AUDIO:

"The EcoNews Report," Feb. 8, 2025.

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TOM WHEELER:

Welcome to the Econews Report. I'm your host this week, Tom Wheeler, Executive Director of EPIC, the Environmental Protection Information Center. And joining me is my friend and colleague from Humboldt Waterkeeper, Sylvia van Royen. Hey, Sylvia.

All right, Sylvia, we're talking about something that you have done quite a bit of research on and are interested in: Light pollution. Do you want to do an introduction to light pollution or your interest in the subject?

SYLVIA VAN ROYEN:

Yeah, so Humboldt Waterkeeper has become interested in light pollution because we have some interest in local government for implementing some regulations to limit light pollution. I recently wrote an article for the EcoNews publication. I think that's going to be coming out in the next month or so, so you can read about that there. And then we're here with Ruskin Hartley, the CEO of Dark Sky International, which is one of the leading organizations working on light pollution, not just in the US, but across the globe.

WHEELER:

Welcome to the Econews, Ruskin.

RUSKIN HARTLEY:

It's great to be with you. Thanks for having me.

WHEELER:

So let's start at the very beginning, the most obvious. What is light pollution and what are dark skies and why should we care about either?

HARTLEY:

So it was great to start at the beginning. And so briefly, my history, I got a start in conservation actually working in California, working up in Humboldt County with redwood issues and working on forest restoration and protecting old growth trees. And I can remember hearing someone ask a question once about light pollution. I didn't think anything about it. I just moved on. There must be other more important things to think about, right?

I only started to think about light pollution when I started to interview and then in the end joined Dark Sky International about six years ago. And what I've learned over that time is how light pollution is all pervasive. It impacts most things that all of us care about and they're really simple solutions. So what is light pollution? Light pollution is simple. It's the brightening of the night sky. It is the glary headlight shining in your eye. It is your neighbor's porch light and security light blasting into your window at night when you're trying to sleep. It's essentially, it's light when it should be dark, right? That's light pollution. Why care about it?

Well, some of us care about it because it means we can't see the stars, but it's so much more than that. Light pollution fundamentally disrupts ecosystems. It disrupts ecological processes that have been part of what is inherent on life on earth for five billion years or four billion years, right? Four and a half billion years. That natural day-night cycle has really been one of the constants and we're disrupting that with what we're doing in terms of lighting the night. And light pollution has more learning impacts, probably human health as well. So it impacts everything we care about. It is pure waste and there are such simple solutions that I'm really happy to and excited to talk with both of you about.

VAN ROYEN:

Cool, thank you. Yeah, in the article that I wrote, I talked about how light pollution, artificial light at night can disrupt circadian rhythms, not just of humans, but of wildlife, and also plant physiology, actually, which has cascading effects in an ecosystem because if a plant's physiology changes the time that it blooms and flowers and goes to seed, that impacts any wildlife that's depending on those plants. So I'm curious, what does it mean to be an international dark sky place?

HARTLEY:

Yes, I probably should answer the first question again. Talking about DarkSky, maybe we talk a little bit about DarkSky and DarkSky International, then move on to DarkSky Places. 

So DarkSky International, the organization that I now run, formerly the International DarkSky Association, was founded about 40 years ago here in Southern Arizona, in Tucson, where I live, with really the focus of raising awareness about what is light pollution and the simple solutions. And we've grown from a small organization based here in Tucson with a handful of staff here where we continue to be a small organization, but we support a global network of volunteers and advocates tackling this issue around the world, because this is a global issue.

Today, 99% of people in Europe and North America live under light-polluted skies. 80% of people around the world live under light-polluted skies, and light pollution is growing at 10% per year. Essentially, it's doubling every seven or eight years. A child who's about to graduate high school, maybe 17 or 18 at the moment, when they were born, there would have been twice as many stars visible overhead as there are today. So light pollution is growing rapidly, and that's the issue DarkSky International has been really focused on working to solve, raise awareness, and put the simple solutions into place.

