Text 'Yes' or 'No' in Response to June 2024 Poll!
Host Bill McGeeney is joined by freelance writer, Lauren Collee, astronomer, Tim Brothers, and film maker, Tara Roberts Zabriski.
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Text 'Yes' or 'No' in Response to June 2024 Poll!
Host Bill McGeeney is joined by freelance writer, Lauren Collee, astronomer, Tim Brothers, and film maker, Tara Roberts Zabriski.
See Full Show Notes, Lighting Tips and more at LightPollutionNews.com. Like this episode, share it with a friend!
Bill's Picks:
Like what we're doing? For the cost of coffee, you can become a Monthly Supporter? Your assistance will help cover server and production costs.
The.
Tim Brothers:Light Pollution News.
Bill McGeeney:February 2024, a space for celebration. It's February, we've arrived the second month of the year and we have a jam-packed show with some great guests Going in live from Sydney. Lauren Colley adds a unique cultural view of the night, as well as a man who converted dark sky skeptics to believers in his home Massachusetts town, astronomer Tim Brothers. And a brains behind one of the most talked about recent documentaries in dark skies, ms Tara Roberts Zabriski. We have a lot to go over tonight, including holiday lights mistaken as an alien invasion to the preferences of light temperatures of bolder residents. And is the city of Davis, california, simply too dark? Oh, this is some great conversations. You will not want to miss this one. Let's do it. Let's kick off another Light Pollution News. Alright, hello you at home.
Bill McGeeney:Welcome back to another Light Pollution News, the show where we discuss all things related to light pollution in the news. I'm your host, bill McGeaney, very glad you can join us today, as well as three really interesting and great guests. As a reminder, you can find a transcript for this show and more over at our website, lightpollutionnewscom. In addition to that, we have some helpful tidbits packaged in a very friendly way for you or your neighbor's consumption, so definitely check that out over the helpful tips tab for more information. Now, getting back to today, I'm very, very excited about our guests and it's good to have some fresh energy entering this conversation, hailing all the way from the other side of Planet, freelance writer, whom I think I've really captured the pulse of the cultural resonance of light pollution.
Bill McGeeney:Let me welcome Lauren Colley to the show. Lauren, I first came across your name back in October of 2023 when we did a show where you wrote a piece that was picked up by the Los Angeles Review of Books. You described a Simpsons episode whereby the town erected a giant light and had essentially instilled a permanent in Springfield. I hope we're not headed that direction. Where did the impetus for that piece come from?
Lauren Collee:Thanks very much, festival, for having me on. Yeah, that piece kind of grew out of some PhD research I'd been doing over the sort of previous four years, which is sort of all wrapped up now as of like two days ago. Actually, I had my vibe two days ago. Congratulations, thank you. But yeah, I was kind of researching, I guess, how the sort of conversation around artificial light had changed in sort of wider culture over the course of kind of like the latter half of the 20th century. So I looked at a few kind of different aspects of that, including sort of Earth Hour, which was something that began in Sydney, and sort of blue light, the kind of discourse around blue light and night modes, and then also the dark sky movement, but again from sort of like a cultural perspective. So yeah, that's where that piece grew out of.
Bill McGeeney:Yeah, that was a really enjoyable piece. I really think you captured a lot of the give and take, the tug and, as you said, the environmental digior of the current time. So it was very, very enjoyable to read and I look forward to reading more of your stuff. So keep up the good work. Thank you Also joining us chiming in from one of the big islands right next to Lauren. I'm very excited to have you, tara, tara Roberts, zabriski, zabriski, do I have that right?
Tara Roberts Zabriski:Yes, that's correct.
Bill McGeeney:So I want to thank you two for taking the time out, because I know down in your neck of the woods it's what 8 am and is it 9 am for you, tara?
Tara Roberts Zabriski:Yeah, I'm in New Zealand right now and it is 11 am 11 am, so I'm in the middle of it.
Bill McGeeney:It feels like midday.
Tara Roberts Zabriski:I don't live here, but I'm visiting and yeah.
Bill McGeeney:Hey, that's. I prefer to be visiting down there. That sounds great.
Tara Roberts Zabriski:I'm on a big adventure right now, away from the snow and, yeah, exploring the sunny side of the world.
Bill McGeeney:Well, you, you released the documentary Defending the Dark, and Defending the Dark received multiple awards, correct?
Tara Roberts Zabriski:It did, it did. It got a couple of awards at some nominations at film festivals. It was picked up by I don't know maybe a dozen different film festivals and a couple of those. It was awarded.
Bill McGeeney:What was the feedback? I guess I'm curious about the feedback from from just general public on that From audiences. Yeah, I know we had. I had Jared Flesher on over to summer and Jared Flesher released a small little video that was done primarily for Princeton and he walked it all through the state of New Jersey and he had people that came up and largely environmentalists that watched it. Who was the audience, I guess, for defending it. Yeah, mine.
Tara Roberts Zabriski:Mine was a real mix. So you know I submitted it to all these film festivals and you know, you just get general film level lever lovers there and you get people that are interested in documentaries and learning about new things. So some environmentalists for sure, some people that are just really love the stars, whether they're amateur astronomers or they just are really excited when they look up at night. And the first showing was in Maine, at the Maine International Film Festival. We had about a hundred people show up to that showing and it was a mix of people in the crowd of various different knowledge levels and they all came out of that screening like inspired to do something, inspired to talk to a neighbor, inspired to make change in their own backyard.
Tara Roberts Zabriski:So, and the thing that surprised me about this, which I didn't go into it thinking this, but kids really enjoyed the film. So I've had a few audiences where kids have been there and at the end they were engaged the whole time. So the full show is 35 minutes, the one that screened at film festivals and, yeah, kids would just be wide eyed the whole time and have comments after it about all the things they wanted to do when they got back home what inspired them. So that's what really surprised me about the audience. But yeah, I did get a general and even the environmentalist type people who showed up may not have been aware of this particular issue, so that was something new that they learned. They were like well, I knew about all these other kinds of pollution air pollution, water pollution, didn't know that there was something called light pollution and that there is something we can do about it and it's a simple fix if we just all work together.
Bill McGeeney:And defending the dark for your home. Who may not have ever heard of this is? It's a 35 minute documentary, the PBS one's 30 minutes. Is that right?
Tara Roberts Zabriski:Yeah, yeah, so I cut it down for PBS. It's 30 minutes on PBS. For the last year it's been on certain PBS channels across the country and it's available to view all the time at PBSorg.
Bill McGeeney:Yeah, and the film discusses, amongst other things, the Penobscot reservations, interaction with Knight.
Tara Roberts Zabriski:It does.
Tara Roberts Zabriski:Yeah, I was able to interview a professor of Native American studies at the University of Maine and he's a Penobscot nation member, which is one of the four tribes that make up the Wabanaki people in Maine, and he was able to give me a lot of insight into how they relate to the sky historically and the knowledge that was passed down to them from their ancestors and how it sort of impacts them in today's world.
Tara Roberts Zabriski:So you know, they have a lot of areas up around the north woods of Maine and yeah, he just he talks about how the encroachment of the light is starting to take away their connection to their ancestors, because they used to, they would tell stories about the night sky and without being able to see that those stories, they kind of lose connection with their culture. And yeah, but the story itself really digs into two organizations up in the north Maine Woods that both created dark sky places, I don't know in the last few years the Katahdin Woods and Waters Dark Sky Sanctuary and also the AMC, believe it's called the Maine Woods. Yeah, I think I'm right, dark Sky Park.
Bill McGeeney:Yeah, Well, we'll be talking about one of those probably a little later tonight and that general area. Now I know you've hiked the 480, right, yeah, that's congratulations on that. That's always an accomplishment. I've met many great, cool people who have done it, but that's very cool, life changing.
Bill McGeeney:So, before we get going, I still got one more guest, mr Tim Brothers. How you doing tonight, man, I'm doing all right. How are you today? Good, good, good, so. So how is everything over your over at MIT's Wallace Astrophysical Observatory? And for your home, tim co-founded the Massachusetts chapter of Dark Sky International and, tim, you were recently awarded a minor planet designation.
Tim Brothers:Yeah, that was a really exciting development for me last year. I was greatly honored last year to find out I was nominated for this. It's been a great honor. It's a main belt asteroid beyond the orbit of Mars and in an early part of my career I co-discovered several hundred asteroids and tens of comets in the early 2000s as part of MIT Lincoln Labs asteroid discovery program called Linear, and so having a 1.7 kilometer wide hunk of space rock named after you is honestly pretty cool.
Bill McGeeney:Definitely yeah.
Tim Brothers:It was a nice surprise and it was a welcome surprise last year. So I've been working on asteroids and other objects in the solar system for a long time and so this was a nice treat and it sort of cuts into this whole light pollution you know discussion. It sort of intersects with this whole light pollution discussion. You know, since then, since I was part of this program, I've continued to work on help characterize solar system bodies and I suppose that that's part of the reason I put so much time into light pollution mitigation. Each year I'm literally losing the ability to discover and characterize more and more faint objects, so you can think about objects like nearby asteroids or exoplanets or orbiting distant stars. They were observable from Massachusetts only a few short years ago and are sometimes now impossible to detect if they're buried in a light dome. Oh wow.
