[Music]
thank you
[Music]
all right
foreign
I prefer to talk about more as a
nighttime conservation but uh
um so in in
basic overview of this topic a lot of
you have probably seen Graphics that
look like this this is a this isn't a
photo of the United States it's a
rendering of what uh modeling actually
of what the man-made light shining out
into the environment is like at night
this is from 1994 the data used for this
is from weather satellites and this is
the for these are the first years where
we had Digital Data like this from the
Department of Defense and their weather
satellites we can take models like this
we don't don't have that Digital Data to
see what the skies and the nighttime
conditions were like from years before
this but we can look at actual readings
that were made of the brightness of sky
in various places at various times and
we can regress this
I'm going to take it back 30 years from
this 1994 date to uh 1964 and this is
approximately what the nighttime Skies
would have looked like 30 years prior so
what we're seeing here is a real change
is it a little thing you have to stare
at it much to CEO there's a little
change in there this is like an
explosion that happened in outdoor
lighting during that period and what
caused it oh I should preface this by
saying I've been looking at this issue
since almost then I grew up in these
years and I watched this guy go away
I've been looking at this seriously as a
cause as a effort to do something about
it for like 15 years or so now so you're
going to be hearing my take on these
things what caused this is really very
simple it's a change in technology
pretty much we went from the 1950s and
60s being lit by dimmer mercury vapor
lights and even still incandescent
lights outdoors and even fluorescent
lights in some places
to the more ubiquitous yellowish sodium
highest pressure sodium street lights
they're much brighter they make more
light for the amount of electricity they
consume so instead of keeping the light
levels the same as they were in the 60s
and using less energy with these more
efficient lights we just made everything
a lot brighter so of course there's also
new street lights added in this period
too because you very rarely take out
three lights you just put in new ones
so why does this matter at all
um this is the main thing I want to
touch on today before challenge you all
to do something about it
um
we can break down five major issues of
things that are affected by this
artificial light out in the environment
at night and I'm going to put these in
no particular order because the priority
would depend on who you are but your
priorities are what your community's
priorities are we'll start out with
energy waste because that's a simple one
and we can break that down into
questions like
are we putting the right amount of
lighting out there if we're putting out
twice as much light as we need we're
using twice as much energy as we need
that simple physics if you're using if
we're making it eight percent brighter
than it needs to be we're using eight
percent more energy so again pretty
simple physics next question is
are we winning the whites when we don't
really need them do we turn on the
lights over a parking lot or over a road
or whatever
when there's traffic there and there's
activity there or do we have them go on
when the sunsets and turn off in the
morning when the sun comes back up
we can ask are we only lighting what
areas need to be lit
if we need to light up this parking lot
are we also lighting up the properties
on either side of them and down the
street and things like that too that
aren't our Target area that needs to be
lit
and the top of the list for energy waste
and Outdoor Lighting is the efficiency
of fixtures so let's look at that
kind of really quickly here here's a
light fixture you can buy today here's a
street light you can buy today
um it looks like a street light I mean
it's you plug it in and it goes on so it
it's an appliance it uses electricity
and reuse to the idea of our energy
consuming devices
these days being rated for how efficient
they are we see these yellow stickers
everywhere whether you buy a computer
printer or a washing machine you buy
your car it's got that stick around it
says how many miles per gallon it should
get how much it'll cost you to run it
for a year things like that
for outdoor lighting the efficiency
rating system looks like
oh there is no efficiency rating for
outdoor lighting I'm sorry I was leading
you down a path there so there is no
efficiency reading
um we can figure it out here's the cut
sheet on that light you'll notice from
the manufacturer's catalog there's no
yellow sticker on there that talks about
Energy Efficiency there is on the other
hand a big data set that the
manufacturer provides
that has the photometric data for this
light fixture and they have to provide
that for the lighting designers who need
to be able to calculate how many light
poles to put in and what spacing with
what modded lamps in them to provide the
illumination they need but we can take
that data and put it into other software
which gives us a view that looks
something like this
the colored disc there is actually a
sphere it's the severe light coming off
of the street light and it's divided up
into zones so down in the lower left
