Light Pollution: Impacts and Solutions
by Light pollution is often regarded as an illegitimate form of pollution, but it is a serious issue – with many easy ways to fight back.
You may think that light pollution isn’t something extraordinarily important. You may believe that every other type of pollution has a larger impact on the environment than light pollution does. You may not even have heard of it before. It may not be polluting our lakes, our air or the Earth’s living creatures, but light pollution is serious, and it needs to be addressed by everyone.
Light pollution, or “sky glow”, is the glow you can see at night above cities and towns. From our perspective, it may not be a matter of life and death, but now the number of stars you can see in a rural area is amazing young children from large cities. That’s obviously not a good thing.
The main causes of light pollution are the street lamps and security lights found in suburban areas, and lit signs and lit commercial buildings in urban areas. Most of the lights from these are wasted and go straight up into the sky. As we all know, the sky doesn’t need to be lit up at night.
The components of light pollution are Glare, Light trespass, Uplight, and Too much light, or the acronym, GLUT. We all know what glare is: light that shines into your eyes during the day so that you can’t see. Glare can be in your eyes at night, too, which can be very negative when you consider the effects that will be discussed below. Light trespass is light where you don’t want it, like in your bedroom window when you’re trying to sleep. It gets annoying after a while, doesn’t it? Uplight is simply light that is supposed to be lighting roads and pathways, but goes straight up into the sky. Too Much Light means that there is just too much light, of course! “More is Better” is a bad theory.
A small example of light pollution’s impact on the environment is the mortality of newly-hatched turtles. Because their necks aren’t yet long enough to see things far away, baby turtles rely on the mirror image of the moon to guide them to the sea, to begin their new life. A car hit this particular turtle, which was thinking the light from a nearby city was moonlight reflecting off the ocean waves. Birds that live in and around cities can die because of sky glow, too. The abundance of bright lights can blind them, leading to countless collisions with buildings, billboards and other tall structures.
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