Unfortunately, most of my neighbors seem to think that the first two things to do when moving to the country is to install a streetlight or two and get a dog to bark all night. I really wish these a__holes would move back to the city, since it's clear they have no idea what the country is for.
As far as I know, light pollution has only been addressed seriously in the vicinity of important observatories, such as Albuquerque. But it really is pretty obnoxious everywhere. Those who need to see in the darkness can always turn on a light, but those of us who prefer the dark have only one option: take the BB gun to all those lights! Even the owners can't turn them off -- they're invariably connected to a light sensor to be on at all hours after dark, regardless of necessity.
One entirely sensible regulation would be to require that outdoor lighting cannot shine upward; it must be designed with reflectors or lenses that direct 100% of the light downward. This only makes sense, and intelligently-designed lights are already designed this way. However, there are still quite a few designers and architects who feel that lights should shine skyward, and these idiots need their minds improved. There's too much light pollution from the light reflected off the ground alone.
But, much as I love to propose laws, what's really needed here is some social awareness. There are generally four purposes of outdoor lighting: traffic safety, security, general illumination, and advertising.
I suppose streetlights are truly important for traffic safety, so it would be difficult to argue to remove them. They generally could be a lot less powerful, though. And they really only need to be installed at particular places, not everywhere there's a road.
Whether or not lighting is really important for security may be arguable; statistics may show that neighborhoods with lights have less crime than neighborhoods without lights, but it's not likely that the lights are the only difference between the neighborhoods studied. Even if lights are truly beneficial, it's not at all important that security lights be on! The wise thing to do is to provide motion detectors so that whenever something moves, the lights come on. When nothing's moving, everything is dark. Startles the hell out of the would-be prowler, alerts the neighbors, saves money on electricity, and reduces light pollution by a considerable amount.
By general illumination, I mean wherever people really need to see what they're doing at night. This is a valid purpose, but the lighting should always be controllable -- the user should be able to turn it off when not in use.
Advertising, of course, shouldn't be causing anywhere near as much ugliness as it does. See my separate treatise on billboards.
All of the above really doesn't address the real reason we have so much light pollution: the power companies. Power companies are out to make money. Since building new plants is so costly, they prefer to make more money by selling electricity during off-peak hours, when the existing plants aren't at full capacity anyway. This not only gets them sales for only the cost of the fuel, but it also allows the generating plants to operate at nearer constant load. It's easier to run power plants at a constant load than to be throttling them up and down all the time.
So, the power companies have spent the last several decades convincing us that we cannot possibly survive in the dark, and that we need lights everywhere -- even on neighborhood streets. It's high time we told the power companies to revise their profit margins and start taking the streetlights down.
As far as laws go, I personally believe that outdoor lighting -- even on one's own property -- affects others, and therefore may justifiably be regulated by the government. I'm not sure there's enough support for this currently, but I would hope that we might eventually come to support such a movement.
Return to Kirby Palm's opinions page.
Return to Kirby Palm's home page.
Of course, if you have questions or comments, you are welcome to send e-mail to me at palmk@nettally.com.