by Paul Bogard
This is the exciting part of the question: What can we do? It’s not only a question of what actions, but what is possible.
While we eat dessert—torta sbrisolona, an almond cookie and Mantua specialty—Falchi tells me he wants to make another map, this one an atlas of what it could look like, what it could be. By using computer simulation of the light that towns and cities would emit if they were using fully shielded fixtures, he could show us the future. It would be a map that would show us what we can achieve. It would be a map of possibility, a map of the world at night as the night could be.
On a Tuesday night I’m in southwestern England, in a town called Wimborne, at the local astronomy club meeting (where for the first time I will hear stars referred to as “chaps,” as in “these chaps here in Orion’s belt”), and I’m holding a map unlike any I’ve ever seen. It’s a road map, the old-fashioned foldable kind you might once have tramped around with on a trip of the British Isles. Except that this Philip’s Dark Skies Map is a road map for astronomers or anyone wanting to find a good place to watch the stars—in other words, it is a map of light pollution and how you might get away from it. Essentially a road map of the British Isles with the appropriate section of Falchi’s World Atlas of the Artificial Night Sky Brightness overlaid, it reminds me of activist Pierre Brunet of France’s Association Nationale pour la Protection du Ciel et l’Environnement Nocturnes (ANPCEN) telling me in Paris, “I always say that a car is the main observing instrument of the amateur astronomer, not the telescope.” That’s because the vast majority of astronomers—or anyone else—can no longer see good stars where they live. They have to get in their car, grab their Philip’s Dark Skies Map, and hit the road.
I’m in Wimborne at the invitation of Bob Mizon, of the British Astronomical Association’s Campaign for Dark Skies, whom I’d first met in London. “The trend is good,” he tells me. “More and more councils are thinking about light pollution, and more and more people know about it. I was pleased a couple of years ago when I looked in the dictionary and there was the term ‘light pollution.’ Twenty years before, nobody would have understood the term.”
Because?
“It was something that nobody thought about because everybody had grown up with bad lights and thought it was normal. And when you told them it was a kind of pollution, they would think, well, Why? That’s just lighting, isn’t it? Surely it’s okay. Good stuff. Helps us. Light, good; dark, bad. Says so in the Bible.”
Mizon’s good nature covers the fact that anyone working to reduce light pollution runs into these same objections—apathy and ignorance, especially—all too often. The term may finally have landed in the dictionary, but acknowledgment of the problem still hasn’t reached a critical mass.
“The thing that gives me most hope is the energy crisis,” he admits. “We know that energy will become more expensive. As the oil begins to run out and we are forced to use different kinds of energy, people will become a lot more careful about how they use it. Because at the moment, most people don’t care. People don’t switch lights off, they don’t turn the heater down by a degree or two. If people see water being wasted, they will quite often do something about it. But if people walk along a road and see lights shining all over, they don’t care. But when your electricity bill comes through the door and it says five hundred pounds, you’ll think, Shit, let’s do something about this.”
It’s estimated that the European Union spends some 1.7 billion euros a year on wasted outdoor light. In the United States, the figure is a similar $2.2 billion. Compared to the money we spend for heat or gasoline, these aren’t big numbers. But there’s no reason to be spending this money—it’s all waste, in the form of light pollution. There’s also that small matter of cheap—artificially cheap—energy that fails to account for the true cost of its production for human and ecological health. But the bigger point Mizon’s making, and an idea that I run into time and time again, is that the way we light our world is going to change.
It’s changing already—one of the big concerns for many people is the coming of LEDs (“this tsunami,” Falchi called it) before we really understand their strengths and limitations, benefits and perils. But several people told me that the way we light our world in the future will be different from—perhaps radically different from—the way we light it today. I can’t think of anyone I talked with who thought this was a bad idea—few who are thinking seriously about lighting and darkness are happy with the current state of affairs. But the question is how we will change. Will we continue along the path we’re on, with levels of lighting growing every year, everywhere, and with only a few rare places (such as Lombardy) keeping a thumb in the dike? Or will we somehow begin to use light differently? Will we, perhaps, even begin to value darkness?
Mizon has two stories from his London childhood of society choosing to change course. He remembers the “pea soup” smog of the 1950s (“I remember how awful it was. It must have been like smoking a hundred cigarettes at once, and we thought it was fun!”), and he remembers the River Thames.
“The River Thames is a great success story. When I was a boy the police would come to our school and warn us about the river. Don’t go near the River Thames, it’s toxic. You mustn’t ever try to drink the river. Don’t get it on your hands, because if you put your fingers in your mouth you will be poisoned. And it was absolutely true; the river was a sluggish, black filth. And then, there was legislation and people were no longer allowed to pump sewage into the river anymore. Because obviously in Victorian times all the sewage from people’s toilets went straight into the River Thames, and it stank terribly. And the legislation was such that the river immediately became much cleaner, and now, fifty years later, there are one hundred twenty different species of fish in the River Thames. It’s now a living river, thriving. Just a little bit of legislation causes a big difference. And that’s what we say about light pollution. We’re not asking for some huge draconian change in the law. Just a little bit of legislation about planning and getting the lights right when you put them in solves the problem.”