Bill McGeeney:Only a few years ago. I'll be back to you soon.
Tim Brothers:So Wallace Observatory was conceived in their late 60s, basically because MIT did not have our own observatory and all of a sudden, astronomy students who were interested in astronomy went from eight one semester to 500. And that was in 1969. So you can imagine that the Apollo moon landing had a huge impact and interest in astronomy. And so MIT already had a radio observatory, haystack Radio Observatory in Westford, which is about 45 miles northwest of Boston, so it's outside the Boston metro area, just outside of 495. And it was a dark enough location. You imagine.
Tim Brothers:Back then this was farmland left over, developed in the early 1700s, and it was still a sleepy collection of farm towns. We own 1,300 acres in Massachusetts, so it's a very large protected piece of land and it was dark and radio quiet. So it was perfect for radio astronomy, perfect for optical observations. But that's changed drastically. Just I've been working there since 2009. And just in the last few years we've actually lost the Milky Way. So we went from being able to see it and lost the Milky Way. I think we can get it back. I'm hopeful we can go backwards, given some of the case studies that we've been working on, but it shows that this is happening rapidly, whether it's 3% a year or 10% or 20%, it's happening very rapidly. It's definitely the fastest growing environmental issue, and us astronomers are keenly aware of how fast this is changing.
Bill McGeeney:And is this Northwest of Lowell?
Tim Brothers:Yeah, so it's roughly due. West from Lowell yeah, so it's right on the New Hampshire border and we are surrounded by. We're actually sort of one of the more remote sites on the property. Our closest streetlight is about half a kilometer, but even with that we're seeing larger and larger light domes. It's not just streetlights, it's residential, it's commercial, it's strip malls. It's a little bit of all of the above.
Bill McGeeney:Well, the thing with LEDs writes them. You can light up any place, like a professional sports field now, which is both a perk, I guess, and a problem.
Tim Brothers:Yeah, and I would say that one of the just sort of anecdotally and I'm a natural observer and driving home at 2 or 3 in the morning one of the things I think a lot of us observers have noticed is that residential has changed significantly as the cost of LEDs have come down and they're more readily available and they're easy to put up. And especially when you start talking about things like solar powered LED uplights that illuminate your shrubbery or your trees or your rock wall or your house, we're seeing a lot of wealthier residents illuminate their property extensively, to the point that it really does look like an NFL stadium from a distance. We see LED strip lights, some of these houses quite honestly, we joke that they sort of look like UFOs from a distance. They're a lot of lights, some of them are blinking, they're dynamically changing and they're very blue, and so we can see all of that in our data. We can see the scattered blue light in our data.
Bill McGeeney:Let's jump into the show and before we get going, I do have some good news on the astronomy front. This comes from prior guest, drew Evans. So this is a quartet of amateur astrophotographers including Evans, jeffrey Horn, jossah Rubla and Brian Faldah. They identified planetary nebula in a constellation, cepheus, which colloquially known as the Elphin's Trunk Nebula. They found a couple of planetary nebulas in there in IC 1396. Very cool find for those guys. Two new discoveries are currently under review and are designated as Horful Evreb 1 and 2, just the names of the quartet that found it. Good job, drew and team.
Bill McGeeney:Since we were talking about those neighborhoods, right, one of the things that I think there's. And maybe, tara, when you made the film, there probably wasn't as much material out yet on the ecological impact of light at night, but let's get into the ecology side, because this is an area over the past year that's really, really grown. I came across this video from Be Smart YouTube and it's essentially a video title. It's all done everywhere, except for under the streetlight, which appears to show trees retaining their summer green leaves well into the foliage season when situated under a streetlight. The narrator, joe Hanson, attributes the cause of that to the artificial light of the streetlight. Have you guys ever seen anything like this in person?
Tara Roberts Zabriski:I haven't. I haven't specifically seen it in person, but I was just talking to a friend the other day about my film and she didn't know anything about light pollution. But she goes. That's weird. I have a bush outside of my house where the light shines at night and she said, one side of the bush at night when the flowers are blooming, during the daytime the flowers open and then at nighttime the flowers close. But she went out one night and she noticed the side of the bush where the light was shining the flowers were staying open on this bush and she's like that can't be good and she's not particularly involved in environmental activism, but she noticed this and when I brought up the light pollution thing she's like oh, maybe I should do something about that light so that it's probably affecting the plant in a negative way.
Tim Brothers:I have a short anecdote about that. So one of the images, and having lived in Boston and San Francisco and other places, I've definitely seen this in real time, where you have municipal lighting that lights up these poor little trees on the sidewalk in the effort to green the cities.
Bill McGeeney:Well, Tim, a lot of times new developments are built in cities, like here in Philadelphia, when we have new apartment complexes come up right, they put trees in and then they put a light like right adjacent to the tree, right.
Tim Brothers:Absolutely so. One of the images I often use for my introductory talks to light pollution is from when I took my kids' trick or treating about a year ago. And so in the image here's this lonely burst tree in the middle of someone's yard and perfectly visible from the light coming off of the house. Yet they had this very blue LED shining at the tree and there's new vegetative growth. They were talking about October 31. So leaves should be down, the tree should be dormant for the winter, and there's vegetative growth at the bottom of the tree, and yet the top of the tree doesn't look so hot. So the bottom half has new leaves budding, and at the top you sort of have this raggedy tree that looks like it's probably pest-ridden. And so you can think about that in a way that, besides the fact that uplight is 100% energy waste, it's more than 100% energy waste when you think about you paid to have that tree installed, you dug a hole, you paid for the tree, and so you're also wasting this poor tree that's getting manipulated by your artificial light.
Bill McGeeney:That's a really interesting little tidbit there, Tim. I like that Well saying. On topic of plants, there's a study out of Journal of Ecology. The study looked at 17 plant species first exposed to daylight, then followed by artificial light at night. It looked to see how, while native plant species and plants often considered invasive or non-native, reacted to artificial light at night through a variety of conditions including soil, nutrition and competition. The results may not be completely shocking, given the ability of invasive plants to quickly adapt to their new surroundings, but the findings consistently identified significant variations in biomass growth, favoring invasive plants over native plants, across all levels of nutrition and competition when placed under artificial light at night. So this story pairs up nicely with the previous showcasing the 24-7 daytime effect on plants.
Bill McGeeney:How do you see the rise in artificial light in mass effect in plant life? Often, like I mentioned, you have a lot of new construction here and I'm sure pretty much everywhere that is growing, you have lights put on the outside of apartment complexes now or even homes. Homes will have decorative LED I'm not lying about this, decorative LEDs in the walls on new construction, and so your house will look like a hotel kind of, where it has decorative LEDs, could be changing color, or it could just be a LED strip or LED kind of like a bar. How do you see this happening? What are we looking at in 20 years down the line for these plants? Are we going to have some? I mean, we already see the consequences on insects. Anyone want to take a stab at that?
Tara Roberts Zabriski:Well, this is kind of interesting because another film that I'm working on right now is on native plants and how they are so important to the pollinators, but also how invasive species are taking over a lot of areas and how that's affecting sort of the whole food chain.
Tara Roberts Zabriski:And if we have these lights on that are making it easier for these invasive plants to take over. They're already at an advantage because they're naturally propagating quicker than the natives and taking over large areas out competing the more nutritious plants for the local insects. And when you take that out, then that's the bottom of the food chain and if you don't have those moths, those insects, those bugs to do their job for the plant, not only are you losing the variety there, but you're also losing the food source. That starts the whole food chain on up. So it's not. If things continue this way, it doesn't look good for native plants in the future and hopefully that's another reason, because that's another movement that I'm seeing happening is people wanting to put in native plants over invasive or decorative plants. So hopefully they'll think that through with the lights. Yeah.
Bill McGeeney:Yeah, that's a really good point. Do you do see that trend going on right now and to your point, when you have insects that are naturally trained on they like? It's kind of like saying you like I'm just going through it, I don't know if anyone's, I apologize if anyone's vegan or vegetarian here. If I like eating steak and then all of a sudden I'm forced to eat grasshoppers, I'm not going to want to do that and that's what the insects. When you're taking away those native plants or making those native plants degrade, the native habitat is changing and you're not going to see a new line of insects. That's one of the reasons why the invasives are so strong right, because they don't have a natural pest. It's going to be interesting to see how that plays out.
Bill McGeeney:On the bird front, we have one from Nature Communications and this is a biggie Future guest, Jeffrey Bueller, in a paper led by Kyle Horton and many other talented individuals, identified that sky glow serves as a key influencer in predicting bird migration stopover densities. Sky glow essentially acted as what they term ecological traps. A study used over 10 million radar observations, with 70% of the models proving out manmade sky glow as a top predictor for bird layovers. To be clear light pollution, beat out, tree canopy, cover temperatures or even anticipate precipitation as driving indicators from where birds stopped off at. That's a big paper right there. When I read something like this, I really question if any of it really seeps over. In building designers, we see new towers going up right and they become glow sticks, or they have decorative LEDs along the sides, or each level has a decorative LED, or all that light is attracting the birds and then we get cloud cover and we have mass kills, right, lauren? I know you mentioned before that Australia was first in. Was it the globe at night or light?
