With the chalky cliffs of the Dorset coast stretching for miles in both directions, Bob Mizon sits down on the thick grass of the Purbeck hills, takes out his newspaper and begins to read. A perfect way to spend a relaxing afternoon.
Except this isn’t the afternoon, it’s 2 o’clock in the morning, and thanks to the lights of the Poole Ferry terminal some 10 miles away, Bob can still read the nine point newsprint on his Sunday Times.
Bob hasn’t come up to sit atop one of the UK’s few World Heritage sites and read his paper at night because he’s odd. Nor should one question the fact that he spends his days travelling the schools and colleges of southern Britain with a 20-foot inflatable grey planetarium in the back of his car. For Bob is the UK coordinator of the Campaign for Dark Skies, part of an international network that campaigns on behalf of the night sky.
‘Half our environment is above the horizon,’ explains Bob. ‘Half our environment is not protected by the force of law. The night sky, by its very nature a site of special scientific interest and an area of outstanding natural beauty, has, over the last 50 years, been quietly and gradually taken away from those dwelling in towns and urban fringe areas throughout the developed world.’ One of his colleagues in the Dark Skies coalition goes one further, bemoaning the loss of ‘The largest national park in the world.’
The heavens, say Bob and his ilk, are in need of saving.
According to research by the British Astronomical Association and the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England, 85 per cent of people in this country now live in areas where artificial lighting blots out the night sky. Areas suffering the most severe light pollution have risen by 17 per cent, with a quarter of England’s landmass now producing more light than seven years ago. Increasing light pollution means that most UK residents are now unable to see our own galaxy, the Milky Way.
Professional astronomers are finding that telescopes built to observe the further reaches of the night sky a few decades ago are no longer up to the task. The 2.5m telescope on Mount Wilson near Los Angeles is as good as useless for deep-sky observations. Even the giant observatory perched 4,300m atop Hawaii’s volcanic Mauna Kea is beginning to be affected.
So what? Yes, it’s a shame not to be able to see the stars at night, but aren’t there more important things to be worrying about, like the very real pollution of our land and our water before we start getting too concerned over what is nothing more than an aesthetic loss? On the contrary, light pollution has very serious, very real, consequences. It’s just that, like the stars it blots out, they are somewhat harder to see.
Messing around with nature
At the risk of stating the obvious, life on a spinning planet is split into two halves, day and night. The many animals and plants of the natural world rely upon this rhythm for everything from hunting to sleeping, navigating their long migrations to choosing when and where to give birth. When we mess around with the natural order of the skies, we mess around with their ability to survive. When new highpowered street lights were installed in a rural Leicester village earlier this year, a local councillor complained to the paper that: ‘It looks like lighting from a retail park. It is incredibly bright and not at all what you would expect from a country lane. On the first evening after they were installed, birds were still singing, even though it was very dark, because the street lamps had convinced them it was still light.’
At the other end of the night, dawn choruses are starting earlier and earlier, as birds, confused by bright artifi cial lights, herald yet another a false dawn. With their sleep patterns disrupted, they are less alert in the day, and so less able to catch their prey. Of greater concern, however, is the number of birds that die each year from collisions caused by artifi cial lighting. Confused by the reflection in the windows of tall buildings, they fly into the glass, mistaking the reflected lights for distant stars. More birds die each year in this way in the US than died from the very ‘real’ pollution of the Exxon Valdez disaster. (Notably, that disaster is often blamed on the captain of the vessel being overtired as a result of trying to sail a vast tanker around the clock, rather than taking proper rests.)
A report on the BBC website last year explained how important light is to birds: ‘US scientists believe they have made an important breakthrough in the mystery of how migrating birds manage to navigate thousands of kilometres and arrive at exactly the same spot each year… The researchers concluded that each night the thrushes must have ‘recalibrated’ their inbuilt compass from the position of the setting sun.’
Another animal well known for its seasonal navigation is the sea turtle. Female turtles, having conceived on one side of the Atlantic, swim across the ocean, arriving en masse at one of only a few beaches on the Caribbean coastline over a period of a few nights to lay their eggs. Then, several months later, again over a period of a few nights, all the baby turtles hatch and the beach becomes a mass of frenzied scuttling as they all try to
reach the sea.
Unfortunately, sea turtles aren’t the only scuttling animals attracted to the beautiful Caribbean coastline. High rise tourist developments, with brightly lit beach fronts and long esplanades, now line the backs of many of the turtles’ natural birth-grounds. If the lights are not extinguished (and thankfully increasingly during this time of year they are), the mother turtles refuse to come to shore to lay their eggs. For the few who do, there is a high chance that the baby turtles that do emerge from the eggs will scurry the wrong way, drawn away from the sea by the artificial lights.
