The End of Night

by Paul Bogard

  In the meantime, Clanton is keen to help show people that we are using way more light than we need to. One of her prime clients in recent years has been the U.S. military. She is helping it understand that instead of high levels of light, contrast is the most important issue when it comes to visibility—and therefore security. “We did this experiment with the antiterrorism group with the navy. They go to bases and try to break into the buildings, evaluating defenses. And all their high-security buildings are really brightly lit—walls, the concrete—everything was lighted so the cameras would work. So, if you are going to break into a building, what color uniforms would you wear? They were all wearing black. I told the squad commander that he and I should wear white. Guess what? No one could see us because we were blending into the white concrete and the white building. Anyone wearing black was a huge contrast.

  “You want to see objects in varying light levels or varying backgrounds, kind of like what prisoners used to wear—black-and-white stripes—so no matter where they were, you could see them. In a dark situation, you see the white, and in a bright situation, you see the dark. That is why the best thing you can do if you are jogging at night is wear something really bright and something really dark, so you can always be seen.”

  Talking with Clanton I am reminded of the small Wisconsin town where I lived, and how Luna and I would go for a walk in our neighborhood every night at 11:00 p.m. before bed. We’d step down to the sidewalk and take a right, going three blocks to where the town’s middle school stood blazing away in the Northwoods night. At regular intervals around the brick schoolhouse building, high-pressure sodium wallpacks were glaring straight into a viewer’s eyes, spraying light across the streets, completely illuminating the facing neighborhood houses. As Luna and I followed the sidewalk around the school, we were steadily bathed in light. It was the best example of light trespass I have ever seen, and a perfect example of 1) decisions about lighting made during daylight, installed during daylight; 2) the people who lived around the school having to accept—if they noticed, and maybe they didn’t—the light plastered against their house sidings; and 3) a needless waste of money and energy that everyone in town paid for in taxes and the loss of their night sky. This small town could have wonderful dark skies if this kind of wasted light were controlled. In fact, small towns all across America could save money and bring back their stars by paying attention to schools like this (not to mention warehouses and businesses), lit without thought and then forgotten.

  “Wouldn’t it be great,” Clanton says, “if in a schoolyard at a certain time in the night, all of their lights went off and switched over to motion detectors?” She tells me that the Loveland schools north of Boulder had tried this and it had worked out well. “The police loved it,” she says, “because if they saw the property with no lights on, they knew no one was on site.”

  The best exterior lighting, whether for schools or most other kinds of buildings, Clanton tells me, would be “responsive to your actions” in the way she’d described. In this way, a building would be dark unless there was someone there, and then, anyone in the area would be more likely to notice the light coming on and take a moment to look. As I walked around the Wisconsin middle school, I used to think, What if this community chose instead to light this school with care?

  “You know,” Clanton says, “increasingly, the higher-end the community, the more subtle the lighting. If you go to Aspen or Vail, everything is very subtle. And people go, ‘Safety and security. We need more light.’ But the people in Aspen and Vail have more assets than anyone else. So, I am not buying that you need more light for higher security and safety. I think a higher lit area signifies a less desirable area. Like with retail or hospitality, you go to a really cheap hotel or restaurant like fast food, and it is brightly lit with a lot of glare. The finer the place or the higher-end, the more subtle everything is.”

  While talking with Clanton, Narboni, and other designers, the word I often think of is “progress.” I wonder if, as we ponder where to go next with lighting, we might think of progress in a new way, as defined by subtlety. Bright lights have long been seen as progress rather than as light pollution, but that can change. To prefer the stars doesn’t mean to relegate yourself to living in the Stone Age at night. Good lighting is effective lighting is subtle lighting, and good lighting prefers the stars.

  Of all the places from which to see the stars, a city parking lot is not high on the list. But as I step from the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, there is the Milky Way bending over the mandarin orange of low-pressure sodium lights. You might expect the lights around an observatory to be well shielded and subtle. But that Lowell lies within the city boundary just up the hill from downtown is dramatic testimony to the city’s strict lighting code, arguably the best in North America, maybe in the world. From the observatory’s site, the city of sixty-five thousand spreads toward the eastern horizon, looking noticeably darker than one would imagine a city of its size would look. “It’s not perfect,” says my host, Chris Luginbuhl, “but it’s proof of what can be done.”

  No one has taught me more about lighting, light pollution, and the importance of darkness than Chris Luginbuhl. An astronomer at the U.S. Naval Observatory in Flagstaff, Chris introduced himself after I’d spoken at the IDA conference several years ago, where I’d introduced—to a room full of engineers, astronomers, and lighting industry folks—a book of creative essays about the value of darkness. At the meeting, I’d read from Henry Beston’s The Outer-most House and then asked if anyone knew what year Beston had written of “lights and ever more lights.” Chris raised his hand and said 1928. Since then, each time I’ve been to Flagstaff I’ve checked in with Chris and his work on behalf of dark skies.