Lauren Collee:Yeah, earth hour, that's it.
Bill McGeeney:Yes, earth hour, so do you guys have a lights out campaign down there?
Lauren Collee:Not a lights out campaign, as far as I'm aware, and not anything that targets the impact on birds specifically. And earth hour was largely symbolic. It wasn't really geared towards reducing light pollution. It was more about light standing in for this carbon dependence more broadly.
Lauren Collee:So I guess that's the context I was looking at it in was how light was becoming emblematic of just the Anthropocene more broadly and these images of the illuminated earth at night became these emblematic images of where the world is at, I guess in a more general sense.
Lauren Collee:But yeah, I think the impact on birds and stuff is interesting because I think a lot of people tend to think of light as something kind of immaterial, as, I guess, just like an aesthetic quality, rather than something that is part of the environment. That started to change, I think, recently, especially with the conversation around circadian rhythms and blue light, but it's been a recent shift for sure. Now I think there's more of an awareness of light as something that does change environments, not only on a aesthetic level but also on the level of making them livable for certain species or certain humans, or not livable. So I think that there's a lot of crossover between the kind of conversations around animal health and the conversations around human health and they sort of lead into one another and can reinforce each other in ways that are sort of sometimes productive and sometimes helpful, but then other times like a little bit confused. Maybe, I'm not sure, because they are separate issues as well.
Bill McGeeney:Right, it's not just the avians that have issues right. We can talk about fish and the ecology of freshwater fish. In article found that artificial light extends daytime activity of the European gujian and the Italian riffle days, whereby the gujian proceeded across the dam fish passage with extra caution under artificial light, then in a natural night environment, the riffle days proceeded at a higher success rate than otherwise in a natural night environment. And as a dendym to this context, where how the lighting is changing behavior and environmental, I guess, consistency underwater, I want to point out an article from New York State in which the New York Power Authority won a International LIT Lighting Design Award for adding extensive amount of LEDs to various canalous bridges and decorative downward wall washing on various lighthouses, and you can see the picture in the show notes. Essentially, the Western New York canals and bridges are lit up extensively and that light is almost always either directed partially or directly towards the water, probably unintentionally, just to kind of give it the ambience. And to your point, lauren, people don't, they don't make that association right.
Bill McGeeney:From the Jordan Journal of Biological Sciences warmer light may be better. 105 juvenile catfish were studied under various lighting situations that included only red, blue, green or yellow LED lights compared to fish that were kept in total darkness and fish that were kept in an environment that contained sunlight. Fish reared in total darkness found to have the lowest survival rate. However, fish reared in yellow or red lighting conditions were found to be the most successful, with yellow significantly boosting a metric they analyzed to food conversion ratio. And, speaking of selective lighting in the journal environments, a study seeks to identify positive uses for light traps for insects. The one question is non-biting midge, which, in quantities, apparently takes away from people's enjoyment of late side activities. It's positive in the paper that selective and targeted light traps could protect sensitive nighttime pollinators like moths, while simultaneously reducing the need for insecticides to control nuisance lighting. Does anyone have a take on that? You're targeting specific pests with particular bands of light rather than spraying chemicals everywhere. Is that a win? Is this a move in the right direction?
Tim Brothers:I mean, I'm not a you know someone who studies insects, but I think everybody can agree that minimizing pesticides whether you're growing your own food or worried about monarch butterflies or birds and so on that's a great idea. What I'm concerned about is in that study they were using 6,000K LEDs, that so you have this hyper blue light and I would want to know that you know it's studied further, because we actually tried this at the observatory before. We knew a lot about this stuff and we had one of these. You know there's different types of insect traps and one of the kinds shines different color LEDs and it attracts them. But what we found was most of what was in there was not mosquitoes, which is the thing we were trying to get rid of. There was moths and fireflies and all the things that we actually need. You know pollinators and fragile insects that you know are experiencing a population decline. So I'm not totally convinced, just from our own experience that you know you can be that selective. But who knows, you know, maybe with further research they'll figure this out.
Bill McGeeney:Tara, I saw you itching over there.
Tara Roberts Zabriski:I don't know what I was going to say. No, I like to point. Yeah, I like his point. I just want to piggyback off of that. If, like he said, we could do further research and really pinpoint that exact light frequency that attracts that particular insect without affecting the other ones, then that's definitely a win. But if it's going to be pulling in fireflies and nighttime pollinators like the moths, then, yeah, maybe we're not moving in the right direction at all. So, yeah, it's a hard debate.
Bill McGeeney:Yeah, it's just kind of replacing one extreme with another. Right, that would be my fear, yeah, okay. Well, I got you guys warmed up here, so I want to switch over to our policy news which, I apologize, this month Was quite extensive compared to previous months and it's probably not the most exciting thing for you guys to talk about specifically. But let's go, let's roll the dice, let's see how this goes. The articles are interesting. Now let's start off here with residents of Port Harcourt, nigeria, whom appeared to be exuberant at the installation of new solar powered street lights. One shop owner feels safer walking home at night. The shop owner notices an uptick in foot traffic at night. These ideas, mainly to latter, are shared by residents in the town of Rochester, michigan.
Bill McGeeney:Rochester, detroit suburb wrapped five blocks of their main street and $275,000 worth of string lights To explain to you how the buildings themselves look like glowing Christmas gifts wrapped with endless strands, distinctive only by separation of color. Per the Wall Street Journal, before the first holiday lights show debuted in Rochester in 2006, commercial vacancies were at 10%. Now they say only at 2% to 3%. One business owner even compares a visual experience to Disneyland. Business owners credit the extravagant holiday lighting with creating a boom town. I will add that this approach has been replicated in many areas, even if we see it here in our Manioc neighborhood, whose main street looks like a fantasy land kind of decorated from sidewalk to roof with countless holiday lights. The lights all share a purpose of expanding and growing commercial activity at night.
Bill McGeeney:A very interesting here at everyone's thoughts on I guess there's a give and take is the we've witnessed an extensive brightening of our community commercial corridors under the eyes of safety, but reality it really feels like it's to promote commerce specifically in nighttime economies. So obviously the first question I have is the most obvious one how does this kind of brightening make you feel when you partake in nighttime activities? Do you want to shop more? Do you feel a downside when you're actually partaking in nighttime activities? How do you feel?
Lauren Collee:I can jump in here. Yeah, I think it's interesting because, like the relationship between sort of commerce and light is so kind of deeply rooted and if you look at sort of like the, even just the first kind of like white way lighting of the 1920s in Times Square, like it goes back kind of that far to when it was light was associated with the kind of glamour of this. I guess like yeah, kind of modernist lifestyle and of course it's always been kind of bound up with commerce and the promise of increasing kind of commercial activity and drawing kind of commercial power to a city. But I guess, on the other hand, it's kind of like yeah, I'm wary of sort of just like dismissing kind of Christmas lighting as like oh, this is frivolous, or because I think you know it's, I don't know like it's like it's so different, yeah, it's emotional, it serves so many different cultural functions and I think like, yeah, to kind of, I mean there's obviously like in the depths of winter.
Lauren Collee:I mean I understand why people are sort of drawn to the idea of, like, lighting up their environments and there is a kind of strong sense of community that can be gained from doing that. But I think, probably at its most powerful, what's something like the conversation around light pollution or the dark sky movement does is draw attention to the fact that, like spaces shared and night spaces shared, and so when you, when you light up your building and that cuts both ways right Like when you light up your building, that can be an act of generosity, not just to yourself but to your community. On the other hand, you're not just lighting up like your own space, but also that of everyone else, and ideally that leads to a conversation where those decisions are made with the community, kind of based on, not just like the people who live there but also the other creatures who live there and the insects who live there. And I think, yeah, in an ideal world, that's where that conversation would lead.
Lauren Collee:But yeah, I don't know, christmas lights is an interesting one. Often, yeah, the kind of debate around like what light is necessary, often seems to kind of come back to this notion of Christmas lights. It's like a real, I guess it's. Yeah, it's just indicative of that tension between sort of community celebration and sort of unnecessary unnecessary for volities of like modern life. I don't know.
Bill McGeeney:It's a tough one for sure, right, the commerce side, I feel like, is a very challenging one, and I guess the harder question is are places like Rochester, michigan, are they kind of an indictment against the dark sky movement saying, hey, look, see, this is how beneficial light at night is. This is why we want to have more of it?
Tim Brothers:Okay, so I mean as someone who also works a lot in the policy end of things, we've been working on a in fact we just published it a model lighting ordinance or bylaw for Massachusetts and really applicable to anywhere in the Northeast, and so we've been thinking about a lot of these issues in detail, and, in particular, the holiday lighting comes up every single time, whether you're at a public meeting or dealing with residents who are just concerned that you're going to take something they have pride in or have an emotional attachment to. And I'm honestly not against Christmas lighting at all. I think we just have to make sure that, as activists and scientists, we're careful that we're not against all lighting. But what I worry about whether it's the Nigeria shop owner example or the holiday lighting example is that you know, for example, with solar powered light, no matter where it's mounted, people stop thinking about the light when they stop paying for it in their electricity bill, and so you know it might have initial economic reasons, but there's probably an extra step that could minimize the light pollution part. Right Like so. Maybe the shop owner needs it for the first few hours of the night, but what about the 75% of the night when people are sleeping, is it really necessary? And so you know, motion sensors or timers or dimmers can go a long way to minimize that and sort of thread the needle with all of that. And then you know, similarly with the holiday lighting not against it in principle, but I'd be careful about using this particular town as an example.
