Take back the night: Establishing a "right to darkness" could save our night skies
Dark sky proponents mull the rights of nature to battle light pollution. Here's how it would work
The technicolor Florida sunset had faded into darkness, and my extended family, assembled from two continents and three countries, gathered on the beach at Longboat Key to look at the stars. We were incredibly lucky that night in 1984, when I was seven, because a satellite came into view. With no clouds and few lights, it moved steadily like a bright little star across the dark, dark sky. We oohed. We ahhed.
Today, some laypeople may still gather to watch a gaggle of newly-launched Starlink satellites, each designed for a lifetime of about 5 years, as they move through the sky like a string of pearls, or a long ellipse of unblinking stars. But the satellites are common enough these days that they often zip through the field of view of astronomers' telescopes, and their radio signals interfere with the signals used by those telescopes. With sunlight reflecting off their solar sails, at times satellites can be brighter than the stars that, from our viewpoint, surround them, and there are enough of them to brighten the night sky.
There is little regulation of such space sources of light pollution. And work to better regulate and limit terrestrial, or ground-based, light pollution, while showing some promising results, is still in its infancy. Could an increasingly popular, intermittently successful legal argument involving what's called the Rights of Nature or more-than-human rights possibly reclaim our planet's dark skies? It sounds like a goth dream, but do we have a legal right to darkness?
Is light pollution really that bad?
It's a small step from annoyance to menace. While satellites offer many benefits, including environmental data gathering, with hundreds of thousands satellites expected to swarm the skies within the decade, we are looking at a genuine threat to the nighttime darkness within which we, and all living things, evolved over hundreds of thousands, in fact millions, of years.
Not that satellites are the only concern. Light pollution from terrestrial sources has been a gradually growing menace to dark skies since the Industrial Revolution, as electrical lighting, explosive population growth, and dramatic increases in industry over the years have steadily brightened the sky while dimming the stars, especially near large urban centers. Since the advent of LEDs, though, the problem has become dramatically worse. The low cost, perceived environmental benefit, and abundant availability of LEDs has led to lights being used in entirely unnecessary ways.
"Ground-based light pollution has been growing with urbanization, but there's an inflection point just a couple of years ago due to the arrival of LED lights, which have made it much easier to make much more light with less energy," astronomer James Lowenthal, also a dark skies advocate and professor of astronomy in Northampton, Massachusetts, told Salon in a video interview. "And not only are they bright, they're very blue ... It looks white to your eyes, it looks sparkling while, like an emergency room, operating room kind of light".
"We see the stars less and less than we did just ten, twenty years ago."
White light with that cool, bright white appearance, like intense moonlight, actually contains a higher proportion of short-wavelengths, the blue and green part of the visible spectrum. This cool blueish light is said to have a high temperature (the higher the temperature of light, the bluer it looks to us). In fact, the original LEDs that hit the market around 15 years ago had such a high temperature that when cities and towns installed them in street lights, people were horrified, Lowenthal said, describing "many cases of cities where citizens just revolted against what their city had done."
As most late-night computer users know by now, probably thanks to someone nagging at them, informatively but in vain, to get off the damn screen, blue light has effects on animal and human eyes, especially on older humans.
"Just as blue sunlight scatters in the Earth's atmosphere and makes the sun look slightly less blue, light from a strong blue, rich white street light enters your eyeball, scatters around in your eyeball and causes a sort of gauzy veil of glare," Lowenthal explained.
There's more, though. The short wavelength blue light of LEDs bounces around more in the sky, intensifying the brightness of light pollution more than an equivalent amount of less blue light energy. To add insult to injury, our eyes' sensitivity shifts towards the blue end of the spectrum at night. That's why moonlight looks bluish, when it's actually the same color as sunlight.
"And that's actually one of the main reasons that we see the stars less and less than we did just ten, twenty years ago," Lowenthal said.
A few steps short of regulation
As a result of these twin Earth-based and sky-based threats to the skies under which we all evolved, dark sky advocacy became a thing. So have dark-sky preserves, where light pollution is restricted; dark sky certification, which echoes programs such as the UNESCO World Heritage Sites; and dark skies as a marketing attraction.
The Dark and Quiet Skies report, a 2021 report commissioned by the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, notes from the first paragraphs the wide scope of dark sky advocacy — from the importance of that astronomical research for protecting the Earth from asteroids or for advancing scientific research that benefits all humanity, to the cultural significance of dark skies. Many Indigenous peoples use the stars for orientation as their ancestors did, and the panorama of stars serves as a "library" of Indigenous knowledge.
