Have you ever thought about how wonderful it is that you can see the stars in the night sky over Adams County? It’s easy for us to take this miracle for granted, but visitors from cities and suburbs notice it right away. In today’s 24-hour world, many people have lost touch with the infinite wonder of the night sky, but we here in Adams County can still enjoy it. It’s one of the ways we’re compensated for the inconvenience of living so far from the centers of shopping and entertainment.
Darkness at night is a non-renewable resource like peace and quiet, clean air, and clean water. Little by little, we’re losing these precious things without even realizing it. Once they’re gone it’s almost impossible to get them back. The loss of this inspirational natural resource might seem unimportant, or even be seen as progress, but evidence links it directly to negative impacts including health issues. This is a big reason why Adams County is a healthier place to live. It still gets dark here, at night.
Artificial light at night negatively affects human health, increasing risks for obesity, depression, sleep disorders, diabetes, breast cancer and more. Darkness stimulates your body to produce melatonin, inducing sleep, boosting the immune system, lowering cholesterol, and benefiting your thyroid, pancreas, ovaries, testes and adrenal glands. Nighttime exposure to artificial light suppresses melatonin production. It’s also bad for your eyes. According to a 2012 report from the American Medical Association, “Glare from nighttime lighting can create hazards ranging from discomfort to frank visual disability.”
For all of earth’s history, life has relied on a predictable rhythm of day and night. It’s encoded in the DNA of all plants and animals. Plants and animals depend on Earth’s daily cycle of light and dark rhythm to guide reproduction, nourishment, sleep and protection from predators. Humans have radically disrupted this cycle by lighting up the night. There’s scientific evidence that artificial light at night has negative, and sometimes deadly, effects on many living things including amphibians, birds, mammals, insects and plants. Artificial light radically alters their nighttime environment by turning night into day.
According to research scientist Christopher Kyba, “the introduction of artificial light probably represents the most drastic change human beings have made to their environment. Near cities, cloudy skies are now hundreds, or even thousands of times brighter than they were 200 years ago. We are only beginning to learn what a drastic effect this has had on nocturnal ecology.”
Humans have also evolved to the rhythms of the natural light-dark cycle of day and night. Like most life on Earth, humans live by a circadian rhythm (our biological clock), a sleep-wake pattern governed by the day-night cycle. Artificial light at night can disrupt that cycle. The spread of artificial lighting means most of us no longer experience truly dark nights.
Many of us have had this experience: a neighbor installs a new light on their property. It’s an unshielded fixture that casts a bright light that spills onto your property and perhaps even inside your home. This is known as light trespass and it can cause a lot of discomfort and frustration. Your neighbor may not even realize that their unshielded lighting is shining on your property, wasting energy and money, and making you uncomfortable.
The fact is that much outdoor lighting used at night is inefficient, overly bright, poorly targeted, improperly shielded, and often completely unnecessary. This light, and the electricity used to create it, is being wasted by spilling it into the sky, rather than focusing it on the actual objects and areas that people want illuminated.
Are you a good neighbor? Most people never think about light scatter or the negative impacts of artificial light at night. Lighting the heavens or your neighbor’s property is needless waste. Perhaps you’ve never given this any thought, so becoming aware is an important first step. Explaining the issues to others will help bring awareness to this growing problem and inspire more people to think about protecting our natural night sky.
Wasteful 24-hour lighting is reversible and each one of us can make a difference. The first step is to appreciate what a priceless, non-renewable resource it is, to see the stars in Adams County.
You can minimize the light from your own home at night, by only using lighting when and where it’s needed. When installing outdoor lighting, look for fixtures that direct light downward. Take steps to shield outdoor fixtures to eliminate wasted light, If safety is a concern, install motion detector lights and timers.
Groups like the International Dark Sky Association have many valuable resources to help you. Their Fixture Seal of Approval program makes it easy for you to find the right fixtures. The program certifies dark sky friendly outdoor lighting; fixtures that are fully shielded and have low color temperature. You can then request the recommended lighting from your local electrical supply store.
Dark skies make our County special. Unfortunately our night skies are dramatically brighter than they were just a few short years ago. Billboard lighting on the Appalachian Highway and a vast increase in 24-hour lighting by residents and businesses threatens to blot out our own view of the heavens. Do we really want this?
An Adams County resident since 1997, Steve Boehme is a local Adams County businessman and political commentator, who published the Adams County CROSSROADS magazine from 2005 until 2019.