Even with efforts to dim the lights, many turtles continue to struggle, because while the lights on the beach may have been dimmed, the night sky is still blotted out by the sky glow from developments further inland. In 1998, despite stringent beach-front lighting measures, 19,970 turtle hatchlings were reported as disorientated to the Florida Department of Environmental Protection. Confused by the lights, they waste what little energy they have by going the wrong way and become easy prey for gulls and other predators. If they do reach the sea, they are too exhausted to swim.
Many other animals suffer in a similar way. Owls, mice and bats all have their nocturnal habitats compromised. The survival of the glowworm and the firefly is considered most at risk from bright artifi cial lights, which make it harder to see their prospective mates’ glow. Dung beetles are also particularly affected.
According to a 2003 BBC news article: ‘Many birds use the sun, moon or stars as a marker in the sky. But the African dung beetle seems to have even more remarkable skills. It uses the pattern created when moonlight strikes tiny particles in the atmosphere (polarisation) to orient itself and travel in a straight line. When nights are cloudy, its progress across the ground is more random and it tends to go around in circles.’
Fish suffer too. Trout have been shown to have their behaviour disrupted by floodlights. Halibut spawning times change as a result of artificial lights. Even deep sea organisms don’t escape. With their eyes unaccustomed to receiving any light at all, when their inky black world is invaded by submersibles with ultra bright headlights, the photoreceptors on their eyes can be seriously damaged.
Even plants are affected. From the green algae that live on the surface of ponds to giant and ancient trees, all have been shown to have their natural systems disturbed by exposure to excessive amounts of artificial light. They drop their leaves at the wrong time of year, or attempt to photosynthesise or flower at night.
As Ben Harper wrote in the journal Conservation in Practice last year: ‘Many of the effects of artificial light may resonate up and down food chains, dragging whole ecosystems into imbalance. And by modifying the playing field on which nocturnal organisms develop, interact, and reproduce, artifi cial light may sculpt not only their individual lives but also the biological evolution of their species.’
A SAD story
While mankind is the cause of the disruption, we are also a victim, as much a part of nature as the animals whose lives we disturb. Like most of the animal kingdom, we generally sleep when its dark and it’s well known that exposure to excessive light can mess with our sleep patterns. Amnesty lists exposing prisoners to unbroken bright lights as a form of torture. And while Scandinavians may be famous for their high suicide rates, it is more the long summer nights than the short winter days that do it. A recent study found that: ‘A signifi cant excess of total suicides was found during spring/ summer (May-July) and a signifi cant trough during winter/spring (December- March) months.’
What separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom is that much of the damage we do to ourselves is by the lights inside our homes rather than just those outside. Children who sleep with the light on have been shown to be more likely to suffer from shortsightedness later in life. Dr Chris Idzikowski, director of the Sleep Assessment and Advisory Service, goes further, saying that leaving lights on at night ‘could lead to a disruption
of sleeping patterns, hyperactivity, and may have a negative impact on a child’s health.’
Increasingly research is suggesting that exposure to excessive artificial light at night can increase our chances of cancer. Exposure to nocturnal light has been shown to disrupt the body’s production of melatonin, a hormone secreted primarily in the brain at night. One of melatonin’s many effects is a reduction in the body’s nocturnal production of oestregen, leading researchers to speculated that chronically decreasing nocturnal melatonin production might increase an individual’s risk of developing oestrogen-related malignancies, such as breast cancer. Following a conference on this issue in 2003, Dr George Brainard of Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia commented: ‘Our work is showing that light at night may be a risk for breast cancer. That is a very serious problem for industrialised countries.’