Tim Brothers:When it's a novelty, and what happens when the novelty wears off and then it has to sort of they have to sort of have a shootout, it has to escalate. And so we see that in New England now with the Christmas lights. So you'll have in towns competitions to see who can have the most grandiose Christmas lighting. And it gets more and more ridiculous to the point where there's now search lights in the sky, there's laser beams shiting into other people's properties, there's sound and there's music. There's noise throughout the night, it's a lot of commotion, and so that's probably not good for people sleeping either. And so you sort of have to think about the peaceable enjoyment of your own property, even if it's, you know, to some degree, a right to display. You know whatever free speech you want on your own property, you can't take that away from the person next door. And so we've got to find a balance here, I think, especially as LEDs become incredibly cheap to operate.
Bill McGeeney:Well, I want to actually jump on that. So we're going to talk Christmas lights. Let's go to the Christmas lights stories. So there was a Texas man made news for bright spotlights, tim. As you imagine, he placed the top of his house that shot four white beams across the sky. Self-described Christmas nerd I believe geek would probably be the more opportune phrase. But I'm not going to split hairs. Lauren, you can criticize me on that one because I know you're a literary person, so you can have the final say on that. But Chris Hartgraves sets up an elaborate synchronized Christmas light show every year from his house. The house sits in a development which looks like houses on up to about a half acre of land total, with about 15, 25 feet between them. And given that the lights shoot upward and dance in the clouds, nearby residents apparently mistook his holiday extravaganza as an alien invasion Lights triggered law enforcement to stop by his Jolly Abode to confirm that he wasn't targeting aircraft flying overhead. The Hartgraves light show ran from 6.30 to 9.00 pm every 15 minutes. So we're not looking at someone who's blasting it through the wee hours of the day. Right, they're turning off at 9 pm.
Bill McGeeney:And then we had similar news of the spotlight thing, tim, right In California, a family utilized a light to act as a bad signal for Santa and it divided a community. A spotlight that was planned to run from 5.30 to 10 pm every day between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Evidently, and of course, the battle plays out on social media, the family took down the spotlight for a couple of weeks after due to vile and outridden nasty comments they received on X and Facebook. The Walker family doesn't appear to have any malicious intent behind the spotlight. Rather, they're simply wanting to bring joy to the holiday season. They even ran the spotlight at a third of its power during the prior year. So, tim, let's kind of get into your point where I guess, where do you even begin on that? Like, how do you have these conversations with people? What do you even say to your neighbor who has it lit up like LaGuardia?
Tim Brothers:Yeah. So I mean, I guess, just personally I'm not against fun, but I am against. You know, I think even just on a safety level I would be highly concerned, for you know that this was probably an FAA violation. It'd be my guess that, you know, for airline pilots it's probably highly distracting. So that alone, you know, for me would be a I'd be highly concerned about that.
Tim Brothers:And then you know why does one person get to disrupt everybody else's sky? I guess that's a sort of a cultural question. But you know there's a lot of policy in place that would probably forbid something like this, whether it's a town ordinance or a state regulation or even federal. But then it comes down to you know, we're generally not enforcing lighting regulations in this country. So that gets to another point of you know it's probably a violation to begin with, it'd be my guess. But you know somebody in the town maybe needs to step in and come up. I would say that any directed, coherent beam is probably problematic. Especially, you know you have a good chance that it's going to reflect off of something or glint off of something, end up in somebody's house. It could be distracting to drivers if it malfunctions. There's a whole host of concerns with this.
Bill McGeeney:Yeah, it's pretty impressive that this is where we're at in society. What do you say to those people who get nasty about it? The one family, the Walker family, was receiving just really nasty messages from people, I believe, who not just from neighbors, but people who considered themselves environmentalists. What do we say to those people? Like that can't be acceptable, right, there has to be a better way to handle this. If the law enforcement isn't going to take care of it, ordinances aren't working. What's a better way to do it than just flaming someone on Facebook?
Lauren Collee:I would argue that probably has that nastiness really has more to do with, like, online cultures than it does with the actual kind of yeah, the way that those that conversation might play out if it happened in, say, like a town meeting, you know, like, yeah, I think I think that might be just kind of yeah, the culture of being online a little bit, or like the cultures of Facebook and kind of you know, facebook. I saw some really nasty stuff play out of my Facebook community group like all the time it was just like I don't know. I kind of think that it wasn't, often wasn't even about the issue, but but again, I think those conversations would have gone differently if that happened in real life. Maybe not, maybe that's idealistic for me to say. I also think when people are criticized, they tend to dig their heels in online and I think that, like, especially around Kind of when it comes to these questions of like personal freedom and sort of like personal expression, and when something's like a tradition you know, like I think that article mentioned this has been happening since 2018 and it was a tradition, which I found kind of funny because, like you know, a tradition that's been running since 2018 like that count as a tradition, like I'm not sure. And also, is tradition alone a reason to keep doing something that's sort of? That story reminded me of the.
Lauren Collee:Again, this is an example from the United States. I'm not super like familiar with the North American context, but the Twin Towers beams of lights, that, the commemorative lights, yes, that I think we'd like, yeah, just killing hundreds and hundreds of birds every year. But obviously there again, it's this like highly emotive issue and and so you know it Tends to kind of spark this passionate debate. But but yeah, I think like it is. You know, yeah, like Tim was saying, it's kind of a decision that's made on behalf of everyone by a small number or of people, or one or two people sometimes. So I think thinking of lighting landscapes as communal is really important. Basically, thinking of light lighting as part of the environment is is really crucial.
Bill McGeeney:Yeah, yeah, would you say, those people who you know have the. They just want to bring joy. What are you gonna say to someone who says, well, this is you know, I just I'm trying to make it a fun holiday. What's wrong with that?
Lauren Collee:I mean, start your stargazing can be a source of communal joy too. I guess, like it's it's it's often about kind of just reframing the conversation slightly and, I think, hearing people's concerns and giving them space to Kind of voice what they feel like they're losing and what they feel like they're missing and what, what you know, because, like it's true that people are, you know it's it's harder to build community now and it's harder to find kind of points at which to kind of like, yeah, around which to coalesce like as a community. Things are more individualized and, and I think people are longing for kind of like those, yeah, I guess, collective symbols that they can Rely upon, to like give them a sense of belonging, and, and stargazing could be that.
Bill McGeeney:Well, on the topic of ordinances, right, tim Gonna, get to the Davis story in a second, but I want to bump forward to the Moab one, where we have a story from Moab, which Moab felt the need to make amendments to the outdoor lighting ordinance and evidently Moab actually enforces us. So there you go. You have one town in all of America that is doing their job. So these new amendments gave residents five years to comply Before it becomes a law of land. An array of forward thinking. The town of Moab is offering a low to no cost subsidized program to cover updating expenses of business or residential fixtures.
Bill McGeeney:I like to pull you guys on your feelings regarding these amendments and Lawrence is your outside of us and we just spoke about something here. In Much of the US, or in probably Alberta, since they're pretty much just like Texas, we have this thing where it's it's my right. Whenever we we have a, we need a validation for anything that we do to others At least it feels that way over anything that it may be irresponsible or rude. We have this validation score, it's it's my right, and we always like to put the onus on the, the victim, so to say. So anyone, feel free to respond. I'm curious to how an Australian would view, or a UK. Are you originally from the UK, lauren?
Lauren Collee:I'm. I lived in the UK for 10 years, but yeah, I'm from Australia.
Bill McGeeney:Okay. So I'm curious to how an Australian would view this. Is overreach for a town of Moab to constrain decorative holiday lighting to a 10 pm Shut off time Is that overreach?
Lauren Collee:I, I mean, I don't personally think so, but I don't again like I don't. I don't think that would necessarily receive the same pushback here. There's a lot of, I think, growing up in Australia. There's a lot of. You grow up with sort of various restrictions anyway, because there's so many sort of endemic species here and you know also, like often you grow up with certain awareness, that you're sort of living on stolen land and that, like you know, part of part of existing in this space is like being aware of that. So so I think I mean I'm not sure if that's really there in the way that, yeah, again, like I'm not super familiar with the North American context, I guess no, this is fine yeah.
Lauren Collee:Yeah, there is this question. You know this sort of sense probably in North America of kind of like, yeah, personal freedom being really important, I wouldn't necessarily say that's the same as in Australia. So, yeah, I don't think that would necessarily be the same pushback here, but that's not to say that I Don't know. I think aspects of that do exist in the culture here as well.