By “planning” Mizon means building codes. “This will be the solution to light pollution in this country in the long term. Because when you build a new development of any kind—industrial estate, housing development—it has to be approved by the local authority, through the planning system, and there are certain directives which you have to conform to. And all we’re saying, quite simply, is that in those directives it should say all exterior light will be directed only on the premises to be illuminated. Job done.”
Only on the premises to be illuminated—not into the sky, not onto your neighbor’s property, not into the street. It doesn’t seem like too much to ask.
“Once you’ve done that,” Mizon explains, “the problem will evolve away over the years. People don’t think they’re being dictated to, they think they’re just obeying a sensible norm. So, get your lighting right, please, and everybody will be happy. It’s not the same as saying to somebody, Your light is crap, do something about it.”
For his part, Bob Mizon is doing all he can right now, but he’s realistic. “It would be nice to wave a magic wand and suddenly get the stars back,” he says. “But I realize it’s a long-term evolutionary process. We’re talking about the night sky in perhaps fifty years’ time, when we’re dead. But it’s still worth doing. Because if my son, who’s now nineteen, can see a good night sky over wherever he lives in 2060, then that’s what it’s about. You have to be patient and a bit altruistic. You’re really doing it for future generations, not for yourself.”
When the meeting ends, a half dozen amateur astronomers drive up the hill to a local pub for warm beer and crisps (and Mizon’s mock disgust at my ordering cold beer). But before going inside we stand in the dark parking lot looking down on Wimborne, population fifteen thousand. Five years ago, Bob Mizon convinced the town council to replace the city’s streetlights with fully shielded fixtures, and the effect is startling. Leaving the
meeting, walking to the car, driving to the pub, I haven’t noticed anything out of the ordinary—we certainly haven’t been, to borrow Mizon’s phrase, “stumbling through medieval darkness.” We’ve had plenty of light. But now I realize, as we look down to where we’ve been, I can’t tell where exactly the darkness ends and the town begins.
That an entire town like Wimborne—or even an entire city like Paris—could design its lighting to achieve a certain effect owes much to the work of Roger Narboni. When Narboni—who worked closely with François Jousse on the relighting of Notre Dame—formed his company Concepto in March of 1988, the world of lighting design was still in its dark ages. Paris monuments, for example, were often simply plastered with energy-gulping spotlights, with little subtlety or integration into the neighborhood. For one of Concepto’s first contracts, Narboni designed for the French city of Montpellier the world’s first “lighting master plan,” a comprehensive plan for how a city’s lights would create beauty and safety together—rather than simply being, as he says, “strictly and blandly functional.” Since then, the idea of a lighting master plan—and of the professional lighting designer—has spread around the world. If the future of darkness has everything to do with how we use artificial light at night, then lighting designers like Narboni will have much to say about it, for already they are imagining the future of light.
Born in Algeria, Narboni moved to France in 1962 and lived in the barrio for twenty-five years. When he became a lighting designer he swore he wouldn’t forget where he’d come from.
“Believe me, we can be as poetic there as we can in the center,” he explains. “So I always try to work for parts of the cities that are the most destroyed, the most difficult. It’s easier to bring beauty to this part with light because you can hide a lot of things and have with light a total metamorphosis.” Narboni says lighting the tougher parts of a city is often more rewarding than lighting landmarks like a cathedral. “A cathedral is already beautiful,” he says. “It doesn’t need any lighting. And also, the way people receive it is totally different. When you work on a historical center, everyone says, ‘Oh, again,’ ‘Whatever,’ ‘This isn’t terrible’—people are spoiled.” But, he says, whereas people in the wealthier areas tend to take his lighting design for granted, when he works in poorer districts, the citizens of the neighborhood are very appreciative. “They are like, Wow, our district could be like that? And they thank you, they kiss you, they react totally differently. It’s like you changed their life.” Narboni says he recently went to check on one such project, a simple decorative lighting scheme projected against the side of a building, and met a local man coming out of a bar. “He was looking at the lighting and I asked him what he thought of it. And he was totally drunk,” Narboni says, laughing, “but he answered, ‘I live here, and I like to look at that because it’s so poetic, and we deserve poetry, too.’ ”
While he has lived in France for forty-eight years, Narboni says his Algerian culture continues to have a powerful influence on his designs. “In North Africa, shadows are more important than light—the way that you play with the contrasts of shadows and light—because it’s hot country, we protect ourselves from the sun, we never go to the beach to get sun, you know. We hide ourselves because the sun is so powerful. So for me in my everyday work this play between shadows and light is very important.”
Unfortunately, he says, people are afraid of shadows and darkness. His dream is that we could have an educational program about light and darkness in the schools, even in kindergarten, “because the kids don’t learn anything about light from their educational program—they learn how to play flute, they learn how to do crazy things—but light, no one is talking about it. About darkness the only thing they get is what they read in the tales, and very often it’s related to the devil, to fear, and it’s a pity, because they don’t learn how to play with shadows, how to be peaceful in darkness.”
He soon will have a wonderful opportunity to help people become more comfortable with darkness, as he recently won a competition to design the new lighting master plan for the city of Paris.