In her book Under the weather – how weather and climate affect our health, The Ecologist’s health editor, Pat Thomas, reports on studies into the problems with artificial lighting, and how certain researchers believe having ‘full spectrum’ lights inside might help. ‘A 1973 study in Florida performed on young children found that that hyperactive children calm down and academic levels go up when full spectrum lights are installed,’ writes Thomas. ‘In a similar study in Canada in the 1980s researchers noted marked behavioural improvement among children under full-spectrum lighting as well as decreased stress levels, identifi ed by drops in systolic blood pressures averaging 20 points per child. When the full-spectrum lighting was changed back to the original cool-white fluorescent tubes, the children’s stress levels shot back
Commenting on further experiments, Thomas notes: ‘Human studies suggest
that exposure to the full spectrum of UV light lowers blood pressure, improves electrocardiogram readings, reduces cholesterol, aids weight loss and the healing of psoriasis and increases the levels of male and female sex hormones.’ The irony, as Thomas goes on to point out, is that while we are damaging ourselves by exposure to excessive amounts of poor artificial light when indoors, on the rare occasions we do emerge from our burrows, we have so convinced ourselves of the risks of cancer from the sun that we do ourselves more damage by getting not enough natural (full spectrum) sunlight. Write Thomas: ‘While official agencies continue to feed the public misinformation with regard to the relative risks of sunlight, other studies into the dangers of fluorescent lighting remain unpublicised. One study published in the British medical journal The Lancet, reported that a group of Australians who worked all day under fluorescent lights had higher incidents of skin cancer than people who frequently sunbathed or worked outside.’
This disconnect is further emphasised by the disorder known as Seasonal Affective Disorder, or SAD, which is considered to affect between two and 10 per cent of people in northern Europe, and more the further north you go. It’s basically a seasonal depression whereby certain people get particularly low in winter. The current favoured ‘cure’, hardly surprisingly, is for sufferers to spend extended periods of time each day exposed to extremely bright artificial lights.
But, as with all forms of depression, this approach attempts to cure the depression rather than living with and learning from it. So what if we slow down as winter comes, and are less excited by going out and seeing people? Is it bad if for a period of the year our high powered jobs thrill us less, or if we become more contemplative and wonder at our place in the grand scheme of things? Rather than denying this process, might there not be some merit in embracing it, in seeing it as the natural cycle of seasonal changes, a kind of mental storing up of reserves in readiness for the following spring?
The medical profession tacitly acknowledge this, for SAD is also known as the ‘Hibernation Response’. Indeed, while Americans living in Alaska continue to follow a 9–to–5 work schedule even in winter when there’s no sun – and suffer a high incidence of SAD as a result, Inuits living more traditional lives in rural villages at similar latitudes are unaffected.
Come the winter months they simply sleep more and do less. Writing in the 1960s, at the time when we all were being wowed with the promise of a leisure-filled future as technology removed the drudge from our lives (of course we now work longer than ever before), the philosopher Sebastian de Grazia commented: ‘Perhaps you can judge the inner health of a land by the capacity of its people to do nothing – to lie abed musing, to amble about aimlessly, to sit having coffee – because whoever can do nothing, letting his thoughts go where they may, must be all at a peace with himself.’
This is anathema in our world now. We have become obsessed by brightening up whatever dark corner remains, a strange combination of evangelism and paranoia. All over the UK, people have fallen for the latest fad – home security lighting, which bathes our gardens in a bright white light at the slightest movement. So bright are they that the average home security light is half as strong as the UK’s brightest lighthouse. Yet the evidence that they actually work at deterring burglars is far from clear. For one, they go off so often that rarely do people go to check if there is anyone there, trusting that the light will scare off any ne’er-do-well.
Meanwhile they provide a handy lighting source for burglars searching for their tools in the dark (far less suspicious than a torch in the hedge). And because we think only of the light, we forget that the brighter the light, the darker the shadow. Once a burglar can see where the light falls, he knows he is next to invisible in the shadows that surround it. The government agrees, its home security and crime reduction website stating that ‘harsh, glaring floodlights are not a deterrent to criminals’ and that most break-ins take place in daylight anyhow, when it is least likely there will be anyone in. As Dark Skies Bob Mizon comments: ‘It’s like a medieval superstition. Back then we hung garlic on our doorposts to ward off the threat of vampires. Now we hang lights from our roofs. They make us feel safer, but that’s all.’
Not that we are likely to start switching off the lights any time soon. In 2001, Blair’s New Labour published a report, Open All Hours, which laid out how our public services were to adapt to meet our new 24-hour lifestyles. From all night Tescos (where New Labour launched its first manifesto), to garages and soon public houses, the new ‘vision’ of Britain is to be a place where we can do what we want, whenever we want. No longer is it the Milky Way that fl ickers at night, but a thousand TV screens. We have replaced night stars with celebrity ‘stars’ in a world where people care more that they share the same star sign with Robbie Williams. than that thanks to light pollution many of us can now only see five of the 12 Zodiac constellations, while the other seven are all missing stars.