  While the tradition of protecting dark skies in Flagstaff goes back officially to 1958, much of its success as the world’s first “dark sky city” is thanks to Chris. In his role at the observatory answering questions from people all over the world about lighting and ordinances, his advocacy work with the IDA, his volunteering locally—speaking to city councils in Flagstaff and other towns—and his scientific papers (he was one of the first to identify the need to fully cut off the shallow angles of light from fixtures), Chris has done enormous work. The fact that he’s both a scientist and someone who can quote Beston—or Joseph Wood Krutch, John C. Van Dyke, or Rachel Carson—speaks to his well-rounded approach.

  And so it is hard to hear him speak when we get together this time. For Chris has always—at least in the years I have known him—been optimistic about the challenge of controlling light pollution. In short, in our many conversations he has convinced me that light pollution is a problem that we can solve.

  I still believe that—and I think he does, too. But when we get together this time, he speaks about “my former optimism,” and I hear in his voice a doubt I haven’t before.

  “Night is beautiful as it is,” he says. “We need to understand when we’re making trade-offs. There’s beauty in artificial light, I’m not denying that. But it’s a problem to assume that if you do quality lighting, then it’s compatible with preserving the beauty of the night. It’s not. You can light a town absolutely beautifully and lose the sky.”

  Astronomer that he is, Chris has never been concerned only about losing the sky. As pleased as he is with how the citizens of Flagstaff embrace dark skies as part of the city’s identity, he’s often frustrated that many people think the lighting ordinances are only for the benefit of the astronomers. “It shows how far we have to go,” he says. “It’s like asking why the Grand Canyon is important and saying, ‘Oh, well, we need to have that so that the geologists can study the rocks.’ ”

  We stand in the parking lot of the restaurant where we have eaten dinner, a couple blocks from the downtown center. Lit to code with just three low-pressure sodium fixtures, the lot is bright enough that we can see just fine, though to many Americans it would probably seem dim.

  “Just doing ‘quality lightin
g’ isn’t going to work,” he continues. “You can light the whole world according to lighting professional standards and we will lose our skies. And I don’t think that’s enough. It doesn’t address the more fundamental problem of when do we need lighting and when do we not need lighting.”

  I have heard this argument from Chris and others before: If we perceive our choice to be only between “good lighting” and “bad lighting,” we forget that “no lighting” could also be a possibility. In fact, in plenty of cases, no lighting would be the best choice among the three alternatives, but seldom are we offered that choice or remember it’s ours.

  This has enormous ramifications when you consider that, everywhere you look, human populations continue to grow. It’s almost a given that with more people there will be more lights. And even if all the new lights are fully shielded, they still are new lights. Recently, Chris published a study in which he plotted a number of towns and cities in the Southwest according to population size and lighting level. Not surprisingly, the chart showed a steadily upward trending diagonal line: as towns grew in size, their level of light grew as well. The two exceptions? Flagstaff was some 25 percent below the line, and Las Vegas was way, way above: Its level of light was actually double that of any other city its size. Because of its strict lighting ordinance, while Flagstaff’s population grew by almost 25 percent from the years 2000 to 2010, its level of light increased only about 17 percent. Chris estimates that, because so much of the new construction during that time was heavy lighting users such as motels and restaurants, Flagstaff’s level of light might have grown as much as 40 percent to 50 percent without the lighting ordinance. What frustrates him is that even with the country’s strictest lighting codes and a tradition of consciousness about dark skies, Flagstaff has still grown brighter.

  “Maybe what we’ve settled for is that tomorrow it will not be as bad as it would have been, but it will still overall be worse,” Chris explains. “Some people might be satisfied with that. I’m not. I’m discouraged by it. To say that we worked as hard as hell and we’re 17 percent worse rather than 40 percent worse—it’s hard to be motivated by slowed loss [of darkness]. It’s progress, but not in the sense that the sky’s getting darker, unfortunately.”

  In fact, when I ask if he thinks every place is getting brighter, he says, “That’s my impression. As a scientist I don’t want to say I’m certain when I’m not, but I would challenge the world of dark sky activists to document a place that has gotten better. I think that’s a fair challenge. It’s difficult to do, and I think it may not be doable.” Chris worries that while communities may have small successes here and there with controlling light, the overall battle is being lost. “You could say, ‘Oh, we’ve got a nice law in place, and the shopping center that was built under that law is, oh, so much better than it would have been.’ But it’s still lighted. I’m asking for a sky that’s gotten darker.”

  As Chris and I drive east out of Flagstaff toward his home behind Humphreys Peak, we pass bright motels. (“ ‘We’ll leave the light on for you,’ ” Chris reflects. “It’s a nice sentiment until you think about it.”) We see wallpacks that must have come from the same factory as those I endured in northern Wisconsin. But we also see things that you would not see in most other American cities, including major thoroughfares without streetlights, backlit local business signs turned off after-hours, and gas stations lit not to daylight but simply to the level you need to pump gas and clean your windshield.

