After over a decade of living in the city, I chose the plot of land, a flat patchwork of pine and oak at the base of the Catskill Mountains, for its terrible lighting. The area so dark, I could watch the champagne fizz of shooting stars from my bedroom window; catch a glimpse of the harvest moon while brushing my teeth. Every evening, the night pressed in against my windows in a way that felt visceral, like a velvet blanket tucking me in.
This was by design. When I had my 1,900-square-foot home built — pocketed away from the road, with trees and mountain brush mostly hiding signs of any nearby houses — I chose floor-to-ceiling glass in place of opaque walls. So deep was my desire to connect to the outside, to the night skies, that when the cost of construction threatened to go over my budget, I cut out air conditioning instead of a chance at a view. Since then, I’ve never even thought about curtains. Why would I? The dark skies were a salve.
But not anymore. Or, at least, not in the same way. There has been an uptick in nearby lights from neighbors, which means an artificial florescence now blots out the sky at times, while leaking an ambient glow into my yard, my bedroom, everywhere. One particular floodlight ripples out a harsh, chlorine-white light from dusk to dawn. The omnipresent light giving the sense that someone is always there. If I sit on one edge of my couch, the bulb shines in my face like a spotlight.
More than being a thorn, there is a name for this: light trespass. It is a term to describe a form of light pollution where illumination — from a neighbor or a business or street lighting — spills onto one’s property in a way that creates a disturbance. While not a commonly-known phrase, it is a common problem. In the course of reporting this story, I heard from upstate friends dealing with similar circumstances: a streetlamp erected on an otherwise pitch-black country road, a security light shining through the woods like an alien tractor beam into the person’s windows. Light-polluting neighbors whose trees shine “as bright as Broadway.” As one woman from a nearby upstate town posed to me: What is the point of an illuminated shrub at 2 a.m.?
Light trespass is a term to describe a form of light pollution where illumination — from a neighbor or a business or street lighting — spills onto one’s property in a way that creates a disturbance.Credit…Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
These one-off situations are individual and small, but also not: It’s not just my dark sky disappearing, but everyone’s. According to a 2016 study published in the journal Science Advances, 83 percent of the world’s population lives under light-polluted skies, with one-third of humans unable to see the Milky Way at all. Later findings, in the same journal, noted that the amount of light-touched land increases by roughly two percent every year.
“Light pollution is absolutely growing,” Ashley Wilson, director of conservation for the International Dark-Sky Association (IDA), an organization working to combat light pollution, told me. “Not even just our use of light, but the excessive use of it. There was a report published earlier this year by the Department of Energy which stated that 99 percent of the light that we emit has no clear purpose. It boggles my mind. My analogy is with water. You would never want to leave your sprinklers on all night in the hope it is going to water a specific plant in a pot. Why are we doing the same with our light?”
As explanations go, light pollution is considered “the inappropriate or excessive use of artificial light,” according to IDA. It’s “a sensory pollutant, much like noise,” said Andrea Bonisoli Alquati, Ph.D., an assistant professor of biological sciences at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. “We’re not talking about chemicals that are spread in the environment as is usual for pollution. Instead, we’re talking about the physical quality of the environment through the senses.”
The most known form of light pollution is the big-city stuff: the brightly-lit buildings, the invasive LED glow of billboards and airports and parking lots. Those obnoxiously orange streetlights. This is called skyglow. As Tyler Nordgren, Ph.D., an astronomer who previously worked for the National Park Service, explained it: Skyglow happens when light beams travel up into the air and encounter vapors, dust particles and pollutants, which then causes the light to scatter. And so, instead of shooting off into space, it’s sent back to Earth, meaning that all you see is a dome of fragmented light.
But you don’t need New York City-level wattage to experience light pollution. In addition to light trespass, another type of light pollution is glare: when a bright object shines into our eyes, causing our night vision to become so overwhelmed we can no longer see faint objects. Faraway stars, distant things in the sky, meteor showers — they all disappear, Mr. Nordgren said.
Think about the poetry, the discoveries, the stories — Vincent van Gogh’s “The Starry Night” — all made possible by looking up. “I don’t think people realize what we’re in the process of losing,” Mr. Nordgren wistfully told me.
To put it another way: The collective want to illuminate a shed at all hours comes at a great cost. “To feel awe at the night sky means you have felt this smallness or this grandness or this interconnectedness to the world around you,” Mr. Nordgren said, adding later, “If you never look up because there’s nothing there to see, suddenly you’ve shrunk the universe — this thing that is millions of light years across — down to just you, your neighborhood, and your own problems. It shrinks us and it shrinks us in a depressing way.”
Then there’s the harm to humans from the over-lighting of our lives. “Up to one in five genes became activated with a daily or circadian rhythm, with hundreds directly involved in its control,” Mr. Bonisoli Alquati said. “If the signals — natural light and darkness — that tie those rhythms together is deregulated, it is potentially affecting many other functions in our bodies.” Several studies have even shown an increased risk of cancer for those exposed to artificial light.