Tara Roberts Zabriski:Actually, you know, when I was filming the dark sky film was talking to these organizations who had been working with really rural communities up in Maine and you do get a lot of that independent kind of Feeling where it's like my right, my property, whether it's a business owner or an individual, and they ran into a lot of that and they, they really made some progress on, just you know, meeting the people where they were and and really taking their time to get to know. You know what was their resistance? A lot of people were putting up resistance to putting in these policies and Once they took the time to actually explain, like you know, the big thing for them was astrotourism. So they said, well, here, if we put in this ordinance, then we can lower our lights or we can keep our lights low and it will keep our skies dark and then that will bring people to the community and then your business will do better. And so when you really when they really took the time to get in and know their community and talk to their community and what was important to them, they were able to find a common ground and and and and come to a reasoning to put in that that ordinance. So they did. They did hit a lot of pushback, all the organizations I talked to, but they were also able to make some headway, just with you know.
Tara Roberts Zabriski:Yeah, education, yeah.
Bill McGeeney:I'm setting a common theme here of simply communicating in a personalized manner and trying to you know, convey, conveyor. It's this, at the end of the day, where you say it was a sounded like a win for all. Is that kind of what they were? Yeah?
Tara Roberts Zabriski:yeah, absolutely. And you know, really, people were just resistant to the thought of an ordinance and Once, once they realized there was benefit to them and that it would bring back the night sky, which everybody loves, whether they, they know it or not. Yeah, every everybody, everybody was in agreement to go ahead and move forward with some kind of policy.
Tim Brothers:And if I could just jump on that, you know, I think the word overreach is is not unfamiliar to me. You know, when we've tried to pass ordinances in Massachusetts, which is normally very environmentally progressive, we've seen and heard that argument, Especially if you conduct those arguments on Facebook, right? So it sort of exacerbates the whole feeling of being persecuted. You know about your lights and so on, but conducting anything on Facebook is yeah.
Tim Brothers:Yeah, for any of us who've tried to, you know Move policy for it on on social media. I think you know that's that's not optimal and probably counterproductive. That said, I think Anytime you have this argument there's gonna be a, especially in the United States. This, this need for personal freedom, that sort of super, you know, supersedes any any other concerns. But what I would also say is that you know, back to some of our early talking points about Economic and commerce discussions, we know from there's a study a few years ago that in the Colorado plateau that the four states, which includes, you know, moab, astrotourism brings in billions of dollars and thousands of jobs, right, so? So there's an economic argument to that. You know you can have your Christmas lights, but how about you just be a little bit reasonable and we shut them off so that we can have both? And I think that that's that's a pretty Good example of a good solution where you can still have your thing whatever it is, but you can't destroy everybody else's thing. And to speak, terror?
Bill McGeeney:is that the? Is that pretty much the argument that was Related up in up in there in Maine?
Tara Roberts Zabriski:Yeah, yeah, definitely, and it was really just about the education of okay, you can still have lights, but you know, here's, here's the difference between, you know, a six thousand K light versus 27,000 K light, or set 2700 and and. Once they realized that, yes, they could still light up their business, but like in a more dark sky friendly way, you know, using the shields and making sure that it's the lower Kelvin rating, then they started to Become more open to it, realizing that they could still have their lighting and they could still light their parking lot, light their storefront, but doing it properly for the, for the dark, for the need of the dark sky and the and the safety of the community.
Bill McGeeney:So in Moab they also want to curtail offensive light. Net emanates from neighbors, garages, from sides of houses, non-shielded garage floodlights are part of that, and then they also would like to curtail the commercial lighting, to turn off or at least very much dimmed down after 10 pm. So maybe this is a good model, maybe, maybe pay attention to this going forward and see how this plays out. I think this is a good little time for a break. I know Laura and well, tara, you're good. You're almost ready for lunch. I haven't eaten dinner yet, but, laura, you you probably need some more coffee, so why don't you grab a fresh cup? I want to thank my guests today Lauren Colley, tara Roberts, zabriskie and Mr Tim Brothers. Very glad to have you all with me today. You have excellent insight. I'm loving this and I want to thank you at home.
Bill McGeeney:Thank you for listening to light pollution news this month. Light pollution news is completely funded by listeners just like yourself. Listeners help offset our audio server space, web server space and, of course, the big one audio editing costs, simply by your donations. I'd like you to be part of that community and help us be financially stable. So why don't you check out the show notes and click the supporter link. I always ask for a simple monthly donation of three dollars the price of a coffee, which Lauren is getting right now as A thank you for all the hard work, any effort, we put into a show each month.
Bill McGeeney:It's a full month experience. So on my end, it begins the moment we wrap up this episode. I'll actually be working to build the next one later tonight and I know we push to editing and start grinding it out through any of our marketing channels and whatnot. It is a full month. So if you find that the show offers you value, why not become a supporter today? And if you're already a supporter, thank you so much. The more we can do to grow the show to a financial Solvency, the more we can put our own funds or at least I can put my own funds toward improvements Like, say, maybe having a video component. What that be neat. So, tara, you did something that I've come across many folks who've done the AT and always that experience changes lives. I'm curious Is there a way you can? I don't know if you can do this? Is there a before AT Tara and post AT Tara? Can you describe what?
Tara Roberts Zabriski:that that is I. I would say that it's not a drastic difference. But you know, I've always been into nature, I've always been into living my own life. But so I hiked the AT 21 years ago, in 2003, and at the time I was in college and I took a semester off to hike the trail. And I would say hiking the trail Like definitely gave me time to really think about what it was I wanted out of life.
Tara Roberts Zabriski:You know, being out on the trail, you realize that you can live with very little. You have just what you have on your back. And you know, realizing that you don't have to go the traditional route, like you meet a lot of people. You meet a lot of characters at different stages in their life that have maybe not taken a traditional corporate job or traditional Track, or or they're getting ready to switch their, their career or something drastic in their life. So you gather all these experiences out there. You know, the Appalachian Trail is not just about a nature experience, but it's it's also about, like, a community experience. You're really getting to know other people that are out there and for me I'd say the biggest thing was it just it reinforced my love for nature and it encouraged me to blend that with my, with my filmmaking and photography trajectory.
Tara Roberts Zabriski:So I was in the middle of college studying mass communications, and it was getting ready to go into my senior year, where I needed a project it's like a, like a senior project and for six months I was thinking what I want to do and I kept staring at these signs that said leave no trace, leave no. And I was like, well, of course, of course you want to leave no trace. But made me realize how important that education was. So I went back when I was done with the trail, I went back to my professor and I said this is what I want to do my film on. I want to do an educational Film on the seven principles of leave no trace. And he said that's great. Here's what I want you to do. I want you to go to the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, which was really right down the road from where I grew up and where I went to college, and in Harper's Berry, west Virginia. So you went to shepherds. I want yeah.
Bill McGeeney:I went to shepherd university.
Tara Roberts Zabriski:And yeah, he said, go there, I want to talk to people and say this is what I'm doing, can you use it and can you work with me to make this happen" and so he really encouraged me to kind of step into that professional role as a student and start building relationships and learning how to work with a client. So that was my first experience doing something of that and, you know, because of that film I shot as a senior, it has sort of triggered all the other projects that I've done along the way in my career, so including the Dark Sky film, you know, through a series of events. But eventually the person that got me into that had seen the work I had done previously. So, yeah, it all leads back to the AT.
Bill McGeeney:So I got a lot of I mean a ton of questions we can't deal on this show with. But did you grow up in Shepardstown or in Harpers Ferry area?
Tara Roberts Zabriski:I grew up on the Maryland side of the Potomac River, so walking distance from Harpers Ferry.
Bill McGeeney:Okay.
Tara Roberts Zabriski:And you know, maybe 20 minutes from Shepardstown University.
Bill McGeeney:And was? Were there guys like were you able to see stars at night?
Tara Roberts Zabriski:Yeah, so I live in a rural area 50 acres and we have this big open field and I used to spend my pre-teenage and teenage years sleeping out under the stars if it wasn't rainy, just my sleeping bag and I would stare up at the stars and I would ask all the questions about all the things you ask about the stars.
Tara Roberts Zabriski:And I started reading books and learning more and more about the universe and asking my brother to explain things to me because he's a little more science oriented so he could sort of break it down for me and it was a really cool experience. And in Charlestown, which is, I don't know, maybe 10 miles, by the way of the bird flies, there's a. This is in West Virginia, but we could. We can see sort of the glow, the sky glow from from my parents' house. They have a race track there and I don't know, maybe sometime around the time I was in college they put up more lights or bigger lights or something, and now that whole section of the southern sky is like obliterated. You can't you can't see anything.
Tara Roberts Zabriski:You can still see the Milky Way from my parents' property, but it is sort of not as good as it used to be. You do notice that sky glow and all the other development that's been done in the area. The lights up the sky.
Bill McGeeney:I asked that because I grew up similar to you. I was able to see a trace Milky Way and when I was like a teenager it was so cool. I just and I I loved the act of going outside in the dark and hearing all the animals and looking at the stars. There's just something weird and spiritual about it. I can't, I can't explain it, and I still love it. I still want my favorite things to do. But how about you, tim Lauren? Have you, did you guys grow up able to see the stars?
Tim Brothers:Yeah, I grew up being able to see the Milky Way from my house, which is now a rarity, I think was it? Less than 15% of people in the United States can see it from their own home. So I was fortunate in Western Massachusetts. That's obviously changed since, you know, the 1980s. But similarly I used to, you know, lay outside on a blanket in the summer months and watch the Milky Way or or planets or or you know, meteor showers, and that was certainly inspiring and I'm sure had some bit of influence on me pursuing an astronomy degree. But obviously that's that's changed.