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"We are adapted to darkness. But I would say not just in a physiological way," Aparna Venkatesan, an astronomer at University of San Francisco, told Salon in a video interview, citing numerous studies on human creativity at night, the rich history of references to darkness in human languages and storytelling, and the prevalence of human origin stories — including the scientific account of the Big Bang — that begin with total darkness.
Venkatesan, with astronomer and dark sky consultant John Barentine, coined the term "noctalgia," meaning "sky grief," to describe "the accelerating loss of the home environment of our shared skies." It's a loss that affects all of us but has intense implications for Indigenous people, for whom access to dark night skies is a vital factor in preserving traditions around navigation and calendaring. It even impacts food sovereignty, as pollinators are impacted by light pollution.
"There's individual rights and community rights, including the rights of future generations and freedom of religion," Venkatesan said. "All of that is true, but I also want to advocate that we are part of the continuum, that darkness lives in our language, our storytelling, our identity, our science, our creativity. Really, much of our human identity rests with darkness."
In response to concerns about terrestrial light pollution, dark sky preserves or parks have been springing up around the world (there are more than 120 in the U.S.), offering a distinct attraction for tourism as well as residents — and the ecosystems that are able to enjoy a kind of life that has become largely endangered, life where circadian rhythms follow the same schedule as our ancestors' did.
Comparison showing the effects of light pollution on viewing the sky at night (Jeremy Stanley/Flickr/Wiki Commons)International Dark Sky Places is an international program of independent third-party certification of particular areas that apply to become IDSPs. Starting with Flagstaff, Arizona's appointment as the first Dark Sky City in 2001, the organization has certified dark sites, which can be communities, parks or protected areas, on six continents, 22 countries. There are now some 200 of them around the globe, representing 160,000 square kilometers of land on Earth from which you can see clear night skies, glittering heavens, the full starry span of the Milky Way rarely visible from cities or even the average over-illuminated suburb. Some of these are in the remote, austere sites that often serve as ideal sites for astronomical observatories. But not all of them.
There are practices of light pollution mitigation that can be learned and adopted if everyone in a given community is on board — or brought on board through policy decisions. But getting agreement and motivation to pursue dark sky certification status by working to achieve light pollution reduction targets is easier said than done.
"There are no binding treaties that have to do with the night sky, with that type of environmental protection," Barentine told Salon in a video interview along with Venkatesan. That's even though certain U.N. instruments do mention it—the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the underlying treaties establishing the United Nations Environment Programme are among these, he said. "At best, what we might get is a series of recommendations to members states of these different conventions that they could choose to enact if they wanted to."
"Much of our human identity rests with darkness."
But voluntary standards for light pollution, like voluntary standards for much else where profit and community or ecosystem well-being might be at odds, have a habit of failing to meet the need, of being inconsistently applied, and of simply being ignored. In fact, Ben Price, director of education at the Community Environmental Legal Defence Fund, which assisted in establishment of the world's first community rights of nature legislation, notes that the establishment of minimum protected areas tends to be supported or even promoted by the corporations that cause greatest environmental harm, effectively maximizing the amount of harm that can be done everywhere else.
The federal Clean Air and Clean Water acts, and similar state laws, likewise set out in law just how much degradation or destruction of the natural world corporations or others can get away with. Partly as a result, environmental damage is far, far worse and natural habitats are far smaller and more fragmented than they were half a century ago, before these pieces of legislation existed.
Price told Salon in a video interview that he enjoyed amateur astronomy as a child and plans to travel to a noted dark sky preserve in the Pennsylvania wilds. "But really, do you have to travel hours and hours to see the stars the way they actually come through?" he asked rhetorically. "Do we really need to have every damn thing on the surface of the Earth lit up?" Or in the sky — Price has also watched satellites and has memories of seeing Sputnik overhead.
Legislation, Price believes, is the answer to bringing back the dark — as opposed to carving the Earth up into little pieces, a few fragments of which might achieve protected status. But with over two decades of work to advance rights of nature at the community level in the United States — nearly 200 communities have adopted CELDF-drafted community bill of rights laws including rights of nature — he believes that the entrenched domination of property rights in the U.S. means that it's going to be an uphill battle.