is this green quadrant
that's the light that's heading toward
the street that this pole is next to so
it's hitting down and out and across the
street
and then the table on the right hand
side of that indicates to us the amount
of the light that the lamp inside that
fixture is creating that goes into that
area so it's telling us in this case
that little less a quarter of the light
that the lamp makes is going down into
that green zone to light up the street
behind there's the yellow moderate it's
got a little light blue at the bottom of
it that's the light going into the yard
of the house along that street away from
the street there and the little like
loose spot the bottom is what's
theoretically shining down on the
sidewalks of that street so where the
pedestrians might be so that could be
useful light but we see in that backward
Zone there that almost supported the
light from the lamp is going there
then there's this dark blue band across
the middle which is
really inaccurately small this is the
lighting Industries
um
breakdown of directionality of light
that's their glarezone the glarezone
should really extend downwards much
farther down right laser is almost
burned out here
it should be much deeper than that
because light that shines out horizontal
down the block there's really nothing to
illuminate the street it's really only
effective down at lower angles but in
any case they still admit that 11 of the
like from the lamp is going into the
glare Zone
and then we have the topper the entire
upper red hemisphere
which is light which is 100 wasted so
that energy is 100 wasted and it's going
into the sky it's lighting up the
bottoms of birds and airplanes and
clouds and things and that serves no
public good and for this fixture half
the white 49.9 of the light from the
lamp
is going upward and directly being
erased it so talking about Energy
Efficiency again
how would you rate this map which you
can buy today it's it's horrible and it
doesn't matter
what the light bulb is inside of that
lamp
um
half of the energy being wasted is half
of the energy being wasted and what does
that mean well somebody's paying for the
energy first off if that's what matters
to you if it's Street lighting it's
probably taxpayers paying for it if it's
uh anybody paying for it there's an
environmental cost wasting electricity
too from whatever method is used to
generate electricity so
the conclusion here is in the yellow
there
today it isn't delightful we're so used
to indoors worrying about whether we've
got the newest Light Bulb that's being
the most efficient outside efficiency
isn't determined by the light bulb it's
determined by how good the fixture is at
putting the light it makes down where
it's needed
so we'll go on to Safety and Security we
have we put up lights to be able to be
active at night and we want to be safe
and we want to be secure while we're
doing our nighttime activities well
here's a street light it must make
it must make that screen safer because
it's a light and it's a street light you
know it's kind of glary though it's kind
of like these lights shiny at me if you
hold your hand up
to block the glare maybe you can see a
little bit more and oh
you might notice that there's actually
somebody standing under the street light
that you couldn't see without holding
your hand up to block the glare from the
street light because it's so poorly
designed so uh this is just one
example but believe me it's really true
that
good lighting can help us at night it
can enable us to be more active it can
make us safer and more secure
but bad lighting can do just the
opposite it can actually make it worse
for our visual process to see what we're
doing so uh this second consideration
with where lighting comes from
environmental disruption I think I would
probably put at the top of the list for
myself personally now now that I've been
studying this for quite a few years
um
to really quickly get the concept across
I think most people would understand
that if you took
a nice natural Meadow and you turned it
into a shopping mall
you'd be doing a lot of environmental
disruption there you're taking
this natural situation and you're
totally upending it
what we don't tend to think as much
about the fact that if you take an area
that has a natural cycle of Darkness at
night a light in the daytime and you
make it light in the daytime and
Perpetual Twilight all night long
you're also creating a tremendous amount
of environmental disruption and we are
very daytime oriented as human beings
and we if it's not daytime out we turn
out a bunch of Lights to make it so it's
a kind of like daytime out that's our
instinct to do that and uh what we we
have to remember is that
um that's not true for the rest of the
living things on the planet I have a lot
of papers that were research has done to
look for the effects of man-made white
in ecosystems and on organisms and I
will say out of hundreds of studies that
I have
um that I have read
I had called a single one they found no
impact from man-made light out in
ecosystems and on organisms usually it's
the other way around the uh impacts are
quite notable they're quite substantial
so uh the thing to remember again is for
billions of years and the millions of
years that all the things that are
living today on the planet have evolved
over