Tim Brothers:And you know, I've lived in major cities where you know, at best you can see the moon in Jupiter, and then I've also lived in the middle of the desert in New Mexico where the amount of stars you can see is is sort of disorienting, it's just sort of mind blowing. So I've seen a little bit of it all, but we're certainly seeing it rapidly change here. And where I live now in in peperal Massachusetts, we can still see the Milky Way. So we're sort of a rarity. But you know the clock is ticking still. So you know, maybe, maybe some amount of years, if we don't really do something, we can lose it here as well.
Bill McGeeney:Lauren, did you grow up with the CNA stars?
Lauren Collee:I mean, you can get to places where you can see some amount of stars fairly easily from Sydney, but, yeah, there's not great night sky visibility from Sydney itself. I had, yeah, a fairly sort of like urban upbringing and then lived in Sydney for 10 years, so I guess, like, where I'm coming at these topics is often from sort of like, yeah, that kind of more urban perspective and also just like the importance of kind of making stars accessible from urban areas, which I think is important. But, yeah, I guess I wanted to like earlier you were kind of talking about the experience of like going out and hearing lots of sounds at night and and I think that's something that's often left out of like the way that people think about the value of dark spaces. There's this kind of overarching narrative that, like night is like a time for sleep and a time for rest and this, you know, time for stillness, and actually when you like you know, when you live somewhere that has high biodiversity and you go out at night, it's incredibly loud, it's incredibly sounds like a party.
Bill McGeeney:Yeah, it's a very it's very active.
Lauren Collee:Yeah, and I think I think that that an awareness of that is important because it helps to understand that, like night landscapes is something that have kind of active and active life of their own and value, Not just as kind of like, yeah, spaces of rest or stillness, of pause, but as their own sort of landscapes that like allow their own forms of kind of like life and and you know different cultures of use night in many different ways, not just for sort of rest, but also as spaces for kind of celebration. And I think that's, yeah, that's something that's sometimes missing from sort of mainstream discussion of why darkness is important or why night's important.
Bill McGeeney:Well, that's very well said and it reminds me we had a guest on a while back that said, compared it to people of light and people of dark, and Lauren, in this case, coming as a person of light, I guess, as part of the way to put it people who didn't grow up with a real, a real natural night and grew up in an urban setting. So I want to now switch over to that Davis article. The case of Davis and the case of the articles we're going to talk about here are very interesting, show a very interesting divide between how people who grew up with night and people who have not ever really interacted with night experience or have a sense of the activities of the evening, I guess. So in 1988, davis, california, adopted a dark sky ordinance, apparently with the explicit reasoning to protect stargazing. However, many residents believe that it's simply too dark, the streets are too dark, the bus stops are too dark, etc.
Bill McGeeney:So as a way to appease some of these complaints and provide assistance to the town's night economy, the city council decided to put three new decorative lighting options to popular vote. The goal was to balance tree health with the downtown's desire for ambience. I will note the city council did not consider lighting as having an effect on tree health. Instead, they're, strictly speaking, about having a prune or cut up trees to add lighting to the area. So Davis came up with three options. The first was to shoot decorative lasers up at a tree canopy. These are lights usually see around Christmas and people's front yards or aimed at their houses side of a house kind of dances around overnight. That's up lighting and would require lighting ordinance adjustment. Stringing Edison bulbs between street lamps and for those of you who are not familiar with Edison bulbs, they're often large, warm light bulbs that hang awkwardly off of a cable or stringing Edison bulbs but wrapping them between trees and light poles, which would actually incur, in this case, damage to the tree.
Bill McGeeney:Now maybe you guys are thinking it's honestly not that bad. These options are not terrible. So what's the catch? There's an underlying theme here in this story and I dug into it a little more. There's something else at play, and it's that Davis is a rare case where dark sky advocates actually kind of seem to get a taste of their own acrimony. In a previous CBS article discussing the lighting options, it mentions a constant refrain in alignment with what I'm going to say below that it's just, it's just too dark.
Bill McGeeney:Take a cruise on the UC Davis subreddit and you'll see outbursts of vile anger towards the limited levels of lighting. Anger points directly at the ordinance. For instance, when a chief of police of Davis gave an interview explaining why limited lighting actually reduces crime, one Redditor stated that MF say crime requires light. Yeah, because all these crimes happen during the day. In a January 6 article in UC Davis' student paper, california Aggie, students are pined on how unsafe they felt due to what they framed as poorly lit streets.
Bill McGeeney:Now I think there's one thing that everyone on the panel can probably agree on, and that's given the fact that you see reversal of this very activity in nearly every context where by dark sky advocates would like fling the proverbial poo right, say, against the oppressively unregulated open-ended lighting communities that they seem to exist in. In the same vein, there's a story out of Stephen and Jinklin where a commuter is petitioning to have street lighting installed in a large borough park. The call is definitely out of fear and the belief that it will enhance safety. So the borough leaders, who are probably trying to prevent that from a cost end, are citing environmental constraints, specifically with regard to the ecology. So in these situations and I really can't believe any of these areas are really dark, so to say, but rather they're not fully or directly lit.
Bill McGeeney:And last month we had I had on Ashley Northcote of Astro Backyard. Ashley asserted maybe it's because people simply never use their night vision. I don't know if it's that as much as people aren't as comfortable with being in dimmer environments. What's your takeaway on these communities? Are these communities being stubborn and unresponsive to the needs of their communities? Should we have more lighting in communities that have taken a hard stance on protecting night?
Tara Roberts Zabriski:Well, it seems like the messaging and the education around it. You know, there's like a there's like a gap between what good dark sky lighting, lighting looks like and and what these people think this ordinance is going to entail or whatever, because there's plenty of ways. What they need to realize is dark sky advocates are not against lighting. We, we do support lighting in a healthy way, and so I think it does come down a lot to that education piece of look.
Tara Roberts Zabriski:If we put up lights like this where it is a lower temperature color, then it's not, doesn't have that blue light that's going to scatter everywhere and in effect the sky glow, then I think you know. And if you start showing examples, you know, show, show an example of what a well lit street is like, where you can see well and you can walk down the street and not trip over things, and that means that the light is pointed where it needs to be, with the correct temperature bulb and not, like you know the uplighting you mentioned, on the tree. That doesn't sound very good to me, for you know, from a from a dark sky perspective, you know the edits and balls. They aren't, they aren't shielded, but at least they are the warmer temperature. So you do have. You do have that benefit. But yeah, I think a lot of it comes down to just showing examples and making them realize they aren't losing the light and there are healthy ways to do that.
Bill McGeeney:Are these communities being unreasonable? Are they just trying to justify a lack of spending and trying to essentially trying to skirt any kind of additional costs that they might need to put in or put forth because their community is asking for additional lighting? Is that what the story is here?
Tara Roberts Zabriski:Yeah, I would just, I would just say that I don't. I don't think it's unreasonable to ask for healthy lighting or to ask for better lighting for safety. But again, it just, it just comes down to you know what are the temperature bulbs that you're using, and and let's, let's make it so that it's a happy medium between dark sky, healthy lighting and being able to see where you're going at night.
Tim Brothers:And I would just like to say that, you know, I mean, I think it would be really sad to see Davis go backwards, since they've generally been considered a success story for dark sky advocacy. I mean, there's also this there's a critical failure in this the study, the survey that they give. They say choose between these three lights, and none of those three follow the five principles of good lighting from the IES or dark sky international. So so right off the bat, you know we're presenting three options that are not going to solve the problem in my opinion. But they don't give you an option to say I like the way things are now.
Tim Brothers:And I think that's sort of a bad way to conduct a study because, you know, maybe some people have been vociferous about saying I want more light. But what about everybody else who likes the way they are right now? And I think that's that's an important part of any any sort of public survey is to say you know, I like the decisions, the sentiment of the town, I like that. We have dark sky policy and maybe there are some areas, you know, for these college students or just people waiting for the bus, that need improvement. But shining light into space is not going to solve that. Shining lasers into trees is not going to solve that, right, lauren, any thoughts on that.
Lauren Collee:Yeah, I think the the like kind of safety question is a really interesting one because a lot of you know it's, it's, I guess I have a question around how much of the feeling of being safer at night when there's light is sort of like a learn Cultural feeling. I was talking about this in my PhD vibe the other day. Actually, like I used to live in a part of London that was really dark and I'd have to. I was working in a cafe and I'd have to go along the canal back home at like maybe 11pm at night in East London and it's like one of the darkest parts of London and at first I found it really scary and then I kind of realized, like that, because no one could see me and no one could see that I was a woman walking alone, I kind of felt safer, like it was sort of this weird thing where, like I wasn't visible as like you know, and it was so dark that I was not visible. But I mean, obviously that's not necessarily going to be realistic to have lighting levels that low. So but I think, yeah, the safety question is, you know, like I have read studies that say that it just increases your subjective sense of safety and not your actual kind of safety from sexual assault or violent attacks, but that's not to say subjective safety isn't important.