“There is a new policy in Paris that calls for renewing all the urban lighting while reducing the energy consumption thirty percent by 2020,” he explains. “The idea is to have a new look at what should we keep, what should we stop, and what should we create for new lighting. So it’s tough, because they want new things, beautiful things—you know, City of Light and everything—and then the energy consumption should be very low.” Narboni says he used studies done by the urban planners of Paris showing the hour-by-hour occupation of the city during the night to do his redesign of the urban lighting. First, he proposed shutting down some of the architectural lighting (Paris has more than three hundred elements to light, such as buildings, fountains, statues, trees, and 32 lighted bridges, plus all the street lighting), and then he got creative.
“The main idea we propose is to not have an even level of light everywhere, and this is a revolution because in Paris every single street is even in terms of lux level, whether it’s a small one or the Champs-Élysées. So the idea is to ask, Why should we stay like that? The second idea is to dim, depending if there are cars or pedestrians or not—if there is no one in the street, why should we light the street? And for that we are making a lot of studies about where is the nightlife in Paris—the night geography of Paris. The idea is to understand better the morphology of Paris at night and then to dim the lux level depending on the level of activity. Another idea is to put on the lighting ten minutes later every single day, so to get Parisians used to having a little darkness, and multiplied by three hundred sixty-five days, that’s a lot of energy consumption. And again in the morning we will cut five minutes earlier, maybe ten—we’ll try.”
The future of light can be very interactive, Narboni says. “I’m sure in ten or twenty years everything will be automatic. And if you are there, there is some light, and if you are not there it goes down and no one cares. If we can have the right light in the right place for the right person it might be a very nice future. So let’s dream.”
Dreaming of new ways to light the night is something Nancy Clanton has no trouble doing. As the founder and president of Clanton and Associates, a lighting design firm in Boulder, Colorado, that emphasizes sustainable design to save energy and conserve darkness, her excitement for the future of lighting is palpable. Like Roger Narboni, she envisions a future full of interactive lighting, a world where the growth of the electric car industry has a direct effect on our use of lights at night. She seems unfailingly optimistic about a future where we change our common assumptions about lighting.
Take light posts, for example. “We should really evaluate whether lights on poles are the best way to light a city or an area,” she says. “For one thing, light poles are expensive, and people hit them. Seriously, you put a pole up, and someone will hit it. Communities are anxious to get rid of their lighting poles.” The reason? Money. When you break down what it costs communities to provide street lighting, more than half the expense comes from buying and maintaining the poles. Instead, Clanton envisions relying on different layers of light—headlights, step-lights at foot level, motion sensors near crosswalks. “And,” she says, “layers may be added or subtracted as the night goes on. Maybe the overhead lighting is turned off and just the low-level sidewalk step-lighting is left on in the middle of the night. I would really like more options in lighting instead of just one size fits all.”
Much of her optimism about lighting comes from what she sees as the possibilities presented by LEDs. Unlike current streetlights, which are either on or off, and at one level of brightness, LEDs can be set for different levels of brightness depending on the situation. Earlier in the night they might be set brighter; later in the night, they might be dimmed. Combine that ability with the potential of smart grids and computer controls, and communities could have the ability to have different levels of light for different areas. “A neighborhood could say, ‘Hey! We r
eally don’t want lights on anymore after midnight,’ ” she tells me. “So someone could go to Google Maps and group all those lights in that neighborhood and say, ‘Okay, go down to ten percent or five percent.’ ”
What might drive a community to ask for lower lighting levels? Again, money. Whether you live in Boulder or Paris or Wimborne or almost anywhere else in western Europe or North America, peak energy use comes during the day—air conditioning on a hot afternoon, lights and heaters in winter. But energy companies have already paid for their generators and other equipment and would like to have them running at a high level twenty-four hours a day. At night, when energy use drops, energy companies have no way to replace that demand, so they encourage our use of electric lights. In fact, Clanton sees this as “the untold story” about how much outdoor lighting we use—it doesn’t have nearly as much to do with safety and security as it does with the need energy companies have to even out their peak load.
Pete Strasser, technical director for the International Dark-Sky Association, agrees. “Utilities pretty much need to have streetlights at night. That’s a load. That need to keep minimum spin going on those generators to ramp up in the morning. They can’t shut them down real low. They have to keep going. So what’s been the solution for a hundred years? Streetlights.” Clanton, Strasser, and others told me that once electric cars come fully online, cities will take a second look at leaving the lights on all night because the cost of electricity will so dramatically increase. “Power sold at night, it’s cheap as hell,” Strasser explains. “One or two cents a kilowatt hour, wholesale rates, because they’re just dumping it. I guarantee you it’s not going to be one and two cents a kilowatt hour when you’re plugging your car in at night. That’s going to go heavy retail price—ten, fifteen cents an hour. So, as soon as there’s a tipping point with electric cars, you’re going to hear, ‘You know what? Studies have shown that those streetlights really haven’t been necessary. Studies have shown that crime rates have done nothing with streetlights.’ And it’s coming. Because you’re right—they haven’t.”
