#i swear in women-only city night illumination wouldn't be necessary

[balkanradfem]

I'm so torn about this issue. City maintenance crew has replaced street lamps around my building. They did it so fast too, I never saw the construction, I only noticed this morning that outside looks completely different, that it's darker now.

The lamps we had emitted warm, yellow, glowing light, and they were whimsy and interesting, they made the street look good! They were nice round lamps with the tops shaded, so they looked like glowing half-circles, and the nice orange-yellow light would make the entire street look homely. Few of them were tangled in tree branches, and I would linger around them in the evenings, watching the light make the leaves glow, imagining I was in Narnia.

New lamps... have none of that. They're bare, tall spike-looking things, with a horizontal shelf that emits white light straight down. The street looks slightly dystopian, corporate, like they put the absolute minimum effort in making sure there's some kind of light. None of the whimsy, none of the detail, no Narnia here. It looks like a corporate parking lot.

However.. the new lamps emit much less light. And they're much efficiently shaded, so less light is being cast up. Which means, the streets are darker, and more importantly, the sky is darker. That means less light-pollution being emitted into the atmosphere. Which means, I can sometimes catch a glimpse of a star. I can stop being annoyed at how light it is outside during all hours of the night. I love darkness in the night, I hate that we need to have lamps glowing the entire time. I like less light. I like less light pollution. One could argue that this is the move in the right direction, and the city is causing less light pollution with this change, so this could potentially be good for the environment.

But it's not that simple! If they went and took down all the yellow, whimsy, fully functional lamps, and made new, minimalistic, boring corporate lamps, they had to take out new materials, they had to mine that from the earth, they had to spend an enormous amount of energy, labour, resources, to make and purchase these new lamps. That means the city is using tax money and resources, and natural minerals in order to replace already functional lamps. Were they really doing a good thing, doing all this just to miminize light pollutin in the city?

And let's say they did this differently; if we assume a city lamp doesn't last forever, and they would have eventually broken down or stopped working, what if they phased them out one by one, replaced each one as it became defective, instead of taking them all out and once and replacing it with the new ones? Wouldn't that have been a more economical, environmentally-friendly thing to do?

And the thing is, I'm not sure this city is actually worried about the light pollution as much as I am, because every damn holiday they're blasting lights from all direction. Every december they're having all the bridges showered in light, they're having giant glowing figures placed around everywhere, they're wrapping every damn building in so much lights, all the trees are having light globes hanging from them, it's a nightmare, and I hate it. And then they're having all this additional holidays and celebrations where they throw fireworks (I'm not even joking they have fireworks 8 times a year) and putting lights everywhere. It's supposed to be for 'tourism'. If they were trying to reduce the light pollution, that clownery would be the first thing to go. I don't think they replaced the lamps to reduce the light pollution.

But then this is my point, why did they do this? If they're trying to make the city look nicer for tourists, why would they tear out beautiful whimsy lamps that made the place look human and nice? If they're trying to reduce the amount of energy spent yearly for the illumination of the city, why not stop overdoing the holiday lights? Who is benefiting from this? I need some answers.