WHEELER:

I have a question. In the rise of light pollution, is this a result of industrialization in developing nations and economic progress, might we say, or is it related to new light pollution in already industrialized areas or accommodations? Both? I imagine.

HARTLEY:

It's only a combination of both, right? Light tracks economic activity. There's a reason the light bulb is the symbol of innovation, right? If there's a light bulb over your head in a classic cartoon, most people will get it that you've had a pretty innovative idea. So our relationship to light and dark is something very fundamental. There's a reason most people are scared of the dark, right? And we want to have light to light our way. That's a normal reaction. So as society has developed, we have found ways to capture energy so that we can extend our activity into the evenings, right? So we can recreate, we can sit outside with our friends or we can have 24 hour economy. So part of it is definitely, it is an intrinsic part of what modern society is.

I would argue that light pollution though is a little bit different, right? That there's a lot of that light that's useful and there's a lot of that light that's wasted. And so our advocacy is not about turning off all the lights and plunging the world back into medieval darkness. There's only places we should keep naturally dark. But a lot of it is just about being thoughtful about the way that we're using light to meet our needs and minimising the impact on the natural world. And what we're learning more and more is that when you do that, you actually create a better quality environment. You can actually see better under better quality light. I think most of us are probably familiar with those black and white movies where they bring the suspects in for interrogation and what do they do? They tip up their light and they blast it into their eyes and literally blinding them. Well, that's what we're doing in so much of the world when we're using light thoughtlessly.

WHEELER:

So, let's be thoughtful about how we use light then. I understand that there are five principles for responsible outside lighting. Can you walk us through what those principles are? So, let's say that I'm a homeowner and I want to have some sort of security light around my house, but I also don't want to piss off my neighbor or lighten the sky so I can't see the stars. What are the things that we can do to continue to have light where it's appropriate but not ruin it for everyone else? So, let's say that I'm a homeowner and I want to have some sort of security light around my house, but I also don't want to piss off my neighbor or lighten the sky so I can't see the stars. What are the things that we can do to continue to have light where it's appropriate but not

HARTLEY:

Well, you've taken the first great step, which you actually think about it, right? The first step is to think about it. Think about things before you act often helps. And the five principles of responsible outdoor light was something that DarkSky developed a number of years ago with the Illuminating Engineering Society -- you know, the body that is responsible for establishing lighting standards in the US. They're the ANSI standard setting body. And for that body to get on the same page with DarkSky International around the top level principles, it was a great win.

So we have a lot of shared interest in how to do it better. And the principles are simple. They apply to a homeowner like you or someone at their home, all the way up to a municipality or a country. And it's simple. You think about it, like, what's the purpose? What use are we trying to use here? Let's shine the lights down towards the ground, the target, the exit, the entrances that we're using. Let's dim the lights down. Let's use lower light levels. Our eyes adapt to lower light levels. When we brighten them, we see that project actually create shadows and darkness. Yes, use control. So the light's on when we need it. It's dimmed down when there's fewer people around and it's off when it's not needed. And let's use warmer colors generally. Let's use warm colors, more like candlelight rather than the bright, harsh white colors of maybe the hospital operating room.

So to your analogy, like if you want a porch light on at your home so that it's there when you come home, think about putting it on a timer. So it's on at six to eight when you come home or an emotion sensor. So it turns on when someone comes around and five minutes later it turns off. And critically, let's point it down and shield it so it's at the step rather than blasting into the eye of your neighbor when they come over to borrow a cup of sugar. So they can't see anymore. And so it's those simple principles that we're asking people to adopt in their everyday practices.

VAN ROYEN:

Absolutely, so kind of in that vein of practices that you're asking people to adopt, what does it mean to be an international dark sky place?