there was night with nothing more than
Starlight and periodic Moonlight and
light sunlight during the daytime and
that was the cycle of things and it's
just in the last blink of an eye
geological history wise we've been
upending that by making it light all
night long
but on health concerns we're animals too
uh Does having too much light at night
affect us
I I usually tell people that I think if
you studied human physiology
30 years ago
um
it was 40 years ago your textbook
probably wouldn't have say much at all
about
photosensitivity in human beings it
wasn't really a two notably study Topic
in the last 20 years there's been a lot
of research which has uh upended that
and shown demonstrated how
very photosensitive we are and
that too much exposure to light at night
could be very upsetting to our
physiology and uh
I think we're really just at the door
opening stage of understanding that and
there's a lot of research going on to
try to quantify how much we're talking
about so there's potentially concerns
about our own health too I'm going to
put
as I say we're more light sensitive than
we used to think or that maybe we want
to think we don't want to think that
turning our lights at night could be
possibly bothering our health but maybe
we should start thinking about that some
I've got is number five the last on list
is dark skies and that may be at the top
of your list it may not be on your list
at all if you live in an urban area
don't really think about it those people
would think that this really only
matters to professional astronomers who
are trying to study the universe and
over having basically the window blinds
drawn over the view of the universe by
the ever increasing light pollution on
the earth it keeps us from being on the
sea the entire rest of everything
but I would pose this as just a
something to think about
as far as
keeping the skies dark and being able to
see the stars I'd ask what if Galileo
had never seen the stars in the sky or
what if Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein
had never seen the stars in the sky or
the people who put us on the moon
again what if they had never seen the
Stars what if Shakespeare had never seen
the stars or Van Gogh had ever seen the
stars in the sky well this is the state
we're at now actually there's 80 percent
of the people on the planet live in
places where they really can't see the
stars of the sky at night so we're
taking this away from our society and we
know that
since time immemorial for the whole
history of our species the sky has been
this window to something Beyond
ourselves and uh
now it's if you walk outside in
Milwaukee
at night tonight go if the clouds are
gone you'd look up and you'd see three
or four stars and that view is gone that
that window isn't isn't open anymore and
I think that that's actually something
to be concerned about
so no one can see the stars anymore
that's that's an issue so we have these
five main
problems then the question is again what
are we doing wrong that's causing these
problems well we can go back to this
image of that really badly designed
light picture that's for some reason
whether you're sending half of its
outputs right up into the sky and
wasting another quarter of it in places
where it doesn't belong
um
that's really straightforward we should
be able to think of when we put up a
light
there's some some activity that we're
doing that we're trying to provide light
for and lightly goes anywhere else is
either wasted or and or problematic for
some reason or another because where it
goes where it doesn't belong life
becomes pollution instead of being a
useful thing
so this is one factor
about where light pollution comes from
it's not the only one thinking it is the
only one leads to
the creation of this illustration which
probably some of you have seen because
it gets published around the place I've
really come to hate this illustration
a lot and it's because
it oversimplifies the issue
I made my own version of it for a talk a
couple years ago and it looks like this
he takes all those first four things in
the top illustration and says these are
all bad
and the reason they're bad is because
there's a white light bulb in the layout
and uh you uh can't address light
pollution in any serious manner without
talking about the color of the like the
spectral quality of the light that we're
talking about dumping into the
environment it's like talking about
water pollution is what are you dumping
into there the top one
is that of the uh
high pressure sodium white which is
primarily just yellow light it's got a
little green a little blue or a little
red in it there but it's primarily that
bright yellow lines
the bottom four are white LEDs like the
kind you'll find commonly in outdoor
lighting now what you have there is a
lot more short wave light coming out a
lot more green and then into the blue
especially coming out in those LED
lights that's what makes them appear
more white to the eye because they have
a more bill on Spectrum
what's the trouble with blue light
well it was a photoreceptive chemical
called melanopsin and it's we have it in
the retinas of our eyes it doesn't
contribute to our visual system but it
tells it's connected to the very
primitive the reptile part of our brain
and it tells our brain
whether it's day or night and our brain