Entire ecosystems suffer, too, including bird migration patterns, turtle nesting, even the rest cycle of trees. “There has not been one species that has been studied that has not been affected by light pollution,” said Bettymaya Foott, director of engagement at IDA. “More than half of species are nocturnal.”
Which is why rural communities in particular, like those in the Catskills, stand to lose so much. They are ecologically-rich areas, while serving as some of the last portals into our night skies. But like everything, the pandemic changed things in many mountain towns, as an influx of people gravitated toward the area. This means more homes and more development and more traffic. All things that bring the accouterment of light.
“Dark skies are disappearing everywhere; this is not just a problem in the urban environment,” Mr. Bonisoli Alquati said. “It doesn’t take the extent of light that is present in cities to have effects on organisms and people.”
And yet, light pollution ordinances don’t always exist. This isn’t a function of small towns, but most places. The focus on conservation is often centered much more on land and water. Space, and by function, the sky, has always been out there, something far, far away.
In Ulster County, where my home is, there are dark-sky compliant lighting standards in the majority of the town’s zoning statutes, but most of its municipal codes for residential areas don’t include light pollution as a form of nuisance, according to Dennis Doyle, director of the county’s planning department. And even those that do, enforcement is sporadic, if it happens at all. Cross a county line and the rules may be entirely different.
The unchanging fact is that there are no official dark-sky areas in the Catskills, according to IDA. From one of my favorite lookout points, I can gaze out over the valleys in between the peaks and see unwieldy patches of light, a melancholy blue glow where darkness used to be. It’s not the city-sized incandescence I’m used to, but as I know all too well, just a few bad lights can change everything.
Others know it, too. Earlier this year, New York State Senator Brad Hoylman, a Manhattan Democrat, introduced legislation called the “Dark Skies Act” in hopes of creating a uniform set of rules for outdoor artificial lighting to preserve the night sky. It has yet to pass the Environmental Conservation Committee for a vote.
Now feels like the time to clarify: I am not anti-light. When I say I love the dark, what I mean is: watching the trees move in the candlelight beams of the moon, seeing the clouds shape-shift around the stars, catching a vignette of lightning bugs sparking in the folds of summer’s dusk. To appreciate the dark is to love light in its most wild and unfiltered form. It’s an opportunity to see things, just in a different way.
I also recognize that what I see as an irritant, others see as a form of safety. (Although it’s worth noting that various studies fail to show a correlation between lower crime and more lights, and in fact, many experts I spoke with said that over-lighting gives criminals dark spaces to operate in. An always-on light is less of an alert than, say, a motion light that signals the arrival of a new presence.) I recognize that what makes me moony about not having outdoor lighting, others see as a hazard. Including my own mom. Once, when visiting me, she tripped as she went out to get something out of her car. I have heard about how I need to install outdoor lighting ever since. It’s really about being “dark-sky friendly, which doesn’t mean dark ground,” Ms. Foott rightly pointed out to me.
It is with this in mind that I finally built up the courage to talk to one of my closest neighbors. I knocked, they didn’t answer, and to be honest, I have yet to knock again. My fellow dark-sky acolytes at IDA suggested writing a letter, making sure I’m clear in that I’m not asking my neighbor to take down their light, but simply redirect it to the ground. Most of the time, every single expert I spoke to reminded me, a neighbor isn’t even aware that there’s an issue.
There is a reason that conversations like this feel hard: It can seem nit-picky, tricky to reach a consensus on how much light is too much. (In reality, it is not. Dark-sky friendly lighting should be pointed downward, shielded, warm in color, the lowest light level possible, and serve a clear purpose.)
But while noise, messy yards, and other ilk that rile up homeowner’s associations, are recognized as problems, we don’t see light in the same way. An example: If a neighbor had an incessantly barking dog or was throwing nightly ragers, we would never tell the person on the receiving end of all those decibels to install better insulation. But the onus to solve the problem of light pollution is often placed on the aggrieved party to install blackout curtains, draw the shades, calm down.
“You can install blackout curtains, but birds can’t, insects can’t, people facing homelessness can’t,” Ms. Foott said, adding later, “You have a right for your property to be lit in the way you want it to. Access to the night sky should be a human right.”
Except that light has been billed to us as inherently good. It’s seen as soft and harmless. Leaving a light on for someone, a harbinger of a safe port. You are welcome here. The dark is for bad guys and boogeymen.
But the real monster is not out there in the shadows. “It’s in all of our stories that darkness is scary and evil and light is progress and purity. I think it takes being out under the night sky and looking up and experiencing the darkness to not have those societal perceptions of the darkness,” Ms. Foott said.
And we can all have that “at the speed of light,” Ms. Foott said. All we have to do is flick a switch.