HARTLEY:

The International Dark Sky Places Program is probably what we're best known for. This is a global recognition program that really recognizes both places that are naturally dark, where you can go and maybe you can go and still see the Milky Way when you look up on a moonless night. But critically, there are places that are taking steps to actively protect those dark sky values and they're taking steps to showcase quality lighting and they're inviting people in to experience these places at night. So many of our parks are closed at night. So you have no place to go and enjoy maybe hearing the owls come down through the trees or sit down and watch the stars with your friends. So these are places that you can go and they're places that are actively taking those steps because believe it or not, we have protected lots of public places. We've protected wonderful park lands, but just because they're protected for all their wonderful biodiversity values doesn't necessarily mean they're protected from light pollution.

VAN ROYEN:

So what kind of places did Dark Sky International have in mind when they created that program? Like were you thinking that it was mainly going to be for nature spaces or that it might also apply to urban human built environments?

HARTLEY:

The history of the program is pretty interesting, because actually the first place was a community. The first place that was recognized for its work to protect naturally dark skies was Flagstaff in northern Arizona, which as some people might know is famous for the Lowell Observatory and the people who discovered Pluto, the former planet, now the minor planet. And the people in Flagstaff, the city leaders in Flagstaff for many years, had been taking steps to ensure that light was used respectfully and responsibly in their city so that they could support the ongoing astronomy research and the observatory that's there. And it was really the recognition of those active steps to provide better quality lighting in the environment that led to its recognition as the first dark sky community.

The second place was actually a national park, and Natural Bridges, I believe in Utah, was a dark sky park. Again, it's a very remote place, a very dark place, and they're taking steps to ensure that the lighting that they were using around the park protected those values on an ongoing basis. Now from those early starts, the program has now grown that we have approaching 250 international dark sky places around the world. Many parks, many reserves, many communities. So it is a mix. Some are very remote, dark places. Others are rural communities or places, and I visited the town of Fulda in Germany, which is a city of about 80,000 people that is close to one of the dark sky parks, and the dark sky park is a naturally dark location, and they wanted to ensure that the lights from the neighboring community of Fulda were being managed in a way that was protecting those values of natural darkness that was so critical for the ecosystem in the dark sky reserve.

So really, dark sky protections, again, it's not about turning off all the lights all the time, it's really been thinking about being respectful in the way that you're using it when you need it in a way that protects the natural values and support the safe, welcoming environments for communities.

WHEELER:

So there is some level that we hope to inspire individual action, right? Collectively individuals, if we all do better voluntarily, we'll, we'll have better collective cumulative outcomes, but that can only go so far. I know another aspect of dark sky international is, is helping governments, municipalities develop their own codes to better regulate light pollution. Can you talk a little bit about this work?

HARTLEY:

Yeah. Voluntary actions are critical. They're essential. We love them. We want more people to do them. Turning off their lights when they go to bed, drawing their curtains, if they're inside watching television at night, et cetera. It's really simple things. And the nice thing about those, you get an immediate response. You can tell that you're making a difference, right? You can tell that you're having an impact, but as you say, voluntary actions get you so far. Voluntary actions don't deal with how the city is managing the lights in the public domain or what's happening when the new gas station goes in or the new strip mall that gets developed or the new area that gets developed.

So really, we are increasingly looking to the role that our elected officials play in establishing a consistent regulatory environment for lighting. And again, this is about better quality lighting for people. What we're learning more and more that when you do it right from the get-go, you actually save money. You save money on installation costs often, and you definitely save money on ongoing operation costs. And you're creating safe working environments for your residents, and you're doing your part to protect the natural world. It's up in Humboldt County.

I mean, Humboldt is obviously very blessed and very proud of its incredible natural values, the great rivers, and obviously the coastal environment there. Well, that wonderful work has been going on for many years to protect land and protect waters. And I think we need to bring the same sort of awareness to how do we extend that protection from the day into the night. Is a park truly protected if the sky glow from Arcadia and Eureka is bleeding into that, impacting the wildlife and the birds in the wildlife that call that place home? We can close our curtains at night if our neighbor's being annoying, but those owls, those fish, they can't do that. They don't have that choice. So it's incumbent on us to take those steps.

WHEELER:

You are listening to the Econews Report. We're talking about something that Sylvia van Royen has done quite a bit of research on and is interested in, light pollution.