Where is it heading? In 1996, Space Marketing Inc, a company in Roswell, Georgia, announced its intention to launch a one kilometre wide billboard into space. The billboard was to be attached as a sponsorship mechanism to a so-called Environmental Space Platform for space experiments. It would have appeared as large and as bright as the Moon. While the proposal stalled, it is very much a sign of things to come as the world and its resources are sold off to the highest bidder.
Very rarely do we step back and ask ourselves: what have we lost? Michael Crichton, author of Jurassic Park, puts it well. ‘The natural world, our traditional source of direct insights, is rapidly disappearing,’ wrote Crichton in his journal, Travels. ‘Modern city-dwellers cannot even see the stars at night. This humbling reminder of man’s place in the scheme of things, which human beings once saw every 24 hours, is denied them. It’s no wonder that people lose their bearings, that they lose track of who they really are, and what their lives are really about.’
The rhythm of life
The more we study life and the natural world, the more we learn that we are governed by it. Nowhere is this more true than in the circadian rhythms that define the ebb and flow of our life’s processes. (Circa = about. Die = day). All living organisms, from bacteria to mankind, sleep and wake according to this regular 24-hour circadian rhythm. And not just sleep – immune function, hormone levels, digestion and urine production – they all display some sort of daily rhythm.
However, as well as ticking to an internal clock, we live in environment that is ever changing. The days get longer and shorter throughout the year, as the sun rises at a slightly different time each day. The main way we balance our internal clock with what is going on outside is through light. Mess with the light cues we receive and you imbalance our internal workings.
This may seem like common sense, but being the inquisitive humans that we are, we’ve done all manner of weird experiments just to prove to ourselves what nature lets us know every time we wake up. The internal clock is located in a tiny area of the body called the superchiasmatic nuclei. So some scientists took a group of ground squirrels, normally active by day and asleep at night, and surgically removed their superchaismatic nuclei. The now rudderless squirrels showed no regard for day or night and were often active and awake during the night. Unwittingly proving the importance of circadian rhythms, a wild cat broke into the compound one night and slaughtered most of the disorientated squirrels. Those in the control group with their nuclei still
intact slept soundly through the whole affair.
A similar, though thankfully less invasive, experiment with humans shows how unnatural our daily life patterns are. The typical person working in a modern, industrialised society spends an unbroken 16 or more hours of each day awake and active, something only possible because of artificial lighting. Yet although we generally sleep in one eight or so hour burst, this is not what we are biologically programmed to do – most other species sleep twice or more during any given 24- hour period.
At the US National Institute of Mental Health in Maryland, researcher Thomas Wehr set up an experiment where a group of volunteers lived under conditions where it was dark for 14 hours a day and they were free to sleep as they wished, with no commitments in their waking hours. At the very beginning of the experiment, the subjects slept for long stretches of time, sometimes more than half the day, as they caught up on sleep lost during their normal day-to-day lives. Soon their patterns began to settle, and they were soon sleeping on average for eight and a quarter hours a day. As well as making them feel more awake when they were awake, their sleeping pattern also changed.
Within a matter of days, and without any prompting from the researchers, they began to sleep in two distinct periods. Once it was dark they would have a period of quiet rest lasting a couple of hours or so at the end of which they would drop off, and then sleep for four hours, after which they would then naturally awaken, generally after a period of dreaming. They would then lie around in the dark resting for a further two hours,
before dropping off again. When they finally awoke into the early morning they would lie and rest for a further two or so hours before getting up. This was not just because they were being lazy. When they did get up they were far more alert. The long periods of quiet repose allowed them time to contemplate, to refl ect upon their dreams in the unhurried comfort of the dark. The darkness was not, as our dictionaries tellingly define it, just ‘an absence of light’, but a state in its own right with a purpose and benefits unavailable when it was light.
The fact that a group of typical American adults so quickly reverted to their natural biological sleep patterns is cause for hope. For where light pollution really does differ from other forms of pollution is in the ease with which we can make amends. There are no oil spills to clear up, no nuclear waste to wait millions of years to decompose, no pesticide residues in our system. At the flick of a switch, the pollution is gone. Across the world, cities such as Flagstaff in Arizona, regions such as Lombardy in Italy, and even whole countries such as the Czech Republic are beginning to implement measures to turn down the lights.
We’re quite likely to get a chance to see what this future might look like this winter. According to an article in the Evening Standard this September, ‘British industry is facing blackouts’ this winter. If that happens, don’t light a candle and sit inside quivering with fear as you wait for the looters to come breaking down your door. Just go outside and look up.