Lauren Collee:I think that people's sense of feeling safe at night is also important. So, yeah, I mean, I guess ideally these conversations happen in a way where people can kind of voice their concerns and come up with something that works for that community. And like every community's needs is going to be slightly different. But I think also people having a sense of like why they're trying to reduce light and like what reducing what, like you know what having more natural darkness means to them as a community. And again, that will be like different based on where you are and who's living there. So you know, like what, what are the benefits for that community? Like do does it mean more opportunities to see the stars? Does it mean, like you know, is it the biodiversity value? Is it better sleep? Like what are they actually doing it for? Like what are? What are they fighting for as a community? I think defining that will be sort of really crucial for the questions of kind of policy start to come up, perhaps.
Bill McGeeney:Yeah, I think people get tripped up in that lighting and safety question. That's a tough one because largely it's an emotional issue. Right, you have crimes that happen all time during the day, all like. You have certain crimes that happen at night and some of them are more influenced by substances. Right, some of them are more influenced by a lack of like opportunity and and it just because you have light doesn't? It's kind of like a variable, but the lighting gives you, gives you visibility to other things around you, and Maybe that is what makes you feel a little safer, because you're able to see stuff. So you think you can make, or you think you have the opportunity to make, an informed decision.
Tara Roberts Zabriski:Yeah, I think with the safety. The big argument against using Too bright light at night is that the shadows that become more dark. So if you have a really bright area, then your eyes are not adjusted to the darkness. So it's easier for an attacker or a robber, whatever to to hide in the shadows and you won't even notice them because you've got your daylight eyes on, because your eyes adjust to the darkness and it's not your. Your eyes aren't going to shift directly.
Tara Roberts Zabriski:It's like when you, when you get hit in the face with a, with a car coming towards you, it takes your eyes a little while to adjust to that that darker, that darker sense. It's the same thing when you're walking through your home area or or your streets that are lit up. If you turn your head towards the dark woods, your eyes aren't going to adjust for several minutes and and that's plenty of time for somebody to jump in. So that's the huge argument against having too bright light lighting. And if you bring that that level down to more of that 2700k lighting that's recommended by the International Dark Sky Association, then your light is your, your eyes are adjusted closer to the night vision, do you? Do you think that's closer?
Bill McGeeney:Do you think we make too big a deal about crime at night? I feel like daytime crime I mean. So they there seems to be much more focus on Fear at night, but we don't have the same fear during the day, and I don't understand why you don't have that same fear during the day, because these crimes that happen at night also happened during the day and it's not that we have. You know like people sit there and wait for it to turn dark and then Come out of woods. I mean that that may happen, but someone could easily sit behind a car and come out of that. You know like jump out of that car when you're walking by or something Like that, right? So it's the, the environmental, the timing aspect. Do you think make too big a deal of crime at night?
Tara Roberts Zabriski:Possibly, but I guess it goes back to what someone was saying about the perceived safety you know.
Tara Roberts Zabriski:I think if you people are, people are afraid of what they don't know or what they can't see, and so in daylight, you know, if you can see your surroundings, then you maybe at least feel more comfortable. Even if I don't know statistically if, if more crimes happen at night or not, I don't have that information but I think if you, if you can see your surroundings, then at least you feel more comfortable. I think that's what's going on there, and at night people are just afraid of the unknown.
Bill McGeeney:Okay well.
Lauren Collee:I think it's also yet a question of, like, population density on the street. Potentially I don't know I think that's often that factors into, I guess. My own experiences is like there's just often less people around at night, so it's like if you're sharing the road with one other person there, sort of like following in your steps, you start to get a bit jittery, like.
Bill McGeeney:I don't know if it, I don't know how much it has to do with like, but but I think that yeah, it's interesting because, like Lauren, you would feel that way if you're under a street light walking, and it was just you, and then Some skivvy person was coming your direction, right like the light. Yeah, like the situation wouldn't be any different, if you can see them. You still feel very uncomfortable.
Lauren Collee:Totally. Yeah, no, I think it is. I think it's it's very much. I think the night definitely adds this perceived level of danger, which I'm not I'm not sure how much that actually kind of tallies with that, the actual increase in danger. I think that. I think that probably that link is overstated for sure, yeah, I guess like it's, but but the cultural Association still remains, so that's still like a real thing that the dark sky movement needs to contend with.
Lauren Collee:It's like the fact that people do feel safer when, like the, the perceived is still. I guess it's like it doesn't change the fact that people feel that way. But I think that, like that you know you can work with those kind of yeah, like you know, called culture changes, and like you can work with that. So it's like, yeah, I guess I. I guess what I'm sure say is like it's not, like we should just say, oh, there's no added danger at night. Actually, this is all invented. Studies show that, you know, like having more light doesn't make you safer. Therefore, you know you can't be worried about it and you know we're gonna dismiss all your concerns. Like I Think that it's important to acknowledge people's Reactions, but then also kind of like that can be the starting point for a conversation around like okay, so like what you know.
Tara Roberts Zabriski:What do you do?
Lauren Collee:Yeah, how do you do? What does the night mean to us? Like? Where is that fear coming from? What are we actually afraid of? Like it's, if that's the beginning of a conversation, then that's, I think, leading somewhere really productive.
Bill McGeeney:Yeah so move out of this, this little segment here. I just want to bring up two facts and and I think this kind of explains it stats from Pew Research in 2020 and the UK crime census in September of 2023. In both places were at a 30 to 40 year low in crime and Even after a little bump in COVID we're at an incredibly low crime Moment in in both countries. But in the US the perceived amount of crime rose up by 31% From 2000 to 2020. So 40, some percent, 43, 41 percent, whatever it was believe that was really relatively crime-ridden country and 73% now do. So you have this, this perception, and you know we're not gonna go down the road of how we get there, but I think it kind of pairs with what we're talking about here. So let's move out of this little area and move on to something else.
Bill McGeeney:I want to wrap up some of the ordinances real quick just by saying here's a quick run-through of Communities that actually are putting in some ordinances Quintana Hills, summer set, england. Liberty Hills, texas. Sheffield, massachusetts. We have a half mile radius around Turner Farm Park Observatory in Great Falls, va will now have a Lighting ordinance that will take place. It doesn't really change anything for the time being, but down the line Hopefully things will change as new fixtures have to be put in Chewbuck, idaho, santa Cruz, california, bessay town, okuyama in Japan and Oxford, canterbury, new Zealand. And I will this set, for those places have no tie to environmental or astronomical observations. Tim, you guys have working hard to get two bills pushed through to Massachusetts Government and you guys been doing this for a while. Right, there have been numerous incarnations of these.
Tim Brothers:Yeah. So Massachusetts is the only state in the Northeast without having passed light pollution legislation or lighting control legislation. So Before my time, you know, I we started this chapter, you know, I think five or six years ago, and and I became involved with a lot of other really wonderful people who have been at this much, much longer than I am, in some cases decades. It's been very hard to pass a basic lighting bill. We even have buy-in from lighting industry. So, whether it's the lighting designer Association or the Illumining engineering society, the IES, which writes a lot of the rule books for lighting, it's bipartisan. We have like 30 something co-sponsors and it's actually going to save Municipalities money. So one of the issues in Massachusetts, you know, we've been very forward thinking about Converting our high-pressure sodium lights to more efficient LEDs, which is great. Right, we want to cut our carbon consumption. That's, that's excellent. We support that.
Tim Brothers:And then, of course, the state also subsidized smart controllers. But one of the things that happened in in that, you know, I think we're almost a 10-year push now. So I think somewhere around 75% of communities have now converted. Utilities are allowed to Charge municipalities a base rate of 25 watts per fixture. The problem with that is that when you start using the smart controllers, you get way below 25 watts. So, for example, that you know. I'm sure we're gonna dig into this a little bit deeper, but the town I live in is now using about 12.9 watts. So essentially every year we're subsidizing the utility companies and it disincentivizes a lot of communities from actually utilizing the smart controller. So there was this opportunity. You know, the state basically paid for half or all of these smart controllers.
Tim Brothers:We can lower electricity, we can lower our light pollution, and some communities didn't even bother dimming them because there was no financial incentive. So that's one of the things that the bill affects. It'll also put a cap on CCT, so it would be 3000 K, which is in line with the American Medical Association. It does provide an exemption up to 4000 K if you can prove a safety reason. It also adheres to best practices about you know, fully shielding your lighting fixture. So there's no uplight, and the one thing that that's important to understand too Is it's very hard to regulate everything in a state.
Tim Brothers:So what we chose to do is construct it so that it only deals with new lighting that is publicly paid for. So any municipal lighting, state lighting, town lighting, anything that the public is paying for with tax money, that would be regulated going forward. So in effect, it would reduce energy consumption. It would reduce light pollution. You would reduce harmful blue light. As far as I know, if it passed we'd be the first state to regulate Color temperature. But it but it's challenging. Last session we got out of our committee, we were passed out favorably and we just ran out of time and COVID similarly sort of disrupted any plans for passing legislation. We've gotten high marks. We had two hearings this this year and in fact some of our astronomy students MIT testified and it was well received. Hopefully we'll know in the next few weeks whether it's going to be passed out. So so there is a deadline, I think the first week in February, where we'll find out whether it's going to move on to the next step.
