Stoneage Ramblings

By John R. Stone

A spring Senior College lecturer at Alexandria Technical and Community College talked about light pollution or, as he put it in a book he wrote, “The End of Night.”

Paul Bogard, who is actually an English professor at Hamline University, talked about excessive lighting and how it makes it difficult to see stuff in the sky at night. For the most part, most places, the most we can see at night is a few stars because the ambient light prevents us from seeing more.

Bogard has been in search of dark places for many years and has visited a few where he could see the Milky Way and the thousands of stars that actually make up the night sky clearly, without ambient light interference.

A lot of light fixtures can be shaded to the light goes down where we want it to lighten the pathway or roadway we are about to use. The light shooting outward and above the pathway is just clutter.

He had one interesting demonstration about less being more. He used the example of a garage light like most of us have. The light is so bright that our eyes actually close down a little to offset the brightness so we actually see less. His example showed a man coming through a fence gate. When the light was bright you couldn’t see him, when the light was shaded you could see him clearly.

Of course that was one unique example but it was one that makes a person think about how much light is really needed and for what it might be needed.

There is actually a scale for measuring extra light called the Bordel Scale. The scale goes from a nine, which is the most extraneous light interference to a one, which would be the least.

He said the National Park Service has been rating its parks and found three parks with areas that would qualify as a one. And the NPS has decided it wants to keep those spots that way and maybe try to get a few more into that category.

After all, national parks are about preserving some things that way Mother Nature created them. So we protect mountains, lakes and other sites so they look the way they did before we came. So why not try to have them look the same as they did many years ago at night as well as how they look in bright sunlight? This is especially true of the night skies.

He further points out that all natural beings grew up with a bright day, very dark night daily cycle. The fact that nights are no longer dark does affect some species of life. It affects humans, one of the inabilities to sleep is caused by too much ambient light. There are few places that are really dark.

We noticed this when we visited a relative’s house several times. We slept in a room that technically, by today’s safety standards, could not be a bedroom because it had no windows. It was in the basement and when you turned off the overhead light it was dark, like totally black. We slept like babies every time we stayed there.

As he talked about this he brought up another issue. With all the talk about wasting energy, he suggested that we could save a lot of energy by not wasting so much light by allowing it to go places where it is not needed.

There is a lot of concern about how we power our homes in Minnesota at night if we are relying on wind power and solar power for heat in the winter and air conditioning in the summer. He didn’t have any numbers for what cutting back on excess light at night might save but it would have to be something.

Most of us, especially those of us who have been around for a while, have seen the Milky Way with its millions of stars on a dark night when we were at some remote location on a clear night. Now we’re lucky to see some stars and the moon.

There are actually five principles of outdoor lighting issued by the International Dark Sky Association: 1) Is a light necessary? 2) Is it directed only where needed? 3) How bright is the light? 4) Is it used only when needed? 5) Is it possible to use warmer colors of light?

Something to think about!