The damage done by bright skies
In the law, reparations are often thought of in terms of damages. Well, there's plenty of damage to be redressed. Remember how our eyes naturally become more sensitive to the blue end of the visible spectrum at night? That's just one of the many known and other likely unrecognized ways in which even daylight-waking creatures like us have been conditioned by millions of years of evolving in a world with roughly equal hours of daylight and darkness.
Nocturnal animals obviously depend on having adequate darkness for the kind of eyesight they've evolved and the nighttime behavior they've evolved to carry out in the dark of night. But diurnal animals like humans, and crepuscular animals, like cats, that are naturally at their most active at dawn and at dusk, also have exquisitely calibrated chronobiology, with hormone patterns that change according to the light and processes that take place during either daytime, when the sun is out, or nighttime, when it's not.
Research demonstrating the negative health impacts of messing too much with our bodies' ingrained expectations about light and darkness has accumulated over decades. Light pollution is linked to a host of health harms. Exposure to artificial light when we should be asleep alters our production of the important hormone melatonin, increasing risks of obesity, reproductive problems, certain cancers such as breast and prostate cancer, and mood disorders, and negatively affects immune function.
Seine et Marne on march the 6th 2021 at night. Taurus constellation. On this image we can see the effect of the movements of artificial satellites through the sky. On the left we can see the planet Mars, on the right the famous stars cluster the Pleiades (M45). From the bottom right the luminous trail of the satellite STARLINK-1269, and from the top the luminous trail of the satellite STARLINK-1577. (Christophe Lehenaff / Getty Images)It's even worse for animals, who aren't able to make choices like dimming the lights at a decent hour, using a red shift filter on their phones, or installing blackout curtains. Exposure to constant bright light causes pigeons to lose their regular locomotor and feeding patterns, and goldfish that are normally active in daytime likewise lose their own consistent patterns of activity and rest. Abnormal patterns of light and darkness reduce reproductive capacity in male sheep. Both sunlight and moonlight play roles in regulating the spawning and migration of Japanese eels. Outdoor lighting can trap migratory birds and moths.
In fact, even kingdoms of life beyond Animalia depend on darkness. Plants, linked in our minds with light thanks to their ability to turn it into energy through photosynthesis, require darkness, too. Artificial light that hampers nocturnal pollinators reduces plant reproductive success and fruit production. It also puts trees' schedules out of whack, affecting the dates of when leaves bud and how and when temperature triggers leaves to change color (though it also might delay plants' schedules for flowering, budding and leap-dropping otherwise moved forwards as a result of global heating-induced changes in seasonal temperatures.)
Even fungi need darkness, as they evolved to use patterns of light to interact with the world. They sense light with photoreceptors, and while they use them to avoid too much of it so as not to dry out, that's not all they're for. Fungi can have white collar proteins and cryptochromes for detection of blue light, opsins that detect green light, and phytochromes for red light. These photoreceptors also regulate things like sexual and asexual development and metabolism, accumulation of protective pigments and proteins, and growth. Artificial light seems to reduce the diversity of both fungi and beneficial ("good") bacteria living on grassland plant species, destabilize natural bacteria communities in soil, and may cause harmful algal blooms of blue-green algae in freshwater lakes.
And it isn't just darkness, but specifically the clear view of the stars that dark skies provide that is key to wellbeing for some species. Songbirds that migrate at night calibrate their magnetic compass to the setting sun, then use the stars as a compass. Bull ants use stars to find their way home. The dung beetle, which disperses seeds as it rolls its dung balls, fertilizing topsoil and enhancing biodiversity and engineering its environment, normally orients itself using the Milky Way and the moon. When light pollution or skyglow (light pollution from elsewhere reflected downwards) dims it, the beetle is forced to orient itself by sources of light on Earth. This increases competition within the species as all the dung beetles are attracted to the same artificial light source, or results in them becoming disoriented when they can't find a replacement for the stars. Either way, the result is less of that dispersal that's so important for soil health and biodiversity.
Suing for dark skies
"Now, of course, there is no legal precedent in U.S. courts for non-human entities having rights in and of themselves. When we talk about laws like the Endangered Species Act, it's always about the value of those species to humans, even if it is only our curiosity or our wonder," Price said, noting that momentum is building in other countries towards a less anthropocentric approach.
"We should draft and enact local [and] state laws," Price argued, "that recognize the right to dark skies as belonging intrinsically to nocturnal life, and not just nocturnal because what happens to life at night, if it's diminished or wiped out is going to have absolutely devastating effects on those creatures and on [that] plant life and so forth that is more active in daylight. It's all connected, and that's the very point of it all."