Bill McGeeney:Well, good luck, that's. I'll be a great achievement. If so, hopefully my best to everyone who's worked on it, and I imagine quite a few folks have been involved. So, tim, I know you want to talk about your town, pepperrill, massachusetts. Yeah, okay. So why don't you tell us about the work you've done in Pepperrill?
Tim Brothers:Yeah, so. So Pepperrill is is an interesting example, and it's not because I happen to live there, it's because we were sort of a holdout in terms of. I mentioned a few minutes ago that, you know, somewhere around 70, 75% of communities in Massachusetts had already converted their street lights, and we knew that. You know, of course we want to cut our energy, we want to save our taxpayers, our residents, money, we want to be responsible and cut our carbon consumption. So we knew this was going to happen at some point. And and one thing we realized after seeing many, many bad examples of, you know, terrible, glaring, very blue, poorly shielded Street lights that were operated at full intensity and made it actually more glaring, so harder to see pedestrians, harder to see oncoming traffic and so on. And and then, of course, higher sky glow, which which I care about at the observatory.
Tim Brothers:So what we decided to do is get really involved at the early step, soon, as we had heard, in fact, even before the the cold call came from from the design company to the town, we actually approached our planning board and our board of select Men and our town administrator and said, hey, if, if you decide at some point, you want to convert the LED street lights. We'd like to help you out, we'd like to work with you, we'd like to make sure that this project, if it's completed, the residents are gonna be happy with, because we have lots of anecdotes, lots of examples in the surrounding towns around us where these LEDs were put in 4,000 K high glare LEDs and people are really unhappy with them. They actually observed that my visibility has been reduced.
Bill McGeeney:Yeah, here, here we had a community in part of Philly that that pretty much revolted against them.
Tim Brothers:Yeah, and that's happened several times now throughout the United States, right, so early adopters whether it's Los Angeles, chicago, manhattan have actually gone back and Conducted a second installation of LEDs, and we were sold, remember, in the in the mid you know, 20 teens, that these LED fixtures would be around for a generation, that they would last 30 years, that they, you know, did not need maintenance, and then, of course, you know, many of these early ones burned out or they turned purple, or just people were unhappy with them because they were too glaring.
Tim Brothers:So we took all that in account, and what we decided to do is is, instead of fighting with the town administration and and fine, with that, you know the design companies and sort of fighting on Facebook and so on, we said, why don't we all work together? And we put together a list of I won't call them demands, but suggestions about how we could minimize light pollution and and this was the key saving money for the town. And so we talked a lot about smart controllers, we talked a lot about preventing wasteful uplay and so on, and, and so what we ended up doing was one thing that we learned along the way was that the towns that were happy with their lighting had bothered to ask people what do you want, and they actually conducted a survey or a demonstration and that seemed particularly helpful in the few towns in Massachusetts or other work other places right, that's what, that's what alarm had just mentioned, right, you know, be a responsive as set up, where your street lights are responsive to what the community needs are.
Tim Brothers:Yeah, and and this was the really interesting part so we we conducted this demonstration. We did not tell people what each of these lights were. We had five leds, different types of LEDs, and we actually stuck in the high-pressure Sodium as a control. So we didn't tell people, they just assumed they were all new lighting and they were all just lettered. So they didn't know what color temperature, they didn't know what brand, they just were allowed to drive around there. Though the demonstration was up for a few weeks. The first week was at 100% intensity, so matching the original high-pressure sodium, and the second week was down to 50% intensity, and what we found was that. So we had four twenty seven hundred K and and one 200k, so this was a brand new light that we didn't expect to even be able to include at the time. We thought that the warmest we could get was twenty seven hundred, and they threw in the twenty two hundred K, and it turns out, despite what we've always been told, that good lighting would cost more, it actually ended up being the cheapest option.
Bill McGeeney:So that that fixture does. The twenty two hundred K fixture was the cheapest option, because I've always heard that it's very expensive. It's two times yeah.
Tim Brothers:So we're told and that was not the case. That that was. That was one interesting thing, and you know, at the end of the day, people chose what they chose and I think if it had been a little bit higher, maybe we still would have gone with it, but the fact was this worked out beautifully, right, because it was the cheapest option. People were Rated at the highest in terms of visibility, so we conducted a public survey using, you know, a Google form that was easily accessible for people and One. There's a few things we learned from this. One was that people prefer warmer colored lighting, so the two lights that they preferred in terms of color appearance Was the 2200k in the high pressure sodium, which are basically the same color. High pressure sodium is just about 2200k.
Tim Brothers:People did not like glare, so the fixtures that were Sometimes more expensive and had more glare, people didn't like those, which is not surprising, right? No one wants to be blinded, especially in a small town. You know of 11,000 people with with flat population growth and Very rural. We have lots of farms. Still, we have two federally designated, federally protected riverways, so you know lots of interest in things like hunting and fishing and in agriculture here and the natural nighttime ambience. So people really value the dark skies.
Tim Brothers:So at the end of the day, people chose the 2200k, without knowing what it was, and it was pretty clear. People also preferred a dim street light. So, as we've been told by by lighting professionals before that LED should really be, you know, somewhere around a third or so of the intensity of the original high pressure sodium. We ended up coming up with a dimming scheme of 50% the first and last two hours of the night and Down to 30% brightness the middle six or so hours of the night. And guess how many complaints we had, say three, zero. So even the police chief went on record saying that his nighttime Officers can actually see better. I apologize if you can hear my oh, that's us great.
Bill McGeeney:What kind of dog is it to?
Tim Brothers:get the German shepherd and she found something outside.
Bill McGeeney:I used to have one. She had to put her down during COVID put it. So I mean that that makes plenty of sense. It's what terror is saying where you have, you don't have to go from the super bright and Look into you know, say, a yard or something where you can't see anything for minutes.
Tim Brothers:Right, it, exactly right and and I think Even that, even if you, you know, I took my astronomer hat off for a moment I think it's really important to understand, even beyond just the general topics. We talked about light pollution. By doing this dimming schedule, we saved 81% of our electricity and that's much higher than the original I think about 70% that the company originally quoted that they could do so by utilizing the smear controllers to their fullest Ability. And then, like I was saying, the police chief went on record saying, as far as they know, there is no increase in crime, no increased traffic accidents during these dimming hours, dimmed hours. There's really no downside.
Tim Brothers:They were, they were happy with them and they actually said this is the funny thing about it the police officers actually said well, I can see better now because it's brighter. And when I try to explain to them when we met, well, it's definitely not brighter, it's down to 30% brightness. And they said no, no, no, I guarantee it's brighter. And the reason they're thinking that is because the contrast was better. They weren't Hit with these glare bombs where they couldn't discern the deer or the skateboarder on the side of the road.
Bill McGeeney:They were actually able to see what's in the road better and and with that color, even though the stun I apologize for cutting you off there, tim the sodium pressure, because still I don't speak to sodium pressure they, they create a uniform Color right, whereas when you have the warm LEDs it creates like a single band of color and that single band of color doesn't seem to saturate. I guess is probably the better thought on it to me. In my eyes is just anecdotal. It doesn't seem to saturate like the high pressure sodium does yeah, so.
Tim Brothers:So one thing that's different about the high pressure sodium is you have a filament that's hanging down below the bulb when you could actually see the thing that's glowing in it and it causes glare.
Tim Brothers:Right with the existing high pressure sodium, the new, the, the 2200k Cooper fixtures that we purchased for the town were very well shielded and they had good optics, so so the thing that's emitting photons, emitting light, is sort of buried in the fixture itself, so you can only really see the glowing part until you're maybe, you know, 30 degrees underneath the fixture itself. So so the glare doesn't really hit you until you're right underneath if you happen to look up. Yeah, so so all in all, I mean it was, it was a good success, people were happy with it and it. You know. My hope is that now we can take this example and get other people, other towns, to take this on and try to Do the same thing, because, well, if it's not more expensive, if people are happy with it and it reduced light pollution, you know, often the question is well, well, did it actually do the thing I've been, I've been sort of blabbing about? Yes, so our, our sky actually got about 20 25% darker, so we actually went backward in time just by changing the street lights.
Bill McGeeney:That's impressive. That is kudos to you guys.
Bill McGeeney:Good work on that and you know everyone's happy, I'm happy, I can see the Milky Way still and but I mean, like the normal street users, normal drivers, anyone who walks around at night, they're, they're happy and that's. I think that's the most important part. I think it's so lost in and you know what's good, what's bad, how to make stuff Super safe, like intersections super safe, that we Forget that there's actually. We don't need to go to extremes, we can kind of, you know, be modest in our approach to it and that that little bit goes a long way.
Bill McGeeney:On your note, to that right we that parallels with this story out of Boulder, where city of Boulder pulled its residents and 55% of them want it warm 2700 temperature lights. They want it. 29% favored 2200 Temperature lights. There wasn't really much distinction for whether that lighting was on a Highway, a major four lane road or just a neighborhood. They wanted to warm lights. And then, similarly, study out of North Carolina, students at the Outer Banks field site found that out of 500 people surveyed that most were concerned or very concerned about artificial light at night at the Outer Banks and 90% agreed to Allen should be reduced. And of that 90%, 60% agreed strongly. I feel like it's overblown. You know, and I live here in Philly when they went and redid the LED lights. They put in initially 4000 and the first thing that it was brain up all the commercial corridors, which are very