What does a municipal code look like when it regulates light pollution? How is this actually implemented and what does that look like for an average person experiencing the code and experiencing working with local governments?

HARTLEY:

Yeah, so first over the last year, we have worked very hard with members of the lighting community, lighting manufacturers, lighting designers, engineers, people from the birding community, the environment community, to develop some templates for municipalities with the goal that they are simple, they're understandable, and both technically accurate, and they're enforceable, right? It's important that when you're writing a code, the code enforcement officer knows, okay, if someone's violating, how do I go and have a conversation with them? Say, hey, would you mind tipping that light down, because it's shining into your neighbor's window, right?

So we need to make sure that they're all of those things. And really, the code, it's about embodying the five principles and a set of standards that apply for everyone. First, it's really important, every community is different. Every community will make different decisions about how far to go in this. But we think there are some common no regret solutions here that any community should enact and enforce. Because again, it's about creating a better quality of life, it's about being a good neighbor, it's being a good steward of that public space. So it's about being thoughtful, but again, thoughtful about why the purpose that you're putting up the light for.

And critically, it's about, yeah, let's meet the standards. Like if the standard for a safely illuminated parking lot is three lux on the ground, which is a relatively small amount, but perfectly amount of light to get around, let's not light it to 30 lux, right? That's creating waste, it's creating glare, and it's going to create artificially dark spots because our eyes adapt to that bright spot and everything else suddenly seems dark.

WHEELER:

So light and terminology around light might be new to folks. Yeah. Can you give some brief definitions of things like lux and lumen and light shading? What do we need to become familiar with to have an intelligent conversation about?

HARTLEY:

Yeah, and that's the other element of the templates. We have ensured that the technical language in them is accurate. We have seen examples of states and municipalities enacting lighting ordinances that the lighting professional will look at and say, you know, that unit doesn't exist, or we cannot actually measure that little. So it becomes unenforceable.

Now, the challenge here is while light is also very simple, it also has a degree of complexity in it. And I think that if you think about just picking up a bulb, if you go into your lighting store these days, you'll pick up a bulb. They're not the old incandescent bulbs like we used to have, right? We kind of knew what those were. We knew what a 60-watt bulb was. A 60-watt bulb was probably the one that we had put in our kitchen or something like that, right? Well, now the bulb is the LED source of different technology. It's producing photons, but it's producing photons in a different way. It's no longer heating up the wire. So we now think about lights not in terms of the number of watts that it takes, because the wattage has gone down, the power usage. We think about it in terms of the number of lumens, right? What is the output? What is the amount of light that's leaving that light fixture?

So round numbers, maybe a 60-watt light bulb will now have, if we double-check, maybe about 800 lumens coming out of it. Now, whether that meets the purpose that you have depends on a whole variety of reasons. So an 800-lumen light bulb mounted on a 30-foot light pole as a street light will essentially put no light on the ground, right? Very little. But if you mount that outside your porch, five foot off the ground, you'll be putting a lot of light on the ground. And really, that's what we need. We want light on the ground. We measure that in lux, which is the amount of light, the number of lumens, the amount of photons falling on that ground surface. And then, obviously, that's reflected back into our eye, which is how we see things. And this is where the complexity comes in, right?

The complexity comes in because the units are complex. The technology is changing. But again, some of the principles are pretty simple. You don't over-light. You probably don't need a 2,000-lumen bulb around your house to light your back deck. You can probably get away with a 600 one. That's perfectly adequate, right? But it's not going to work for street light. Shielding is the other one. Essentially, the common thing here, if you can see the source of the light, it will appear glary, particularly with modern LEDs. So the best way to do that is make sure that the source of the light is tucked up behind inside the fixture so that the light is falling down on the ground or on the bill where you need it, and it's not shining in your eye. The LED sources themselves are incredibly intense, right? They are the sort of intensity and the sort of brightness that we get from looking at the sun packed into a tiny little chip. You want to hide that. You want to make sure it's not shining on your neighbors.

