clear purpose. Warm-colored bulbs that are not too bright.

WELSH: A lot of lightning is just really unnecessary. It causes problems.

Ed Welsh is a ranger at Badlands National Park in South Dakota. During a night sky program at the amphitheater, Welsh explained how to find the Milky Way.

WELSH: Sagittarius is another fun one to point out.We always point out the teapot because teapots are easier to see and recognize because they’re real! If you see the smoke coming up from the teapot, that’s the Milky Way.

Eighty percent of people who live in North America can no longer see it. At Badlands, you can. The park has committed to certain education, policies, and protections. For example, the outdoor path to the amphitheater at Badlands was illuminated with red lighting. It doesn’t mess with night vision.

WELSH: White light, it resets. Sometimes it takes people 20 minutes to reacclimate to a dark sky.

Many national parks are certified dark sky places.

KNUTSON: It’s really difficult to find a pristine, unaltered night environment.

There are also certified dark sky cities. In 2001, Flagstaff, Arizona, was named the first. The dark sky program also certifies towns and municipalities. Knutson says that’s the ideal—instead of the need to drive to a far off place for a spectacular sky.

KNUTSON: It’s the backyard access that’s so enjoyable when you can actually go out to a place near you.

In addition to enjoyment, dark skies will help the environment and wildlife, even human health—not only the health of our bodies, the health of our souls.

KNUTSON: It zooms us out of our daily problems in a beautiful way that draws us out of ourselves into a connectedness. Over ages, the heritage and culture of what are the stories of the constellations and how people navigated the seas by constellations and we used it as our map and we’re just less connected to nature, to one another that when we step back a bit, it gives us a lot bigger perspective.

The stars haven’t gone anywhere. They’re not endangered or extinct. They’re simply waiting for us to flip off our switches and shift our gaze.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Jenny Rough in Badlands National Park.

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