  Blazing bright gas station canopies—Chris likes to joke you could perform surgery under their lights—have become so ordinary that those lit to Flagstaff’s code seem, in Chris’s words, “startlingly faint.” Feeling adventurous, I ask him to pull under one such canopy to see if I can actually fill his gas tank in such dim light. “From twenty years ago till now,” he says, easing next to a pump, “the level of light at most American gas stations has gone up by a factor of ten. Here we have a standard that is much lower than that, but quite reasonable.” I can vouch for that—I have no trouble reading the pump or filling our tank. While the canopies at most stations do block light from escaping skyward, the lights under the canopies are like any others: Unless recessed into the canopy, their light will shine at low angles that add unnecessarily to sky glow, trespass on neighboring properties, and cast glare.

  But while gas stations are bad, parking lots are worse. As with gas stations, shopping center and business plaza parking lots are often lit ten times as brightly as they were twenty years ago. But because of their larger size and number of lights, parking lots are often the brightest sources of light in any community. Here in Flagstaff, that’s not the case. Even the big box stores such as Target and Walmart conform to the city’s standards. “Now on the left here, that’s a new shopping center and it’s all great,” Chris says, pointing. “Although I do see some lights there that are unshielded, but low output.” And more surprising—we pass shopping center parking lots with their lights simply turned off. As we drive past the row of car dealerships so common on the edge of American communities, I’m reminded of the Ford dealership on the way into that small Wisconsin town, and how I knew I was close when I saw the bloom of white light on the horizon miles ahead. Here in Flagstaff, we drive past lots where the tallest lights overlooking the rows of cars and trucks have been turned off, the lot lit only by lower-level lights a dozen feet high.

  Because parking lots produce more than 50 percent of the outdoor lighting we use, controlling their use—making sure they are shielded during business hours, then turning them down or turning them off after-hours—can have significant impact on a community’s light pollution. Unfortunately, in so many towns and cities, our parking lots are lit by wallpacks hung on buildings or by tilted floodlights shining every which way. And this is the middle of the night, and these lots are empty. In the United States, no matter where you live, you almost certainly live within close range of such a lot. But you may not have noticed—these poorly lit empty lots are ubiquitous, so we often no longer do.

  That is, until you start to see them, and then you see them everywhere.

  Which actually makes me optimistic. I mean, here is a good-sized American city showing any other city it can be done. An American city with a lighting ordinance that (mostly) works—and the streets aren’t filled with criminals and the economy is doing relatively fine. The way we light our streets, parking lots, gas stations, schools, cities, and towns is up to us—and Flagstaff shows one possible choice. The lighting here is far from perfect, but already it is better than in every other American city.

  Which leads to the question: What’s really possible? Can we really bring back dark skies? I remember coming back from Canada into the United States on the way home from Mont-Mégantic, and the customs officer asking me about my work. When I talked about efforts to control light pollution, he smirked and asked, “What are you going to do about cities?” It’s a good question, right? And, if you’re thinking about the possibilities for controlling light pollution, it is one you have to consider. When I ask Chris, he immediately makes a distinction between cities and towns, saying that in a large metropolitan area there are still plenty of good reasons to do light right, but bringing the stars back isn’t at the top of the list. “You may change it from one or two dozen stars visible to three dozen or even four dozen, but all of those are still horrible skies. You don’t get the impression of the universe, the sense of place, the sense of scale.”

  That said, because of scale, the benefits from the other reasons for having good lighting are even greater in big communities. “If we talk about saving energy,” Chris explains, “by not wasting fifty percent of your light, how many dollars do you save? Flagstaff is sixty-five thousand people, but Chicago is a hundred times bigger. Numbers like that start to get people’s attention.” The same thing is true with issues like interference with people’s sleep and other health concerns—those stand to carry more weight in large cities simply because they’re of greater concern fo
r greater numbers of people.

  “The other thing,” Chris explains, “is that even though you won’t bring the stars back in downtown Chicago—the inspiring, moving experience you can have with a dark sky—if you darken the city, that threshold is going to move closer to the city, and you’re going to uncover big suburban areas where lots of people live. Right now, a suburb of Chicago could turn all the lights off in their town and they won’t get their sky back. But if Chicago cut its light level, those suburbs could get back their starry sky.”

  This is the kind of optimistic thought I’m used to from Chris. So, huge cities may never have Van Gogh skies again (no nightly reverie for starwatchers in cities from Las Vegas to London), but they still can benefit in numerous ways from choosing efficient, effective light. And as these cities do—which they have every reason to—the suburbs, towns, rural areas, and wildness around them will benefit, too. This would be the opposite of the stone-in-water effect with light pollution we have now, where the overabundance of city light radiates outward. As the radiating pressure of too much light in the city is reduced, darkness would ripple back inward, returning to the suburbs and countryside some of what has been lost.