A rights of nature argument would be about "conveying enough legal recognition to those natural systems that they can at least compete with the Western view of humans being at the legal and environmental apex," where the purpose of the nature is framed as being the benefit of humans, and nature is to be made subservient to us, Barentine said. He has scoured the global legal literature for examples that could serve as precedents for applying legislation to dark skies.
"There has to be a change in paradigms that are at the foundation of how we run our society and the kinds of laws we create."
Some countries have subjected light pollution to law and to judicial review, Barentine said. "And I found some examples of countries that have given a level of consideration to these natural systems that are at least close enough to that, to where you can make the jump and say, if you would protect a river, for example, under rights of nature by giving it [legal] standing ... that there's really no reason that you cannot apply exactly the same logic to light pollution."
But the more foundational idea of a legal right to darkness — or, complimentarily, a right to starlight — has not been tested in courts. But rights of nature arguments more generally have found favor with courts in enough jurisdictions that it's definitely no longer a fringe or symbolic legal concept, despite Price's reluctance to be over-optimistic about how quickly change can be achieved.
And the framing of darkness or starlight as a right is not entirely new. In 2009, the general assembly of the International Astronomical Union passed "Resolution 2009-B5", which among other related points, states that "an unpolluted night sky that allows the enjoyment and contemplation of the firmament should be considered a fundamental socio-cultural and environmental right, and that the progressive degradation of the night sky should be regarded as a fundamental loss." And since this resolution built on a 2007 conference called the "International Conference in Defence of the Quality of the Night Sky and the Right to Observe Stars held jointly by UNESCO and the IAU, the idea that it's a sociocultural right might seem to be endorsed by UNESCO, the global body dedicated to such rights.
But there are limits to how far international bodies are willing to go. Noting a "growing number of requests to UNESCO concerning the recognition of the value of the dark night sky and celestial objects," by 2007, UNESCO's World Heritage Centre stated that "the sky or the dark night sky or celestial objects or starlight as such cannot be nominated to the World Heritage List within the framework of the Convention concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage." Nor, they say, can Dark Sky preserves be considered under the various categories of cultural and natural properties subject to protection — because no criteria exist for them to be considered. And that's still several steps away from an enforceable right. So we're not there yet.
If a person or group of people are going to go to court on behalf of nature, "it is a stronger case if the complaint is brought by a human person who lives in a place that is affected by that thing. So it would be hard for me to make an argument that I should be the plaintiff in a case involving light pollution in China or Europe or somewhere like that," said Barentine, who lives in Tucson, Arizona, a dark sky city, "but I could be the person who brings the complaint in my part of the United States, because I can argue that I am impacted by this and I have an interest in this ecosystem."
Barentine and colleagues have been developing the concept of a lightshed, analogous to a watershed, a geographical region that may cut across existing legal boundaries but that could define an area within which total light pollution must be kept within a certain limit in order to mitigate harm and limit skyglow.
"If we believe that there's anything like a commons and that there is a public interest in the commons, then I could bring suit on behalf of all people similarly situated. We could define a class of people. I can say that literally, every person who lives in my city is affected in one way or another by this issue, and therefore could stand to suffer a legal injury that we're asking a court to remedy," Barentine said.
While restrictions on local governance in the US and the country's strong legal emphasis on property rights makes it extremely difficult to advance dark sky legislation through a rights of nature argument, Price said that, in theory at least, were a bill introduced this year in the New York legislature that would grant rights of nature to the Great Lakes ecosystem prove successful, it might then be possible to argue in court that documented harms resulting from light pollution must be rectified under that legislation. The proposed legislation would devolve powers to local municipalities and counties to protect the ability of local ecosystems to exist, to flourish naturally, and to be restored when harmed. And as we've seen, humans, animals, and other organisms might have a strong case that we've all suffered harm from too much light when it should be dark, and even too few stars when the sky should be a-glitter with them.
Still, Price thinks that this bill is likely to be a public learning experience more than anything else.
"There has to be a change in paradigms that are at the foundation of how we run our society and the kinds of laws we create," he said. "It's really people's minds that have to change more than the laws before they can accept these laws."
But he quoted science fiction author Ursula K. Le Guin on the eventual inevitability of once-unimaginable change. Accepting an award from the National Book Foundation, Le Guin said that "We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings."
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