But Eklöf is also interested in impacts that aren’t strictly health related. “The Darkness Manifesto” tracks how light pollution has increased insomnia, depression and even obesity: Leptin, the hormone that controls appetite, works in conjunction with melatonin, the light-sensitive hormone that tells us when to sleep. “They are all interrelated too, so it threatens the whole system.” “And with every species studied, you find that light has some effects,” he said. The book was published in Sweden in 2020, and over the past couple of years, the subject has exploded, he said.
#Stars go dim how to
When Eklöf, who also runs a consultancy that includes advising companies and governments on how to minimize their light pollution footprint, began doing research for “The Darkness Manifesto,” the diverse impacts of light pollution had yet to be extensively studied.
#Stars go dim full
Even coral, which in Australia normally reproduces once a year when December’s full moon induces it to release a “snowstorm” of male and female sex cells, is getting confused disoriented by artificial light, the gamete release is no longer synchronized, diminishing reproduction and contributing, it is thought, to coral bleaching. On one Australian island, the light was so disruptive that wallabies, whose gestation is normally triggered by the summer solstice, ended up giving birth so much later in the season that food had run out.
Tricked by outdoor lighting, urban trees stay green longer than their rural counterparts. Newly hatched sea turtles head inland toward the city’s glow rather than to the moonlit sea. They haven’t gotten their nectar (and transported the plants’ pollen around), haven’t found a partner, and haven’t laid any eggs.”īut it’s not just insects. Even those that survive “haven’t achieved their night’s goals. “Many of them die before dawn, sometimes of sheer exhaustion,” Eklöf writes. As “The Darkness Manifesto” explains in fascinating - if terrifying - detail, all living organisms are governed by light-sensitive circadian rhythms that, if disrupted, can unleash effects that range from an impaired sense of direction (pity the poor dung beetle, who, unable to see the stars that help it navigate, can’t get its nutrient-rich ball of excrement home) to mass executions (witness the fate of the swarm of grasshoppers that, drawn by the beam shooting from the Luxor casino, descended on Las Vegas in 2019, only to end up like so much lifeless confetti cluttering the Strip).Īs anyone who has ever watched moths circle the porch light endlessly can attest, artificial bulbs can be fatal to insects. But the impact of all that light goes far beyond impeded stargazing. Today, one-third of the world’s people cannot see the Milky Way, on even the clearest night. By 2016, a full 80 percent of the global population - and 99 percent of the population in the United States and Europe - lived under light-polluted skies. 14, is a wide-ranging exploration of humanity’s troubled relationship with darkness, and the damaging effects of our drive to overcome it.Īstronomers first began using the term “light pollution” in the 1960s, and today it most often refers to the persistent glow that emanates from cities after dusk, blocking out the stars and tinting the night sky an orangish-gray. The resulting book, “The Darkness Manifesto,” which came out in English from Scribner on Feb.
That research soon led Eklöf to investigate how other species are affected by artificial lighting - including the species responsible for installing floodlights in churchyards. Together with his adviser, Jens Rydell, Eklöf launched a new bat census and discovered that in 30 years - the average bat’s life span - fully half the area’s colonies had disappeared. “I started to think, how do the bats actually react to this?” Eklöf says. In the intervening years, however, those churches - whose belfries are famously appreciated by the winged mammals - had been illuminated with floodlights. The surrounding grounds were dark, as they had been decades earlier when his academic adviser had tallied the bat populations in the region’s churches. The zoologist Johan Eklöf began to consider the disappearance of darkness in our brightly lit world in 2015, when he was out counting bats in southern Sweden.
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