can the the has triggers the uh
formation of melatonin which you've
heard of which signals tells the whole
rest of the body it sends that nested
around it's nighttime you should be
resting uh if you go into breast mode
sleep mode
so this isn't just a human thing uh
melanopsin was discovered in frog skin
was found in the human eye frogs can
tell whether it's day or night through
their skin their skin is light sensitive
it's been found in algae
it's been found all across
several kingdoms of living things it's
an incredibly archaic very very uh
ancient
photoreceptive chemical and it's only
sensitive to Blue Light and that kind of
makes sense from an evolutionary sense
um it's blew out when it's daytime even
if it's cloudy the sky is blue basically
in the shade you're still getting more
blue light so it's a great thing to use
for a trigger of whether it's day or
night you could use that for our photo
self you know putting out to see whether
it's day or night but why don't you just
stick with blue and that that helps so
that's an issue there blue light is
biologically extremely active here's
Rayleigh scattering this is what makes
the sky blue when you shine red light up
up and through the sky it'll just keep
on going when you shine blue light it
scatters so we shine enough blue light
at night up in the sky it wants to turn
the sky blue like it is in the daytime
the glow spreads out the light scatters
so if we're shining up more blue light
in the sky
we're going to get much more sky glow
than we do with shiny longer wavelengths
up into the sky
here I also tossed in as another item
here at glare response the human eye
glare response is heavily blue sensitive
so you might notice by some headlights
make you win more than other ones do and
it's generally because the wider ones
have a lot more blue in them so they
trigger that both the discomfort and the
disability glare issues with the eye to
have more blue and the light
um here's this in practice there's a
county in Washington state that was
going to do a county-wide refit of their
street lighting so most of these Street
lighting that we had was there was
anywhere from 10 20 30 40 even 50 years
old most of it was high pressure sodium
a lot of it was in Old fixtures which
wouldn't be considered dark sky friendly
they have the hanging Globes and things
like that
the new fixtures which they're going to
do a county-wide switch out again
by LEDs they're in dark sky friendly
fixtures that only shine downward so you
would think that
when these folks did this study to
measure the actual sky brightness over
the county before and after the switch
out they would have found a notable
Improvement
and they found a notable degradation in
the uh bottom illustration here showing
the this is a skywide panorama of the
relative intensity of the sky glow over
these this County area and the bottom
one you can just visually see that the
explosion there of Skyward glow is
notably larger than the tablet that's
after the switch out so the switching to
better fixtures that shouldn't lie
downward didn't make up for the also
switching to White Light which bounces
off the ground and shines up in the sky
and creates tremendous English
tremendous and more sky glow
so that's that in practice
um let's talk briefly about U.S lighting
stairs and I can be really brief because
there there are no U.S lightning
standards for outdoor lighting
um
there are these things called
recommended practices which you will see
reference to any of you have worked in
lighting of any sort or even
peripherally read about it
will have or will if you do we'll run
into the RPS or recommended practices
that are developed by the IES which is a
trade group of lighting engineering
trade group and we are using their
recommendations in most places for halt
right to make a parking lot or a street
or a sidewalk or a basketball court for
that matter
um
I will say that ipsrps are
not necessarily developed in the most
scientific way the most data-driven way
they're generally done by consensus and
I was literally told this by someone who
was on a committee who said they went
into a parking lot and just looked at
each other and said do you think this
looks bright enough and they said they
agree yeah it looks bright enough and
that became the recommended practice for
parking lot lighting and this is how
we're doing things in this country and I
will add again another personal note for
me that uh
lighting Engineers tend to see the
solution to every problem anywhere on
the planet to be adding more lighting
and it's really the truth every stop and
say wait a minute why are we talking
about lighting this up in the first
place it just doesn't happen so well
um so again let's look at that in
practice
we look at all these roadways and uh
why are they as bright as they are well
nobody really knows actually there's not
data driven analysis that says there
will be this many accidents if these
roads are lit to this level and that
many if they're lit to this level and it
just doesn't happen that way the other
guys the question I would ask about
these pictures is
where the hell are the cars
um
if any of these roadways needed to be
lit this much if it actually increased
their safety at rush hour at 7 30 PM say
to have this level of lighting why are
these lights still on at all around at
