#light pollution

[wachinyeya]

Millions of Birds Now Migrating Safely Through Darkened Texas Cities After Successful Lights Out Campaign https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/millions-of-birds-now-migrating-safely-through-darkened-texas-cities-after-successful-lights-out-campaign/

[acti-veg]

“We normalise the abnormal, and accept the unacceptable. Remember that more than 80 per cent of people live under light polluted skies, and two-thirds of Europeans are immersed in noise equivalent to constant rainfall. Many people have no idea what true darkness or quiet feels like.

Within that inexperience, vicious cycles begin to spin. As we desecrate sensory environments, we become accustomed to the results. As we push the animals away, we get used to their absence. As the problems of sensory pollution grow, our willingness to address it subsides. How do we solve a problem that we don’t realise exists?”

-Ed Yong, An Immense World

[hoot-alex]

Reducing light pollution at night helps migrating birds. Turn off the lights for them!

[zegalba]

Light pollution and fog blur the New York City skyline.

[miyrumiyru]

Emerald and Pink moffs

[itscolossal]

A Stunning Image of the Australian Desert Illuminates the Growing Problem of Satellite Pollution

[allthecanadianpolitics]

It's a massive undertaking, but two men are hoping to turn much of eastern Ontario into a dark-sky preserve — and they're leaning into astrotourism, something they say has been a growing trend since the pandemic. Dark-sky preserves are considered protected areas that try to reduce light pollution and preserve the night sky for animals, insects and plants that rely on it. With that comes astrotourism, where people venture to those areas to see objects in the night sky that aren't visible in cities.

Continue reading

Tagging: @newsfromstolenland

[futurebird]

The more I learn about light pollution harms insects, the more I want to try to help... do something about it. But I live in NYC. It feels like an impossible ask. A whole city devoted to making the most light pollution possible.

I strongly suspect that we'd see a greater variety of wildlife if we could dim the light a little.

Just using colors like red light can help. So can dark hours and motion sensors. What if one day, as a treat, every New Yorker got to see the milky way?

Most people doing light pollution activism are working in places like national parks & deep in the country, places that are almost dark, where the lights are encroaching especially as the cost of very bright LEDs keeps falling: companies and municipalities say "why not? what's the harm?"

The harm is vast. So many creatures need the night to live. Maybe humans need it too. We do, at least, need those creatures.

I care about insects most. But if you don't consider: no bugs, no song birds.

Is reducing light pollution in a big city a hopeless cause? Is it better to focus on those once perfectly dark places being lit up?

One positive of making light pollution an issue in a big city is how it would raise awareness. Imagine if, in the small hours of the night the lights slowly shifted red. Lights with motion sensors that slowly gutter out. You can see NYC on the horizon glowing like a bomb went off for miles, that glow could dim a bit, give the stars a chance to shine.

[quiltofstars]

The problem with satellites ☹️🛰️ // Greg Meyer MD

[lunarpunkwonder]

LunarPunk 🌙

Lunarpunk is Solarpunk for the night dwellers. Similar philosophy and movement but with a darker, bioluminescent, celestial aesthetic. With a focus on Community, Sustainability, Reducing Light Pollution, growing Native Flora and creating a livable and thriving home for the night dwelling Fauna (nocturnal animals, insects, and people too), and obviously, don't forget the Punk.

Lunarpunk is a very new and slowly growing subgenre and community, please continue to add new ideas, add to the conversation of sustainability, do research in your own area about the local flora and fauna, what you can do to help reduce light pollution, even if it's just coming from your home, how to be more energy efficient, how to reduce waste, save money on electricity, see if you can switch your lights to LEDs, speak with your neighbors about switching as well.

Any little bit counts.

[theofficialastronomy101]

What our vast universe looks like without light pollution

[iliketurtles55]

I'd wish upon a star, if only I could see one...

[acti-veg]

‘83 percent of people—and more than 99 percent of Americans and Europeans—are living under light-polluted skies. Every year, the proportion of the planet covered by artificial light gets 2 percent bigger and 2 percent brighter. A luminous fog now smothers a quarter of Earth's surface and is thick enough in many places to blot out the stars.

Over a third of humanity, and almost 80 percent of North Americans, can no longer see the Milky Way. "The thought of light traveling billions of years from distant galaxies only to be washed out in the last billionth of a second by the glow from the nearest strip mall depresses me no end," vision scientist Sonke Johnsen once wrote.

(…) Sensory pollution is the pollution of disconnection. It detaches us from the cosmos. It drowns out the stimuli that link animals to their surroundings and to each other. In making the planet brighter and louder, we have also fragmented it. While razing rainforests and bleaching coral reefs, we have also endangered sensory environments. That must now change. We have to save the quiet, and preserve the dark.’

-Ed Yong, An Immense World

[jadiaashley]

the night sky <3

[literaryvein-reblogs]

Noctalgia: "Sky Grief"

a feeling of sadness felt by some people because light pollution means they can no longer see a dark sky at night

to express sky grief for the accelerating loss of the home environment of our shared skies, a disappearance felt globally and deserving its own field of study of "nyctology"

Sources: 1 2

[miyrumiyru]

She's so huge, robust and have spikes on legs. I had a hard time to move her to the safe place 😅

Apple Hawkmoth (Langia zenzeroides)