Ecological Consequences of Artificial Night Lighting

Abstract

Review: Ecological Consequences of Artificial Night Lighting Catherine Rich and Travis Longcore (Eds.) Reviewed by Kathy Piselli Atlanta Fulton Public Library, USA Catherine Rich and Travis Loncore (Eds.). Ecological Consequences of Artificial Night. Washington, DC: Island Press, 2006. ISBN: 1-55963-129-5. $29.95 (Trade paper). ISBN: 1-55963-128-7 $65.00 (Trade cloth). The Urban Wildlands Group, a Los Angeles–based conservation organization, convened a gathering of ecologists in 2002 to review the state of knowledge about the ecological consequences of artificial night lighting. This book provides edited proceedings from that conference. When New York City’s Pearl Street Station opened in 1882, the age of modern urban lighting was ushered in. Coincidentally, this was also a time when large optical refracting telescopes were built. By the 1950s, astronomers were complaining that “sky glow” from city lights were keeping them from doing their work. Sky glow happens when lights from urban areas reflect off clouds, causing light from even a small urban area to obliterate much of what there is to see in the night sky. The effect was most problematic in the western United States, location of several large telescope facilities and the traditional home of big, starry skies. By 2002, nine U.S. states and one entire country - the Czech Republic - had adopted so-called dark sky provisions, and 11 other states were considering similar laws. These legal efforts were based on aesthetic concerns. Some statistics frequently quoted came out of the First World Atlas of the Artificial Night-Sky Brightness (2001): half of the world’s population has never seen the Milky Way, 40 percent of Americans no longer have to adjust their eyes to night vision, two thirds of the world's population lives under light-polluted night skies. In March 2006, the National Park Service’s Night Sky Team released comprehensive data on the amount of light in the night sky in national parks, finding pollution in places that once seemed distant from urban centers. But to paraphrase one of this book’s editors, the idea that light pollution might pose a broad problem for whole ecosystems remained mostly in the gray literature. The topic is relatively new and unstudied and does not even have proper terminology yet. Lighting professionals and environmental regulators speak of “lux” to communicate a quantity of visible light. But for ecological purposes, “lux” fails to express the fact that different light sources