this brightness at whatever hour this is
when there's not a single vehicle out of
the road
um does this make any sense at all is
this good lighting practice I don't
think so
I'm going to sort of end on a
story that shows that we can do better
so this is the town of Flagstaff Arizona
which for
almost 50 years now has been working at
controlling its outdoor lighting
regulating its outdoor lighting to try
to help preserve the sky and they've
been very successful at it this is the
same sort of analysis the sky glow done
for we have Flagstaff in the top
illustration there with the sky over it
and down in the lower half is one of
Cheyenne Wyoming Cheyenne was picked
because it's the populations exactly the
same as Flagstaff and it's also kind of
set off by itself it's not in a big
urban area with a lot of other
municipalities running into it there
there's 11 times more light this guy
over Cheyenne than there is over
Flagstaff and it isn't that they don't
have lights in Flagstaff
I've been in downtown so I accept a lot
at night um it's a college town but you
go on Saturday night but it's dark out
and it's just wrongs of people it's it's
very well like you can see what you're
doing it's just that it's lit properly
it's lit uniformly they use the warm
colored light the Amber lighting there's
no glaring lights in your face and
they're all directed down toward the
ground and just
all right doing those fairly simple
things
this is from
Buffalo Park
where we do a yearly public star party
with telescopes out there level parks in
the city limits of Flagstaff and this is
the sky for both little park so
um it works so we can do a lot better
job
and I'll finish on my challenge to uh
to the creative hacker crowd of the
world with things that we need to do yet
um there's a ton of research that needs
to be done both figuring out techniques
for research and ways to go with things
figuring out how to measure Sky glow
better how to measure these impacts how
to measure the issues with different
light sources this map this is the more
current uh
model of brightness over the lower 48
states this is from 2015 data the
satellite the the data comes from that
this map is derived from
is that the images in it are
functionally blind to Blue Light
they're made to image for weather
Imaging and they don't want the
scattering that you get a blue light in
their nighttime Imaging so they're blind
to Blue Light and we need to see what
this blue light is shining up the sky
all you're seeing in these images is
basically the longer wavelengths of Y so
this is not really good indication on
the level of Sky glow but it's what
we've got we need better satellites so
anybody who wants to build a better
satellite you can come and see me
there's a tremendous amount of data
mining that could be done there's
already lots of data out there about
everything from ecological issues human
health things safety issues like those
roadway things the data is out there and
there's also data about light pollution
and Lighting systems and things there's
a lot of correlation that could be done
to provide good research to give us more
tools to work with
this whole question of roadway safety
so by far more fatal accidents happen on
the roadways during the daytime at night
but your odds of having accident or
night or higher and that has always been
blamed on it being dark
well of course you have more accident
because it's dark so what we do is we
put in street lights
but the reality is it's well known now
that roadway accidents are heavily
influenced by alcohol and by fatigue
it's also known that both of those
things are much more prevalent at night
than they are during the daytime so how
much of the nighttime increase in
accidents per mile driven is because it
got dark and how much it was because of
these other issues and does the lighting
help these other issues at all again
there's data out there on these things
but it needs to be analyzed more
um
I have thousands literally of papers
looking at light at night issues from
all across these different
fields from Health to engineering to
ecological things
we don't have one good resource set up
we could definitely use some help with
creating libraries that researchers
could use if say if you're working on
health and you're also interested well I
wonder how this affects the animals you
know these things I'm looking at human
health it'd be great to be able to pull
these things together so I see a real
need for that and then finishing up
there's a lot of always need for
outreach things we need web development
we need video creation and things like
that to tell these stories more
effectively in places in the halls in
the halls of power where they matter so
we can get things done so I will finish
up by showing
my contact information
um I don't want to take time now and
open up your questions I think I've
probably eaten my time over right about
to the minute so uh that's me I drew at
illinoislighting.org that's one of the
organizations that I'm in by Illinois
Branch
um
contact me or see me after when you see
me around here or something or other I
would be glad to answer questions
discuss things more or recruit people
who would actually like to join in on
this uh this effort so thank you very
much for your attention
[Applause]
there we go
right here
[Music]
thank you