And I think many of us have experienced that. You're driving down a dark road in backwater of Humboldt County somewhere late at night, and someone comes, a car is driving towards you the other direction with our high beams on. You're not going to see anything. You're going to be visibly looking away.

WHEELER:

Well, if there's one thing I want dark skies to cover, it's lifted pickup trucks, blasting my rear view mirror with their led lights. So I run off the road and that seems to be what my common occurrence.

HARTLEY:

Well, I don't think that's a very complex issue to tackle that issue. But that is essentially a microcosm of what's happening when people are using light carelessly without thought. Now, people are not, by and large, waking up in the morning and say, how can I go and annoy my neighbors by blasting light into their yards? But they might say, hey, the yard's dark. It's dark, getting dark at four o'clock at the moment. I need some light. The bulbs burn out. They might go to their local hardware store, and they might see in a bargain basement wrap a 2,000 lumen solar thing that they slap up there without thinking about it. And yeah, when they stand there, they know that the yard is now lit up.

But what they don't know is if they went to their neighbor maybe five kilometers, no, five miles away up the valley, you can see that point light source blasting into the woods, right? So that's the care and attention we're asking people to give to this.

VAN ROYEN:

And I think that that kind of touches on another term that people might see in regulatory documents is light trespass. Can you talk about light trespass for just a second?

HARTLEY:

Yeah, light trespassers is essentially the light that leads your property and goes into your neighbor's yard, right? And it's a very simple concept. Now, the way that we've approached that into our regularity templates is we have a specific number. You can go with a light meter, which is a relatively simple tool that certainly a city department could purchase for a few hundred or a thousand bucks, and you can go and put it down at the property line and you can measure, yeah, they're putting 10 lux over the property line, and that's greater than the allowance that we have, and therefore that light is trespassing.

And the solution, again, is not turning the light off necessarily. The solution is often just tipping the light down so it lands in your own yard and meeting your own needs. And yes, there will be some reflection into the sky, but compared to the direct light going into your neighbor's yards, it's nice.

VAN ROYEN:

So not to get too deep into the nitty gritty of this term but just a clarifying question that I kept coming across every time I was trying to figure out what does one lux even look like is it seems like lux is something that changes with distance. It seems like from what I was reading that the general standard unit is you're measuring at a distance of one meter but that's not always included in these regulatory documents when they say like this should not exceed one lux but it doesn't say at what distance that lux and that standard that regulation is being measured.

HARTLEY:

So this is, again, lux is the amount of light that's falling on an area of property. So it is really important, for instance, if you're using those measurements to define light trespass, that you define both at what point, like at the property line, for instance, you need to define at what height you're measuring it and whether you're measuring it horizontally or vertically. And all of those, like the templates that we've developed, all of that's laid out. So any lighting engineer, any professional, anyone with a little bit of training that we can provide is then able to go out and is able to repeat and take that measurement and understand. And really, it's about creating some simple tools and techniques that people could go out and measure these pieces.

WHEELER:

So Ruskin, I imagine from Sylvia's questions, you can understand that Humboldt Waterkeeper is working on issues of light pollution in Humboldt Bay. We here are thinking about ways that we can better engage our local governments to adopt better light regulations. I'm sure that we are going to run into opposition from folks concerned about safety or other issues. What are some of the most pernicious myths or beliefs, maybe ill-founded beliefs about light that Dark Sky International has run into? And what are your typical responses to folks who are concerned about light regulation then impeding public safety, for example?

HARTLEY:

Yeah, public safety, the perception of light impeding public safety is absolutely the number one issue, right? That is the top issue and our response to that is we are, we hear you, we acknowledge your concern and we are 100% behind light for public safety. There is no gap between light for public safety and better quality light that reduces light pollution. And that's the reality and the best way to show that we have found is through demonstrations, right? We show people what good quality light looks like, they get it.

