By BRETT JOHNSON
Scripps Howard News Service
Friday, May 04, 2007
The night sky is going, going...gone?
More than two-thirds of the nation's population can no longer see the Milky Way with the naked eye. As more and more of us cluster in cities and urban areas, the lights we use for our various creature comforts are increasingly blotting out the heavens above the gallery of planets and stars and occasional comets and meteors that have inspired poets, authors, songs and more romantic impulses this side of a bouquet of flowers.
The culprit is called light pollution, and it's going to get worse before it gets better.
David Crawford, founder and executive director of the International Dark-Sky Association in Tucson, Ariz., looks at light-pollution projections creeping across the nation's map out to 2025 and doesn't like what he sees.
"If it doesn't get under control, it'll be gone for everyone," said Crawford. "I'm optimistic in the long haul but my goodness, it's a battle in the short term. More and more, it's becoming an issue. In most places, it's getting worse."
The group contends that as much as 30 percent of all outdoor lighting is excessive and misdirected.
"It's wasteful and it's not very green," Crawford said. "Wasted light is wasted energy."
It's not only about seeing Saturn or Jupiter from the park or enjoying a pristine view of the stars on a camping trip in a national park; it's also about lights shining in backyards or windows at night. The group and others contend this largely could be solved by turning the lights toward the ground, putting shields or caps over them, and using more efficient lighting.
It sounds simple, and Crawford points to success stories such as Flagstaff, Ariz., and elsewhere. Hundreds of places now have light pollution ordinances, he said, and his group in the next few months will unveil a model ordinance that all can use. The biggest and most pervasive problem is glare from streetlights.
But the group has run into a blur of apathy and ignorance attitudes along the lines of "this is the way lighting's always been done," "it's too big for me to deal with" or the wondering query "what's the loss?" The night sky suffers in silence.
"You lose it and you don't know it's gone," said Edwin Krupp, longtime director of the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles. "We in general are ambivalent about light pollution because it's not affecting the way we breathe or the quality of our food."
Crawford, who goes around the country talking up the issue, estimates that less than 10 percent of the nation's communities have good lighting.
"The stars have become an endangered species," said Krupp. "Our profligate use of light has meant the loss of the night sky. It's a sky most people don't even know exists, unless they get out of the territory."
The territory is getting harder to leave. In 1900, the U.S. population was still 60 percent rural and 40 percent urban, according to Census Bureau data; now, 83 percent of us or roughly five of every six live in urban areas. The 17 percent who live in non-urban areas do so on land that covers four-fifths of the country.
The U.S. population is about 302 million and growing. That's a lot of lights.
It can be argued, Krupp said, that celestial bodies discovered by some observatory telescopes years ago would escape their detection today. While Griffith Observatory is important because it reminds people of the night sky, Krupp concedes that there they produce it artificially.
"If there's a meteor shower or comet visible, our standard advice is, 'Get out of town,'" he added.
Magic can await those that do. Get out in the wilds of Montana, say, and the night sky bursts forth, flooding the senses. Largely uninhibited and with more of them out, the stars glow intensely and seem closer, as if they are one gigantic chandelier about to fall on top of you. The experience can be breathtaking and almost alarming.
Krupp knows that sensation from those who finally take in the night view, saying, "I regularly hear from people who got out to the mountains or the desert and could not believe what they saw."
The veteran sky gazer and author sees light pollution as a big issue for society in general.
"It's not just the astronomers who are the losers," Krupp said. "It's all the rest of us who benefit from the expansion of the imagination seeing the night sky. It's part of our heritage, our common experience."
It has inspired deep thought and flavored a broad spectrum of the arts, he noted. That won't dry up totally if the night sky disappears, but it'd be nice if the heavens remained a visual and viable cultural wellspring.
(Contact Brett Johnson of the Ventura County Star in California at www.venturacountystar.com.)
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