By Cheryl Blackerby
Have you ever driven by a sports complex at night and noticed the lights burning bright, though no one was playing or working on the fields? Or seen empty downtown buildings lit up after working hours, or streetlights and outdoor globe lights that blast more light into the sky than on the ground?
Top-shielded lights at The Yacht and Racquet Club (above)
and LED lights at Boca Mar (below) focus the light on the ground
rather than into the sky, a key objective of the International Dark Sky Association.
That’s the kind of wasteful lighting the nonprofit Inter-national Dark-Sky Association wants to pull the plug on.
In Florida, excessive lighting is a particular problem on the coasts and in the Everglades, where it disrupts the biological cycles of wildlife.
“Light pollution” can chase fish away from the shoreline, and studies have shown that the glow from sports stadiums can interfere with the mating habits of frogs.
It can be devastating for sea turtles nesting on Palm Beach County’s coast. 100 years ago, turtle hatchlings relied on the brightest horizon at night to find the water. That was easy, since the moon and stars lit the sky and reflected off the ocean.
“We’re now lighting up beaches, hotels and homes, and it’s creating disorientation for hatchlings. They come out of sandy nests and go to the brightest horizon, which means they can walk across A1A toward artificial lights. I’ve seen that and it’s not pleasant. During turtle nesting season you see them crushed in the road,” said Bryan Bodie, president of the Palm Beach County Chapter of IDA.
In Palm Beach County, there is another phenomenon with harmful light — the light glow from cities on the west side of the Intracoastal Waterway. It is causing problems for turtles on the beach even when beach condos are turning off lights.
“Cities on the other side of the Intracoastal are sending so much light up into the sky, the beachfront condos are creating shadow boxes on the beach with light coming through between the condo buildings,” said Bodie. “The mother turtles go to the darker sections of beach to lay their eggs, and we are finding unnatural concentrations of nests in these shadows. They are not dispersed along the beach like they should be.”
The Council of Science and Public Health reports studies that show nighttime artificial lighting adversely affects humans, too. It disrupts circadian biological rhythms that can increase cancer risks and some chronic diseases, and even contribute to obesity.
“The rhythms of day and night are embedded in all life,” said Bodie.
The Palm Beach Chapter of the International Dark-Sky Association was founded in July 2012 to educate South Florida about the benefits of dark skies for people and the natural world, to offer guidance for responsible outdoor lighting practices, and to restore access to the starry nights.
The chapter was founded by Bodie and chapter vice president Eric Vandernoot, astronomer and instructor at Florida Atlantic University.
The chapter recently gave the Yacht and Racquet Club of Boca Raton, 2711 North Ocean Blvd., the 2012 IDA Lighting Design Award for quality of lighting. Lawrence Demme, general manager, accepted the award given Feb. 19 at the Beach Condominium Association meeting. Kirt Rusenko, marine conservationist at Gumbo Limbo Nature Center, also got an award for his work improving the lighting at the Yacht and Racquet Club of Boca Raton.
The Yacht and Racquet Club is in the process of changing all of their “lollipop lights,” globes on a pole that blast 60 percent of their light into the sky, to top- and side-shielded fixtures that illuminate the ground. They also changed bulbs in ceiling-mounted canisters on balconies to LED amber light, which has much less glare and is much easier on the eyes.
Boca Mar Condominiums, 310 South Ocean Blvd., also will be given a 2012 IDA Lighting Design Award on March 2 at the Sea Turtle Day Festival at Gumbo Limbo Nature Center. Boca Mar also changed the light bulbs on their balconies to an LED amber light, and used top- and side-shielded amber light around the pool and deck.
The International Dark-Sky Association was founded by two astronomers — a professional, David Crawford, and an amateur, physician Dr. Tim Hunter — in Tucson, Ariz., in frustration during 1988 after having nights of star-gazing ruined by light pollution.
Crawford and Hunter wanted to get people to think about the negative effects of manmade lighting on the environment and also the economy. If people cut down on the amount of light used at night, more stars would be visible for astronomers, less money would be wasted by governments, businesses and homeowners, and more nocturnal animals would be able to live their lives as nature intended. The group estimates that Americans waste $2.2 billion a year on unnecessary lighting.
IDA’s enemy has always been sky glow, the light that looks like an orange smog polluting the heavens. The comparison to a smog is more appropriate than many realize. Consider that the Griffith Observatory in Los Angles is frequently useless to astronomers because of fossil fuels’ smog during the day and sky glow smog during the night.
The growth of IDA has itself been meteoric.
The movement has spread across the United States and around the world. The organization now has offices in Australia and Belgium, more than 5,000 members in 70 countries, and a long list of corporate partners and supporters at all levels of government, including the National Park Service.
The IDA’s general meetings are the first Friday of every month at 5:30 p.m. at the FAU Observatory. The group will be represented at the Sea Turtle Day Festival at Gumbo Limbo tarting at 10 a.m. March 2. For more information, visit www.idapalmbeach.org.
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