So as an example, we recently worked on a pilot project in New Mexico in the Permian Basin with some oil and gas facilities, right? This is the brightest spot, one of the brightest spots in the map in North America. It is one of the areas that's seen the most rapid growth over the last decade around oil extraction and particularly the development, the rapid growth of the oil industry there. I think a lot of people, when they first look at that spot on the map, assume it's bright because of all the flaring that's going on and well, that's not the reality. It's bright because there's so much artificial light used to operate these facilities at night. These are dangerous industrial facilities, right? They're literally working with explosive, there's people out there working with explosive materials at night. We want them to be safe, right?

And so we worked with one of the operators out there to help them redesign and reimagine some of the lighting. We took some simple steps, right? We said, okay, this is what the lighting standard says, you need this much, this many lux down on the ground to ensure that people are safe. We can meet that, but we're not going to do more than 25% over that. That was one of the first steps we did. The second step we said, we're going to make sure that the light is contained within, no, I think it was 30 meters of the operating facility and it's not going to spread out beyond that. And so we're going to have a cutoff angle of 80 degrees to make sure that the light from the light pole hits the ground and doesn't go for hundreds of kilometers.

The net result of this, after we did before and after evaluations, the property, the new construction that they built, they spent an infinitesimally additional amount of money on the new construction compared to how they would have done it, a rounding error in a very large budget. They saved 60% of the ongoing operational costs because they're using less light. They're using the right amount of light, they're not over-lighting. And they reduce sky glow, that is the integration of all the light that's escaping and going off the property by 99%. So that they are used to going out to these facilities at night. They go out there all the time.

After the new construction that we did some retrofits, the retrofits were done. They drove past the entrance to these properties because they did not recognize them, right? A couple hundred meters off them and yet they did not see them anymore. When they went onto the property and you talk to the operators like, this is better, right? This is safe, even illumination that we've eliminated the glare and the shadows. And now they're like, we see bad light all over the place, right? We want to eliminate that. That's the experience we want people to have.

WHEELER:

So I wanted to give you an opportunity to plug your website and any other resources that you might want to share if folks are interested in both maybe improving the quality of light in their home or outside their home. And also if they're interested in maybe advocating for better policy outcomes in their local governments, where should they go? Well, thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

HARTLEY:

Our website, we have a fantastic set of resources on our website, darksky.org, which is, and it's really the hub for a global community, right? You become a volunteer with DarkSky, join our advocacy community, and you'll be connected with people tackling similar issues around the world. It's a very inspiring, incredible community to learn from. In addition to great resources with the policy templates that I mentioned, we have a great state of what's going on in the scientific understanding of the world, other opportunities to engage, darksky.org.

And just to mention one last thing I wanted to touch on is we've talked a lot about the impact of light pollution on people and on the terrestrial environment, but we'd say light pollution in the marine environment is a growing area of concern, right? Light pollution in our ocean areas, we realize the same issues we're facing in our parks and reserve, that exactly the same thing is happening in our marine areas. And again, the simple steps, we have to keep the direct light from going into the bay and into our water bodies if we wanna see them protected. We know it's impacting marine species, we know it's impacting salmon, we know it's impacting, no, coral's probably less relevant to Humboldt County, but marine life is also exquisitely sensitive to the lit environment, and as we disrupt it, we disrupt those environments.

So we have to extend our protections of the land into the water, and we have to extend the conservation ethic that we have it from the day into the night, and we can do that from these simple steps, as simple as turning off your porch light when you go to bed, put it on a motion sensor, close your blinds when you go to night, and then get involved, get involved, get active, become an advocate in your community for these no-regret solutions, that in the end of the day, no one loses, right? Literally no one loses. We're not taking it, the only thing we're taking away from people is glare and bad light. All right.

WHEELER:

I think that's something we can all stand behind, right? There we go. There it is. There it is. Thank you, Ruskin. Thank you so much for joining the Econews Report and thank you for your work at Dark Sky International.

HARTLEY:

Yeah. Thanks for having me on. It's great to join you both. All right.

WHEELER:

Join us again on this time and channel next week for more news from the North Coast of California.