Thursday, October 30, 2008
The End of Night: Why We Need Darkness
Go National Geographic!
I've been (quite futilely) trying online to get people with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome to consider turning off the light switch a bit more. (Ok a lot.) You might suppose that desperately ill, suffering people would be eager to try a fairly easy, natural way that someone else swears has worked wonders for them. If so, you couldn't possibly be more wrong! This is my second try, I got absolutely no-where two years ago - so I resolved to be much more forceful and jump straight down the throat of anyone who wanted to merely gainsay the research, but supplied no bibliography - just their prejudices. There have been very few takers willing to reach up to that switch and turn it off more often! But the good news is, there have been a couple. As Bruyner (Lance Armstrong's team manager) says in his book, if you want the prize, you have to be willing to bend a few fenders (he is notorious for his driving as he follows Lance on the tour along narrow mountain roads.)
Wholly by coincidence, at the local newsstand I see that the new November National Geographic has emblazoned on its cover: “The End of Night: Why We Need Darkness" which includes discussion of health effects for humans, and so many other animals. I've included below the relevant quotes:
Light Pollution
Our Vanishing Night
Most city skies have become virtually empty of stars.
Published: November 2008
By Verlyn Klinkenborg
Ill-designed lighting washes out the darkness of night and radically alters the light levels—and light rhythms—to which many forms of life, including ourselves, have adapted. Wherever human light spills into the natural world, some aspect of life—migration, reproduction, feeding—is affected.
For most of human history, the phrase "light pollution" would have made no sense. Imagine walking toward London on a moonlit night around 1800, when it was Earth's most populous city. Nearly a million people lived there, making do, as they always had, with candles and rushlights and torches and lanterns. Only a few houses were lit by gas, and there would be no public gaslights in the streets or squares for another seven years. From a few miles away, you would have been as likely to smell London as to see its dim collective glow.
....
Light is a powerful biological force, and on many species it acts as a magnet, a process being studied by researchers such as Travis Longcore and Catherine Rich, co-founders of the Los Angeles-based Urban Wildlands Group. The effect is so powerful that scientists speak of songbirds and seabirds being "captured" by searchlights on land or by the light from gas flares on marine oil platforms, circling and circling in the thousands until they drop. Migrating at night, birds are apt to collide with brightly lit tall buildings; immature birds on their first journey suffer disproportionately.
....
Frogs and toads living near brightly lit highways suffer nocturnal light levels that are as much as a million times brighter than normal, throwing nearly every aspect of their behavior out of joint, including their nighttime breeding choruses.
....
Unlike astronomers, most of us may not need an undiminished view of the night sky for our work, but like most other creatures we do need darkness. Darkness is as essential to our biological welfare, to our internal clockwork, as light itself. The regular oscillation of waking and sleep in our lives—one of our circadian rhythms—is nothing less than a biological expression of the regular oscillation of light on Earth. So fundamental are these rhythms to our being that altering them is like altering gravity.
For the past century or so, we've been performing an open-ended experiment on ourselves, extending the day, shortening the night, and short-circuiting the human body's sensitive response to light. The consequences of our bright new world are more readily perceptible in less adaptable creatures living in the peripheral glow of our prosperity. But for humans, too, light pollution may take a biological toll. At least one new study has suggested a direct correlation between higher rates of breast cancer in women and the nighttime brightness of their neighborhoods.
In the end, humans are no less trapped by light pollution than the frogs in a pond near a brightly lit highway. Living in a glare of our own making, we have cut ourselves off from our evolutionary and cultural patrimony—the light of the stars and the rhythms of day and night. In a very real sense, light pollution causes us to lose sight of our true place in the universe, to forget the scale of our being, which is best measured against the dimensions of a deep night with the Milky Way—the edge of our galaxy—arching overhead.
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/11/light-pollution/klinkenborg-text/
I've been (quite futilely) trying online to get people with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome to consider turning off the light switch a bit more. (Ok a lot.) You might suppose that desperately ill, suffering people would be eager to try a fairly easy, natural way that someone else swears has worked wonders for them. If so, you couldn't possibly be more wrong! This is my second try, I got absolutely no-where two years ago - so I resolved to be much more forceful and jump straight down the throat of anyone who wanted to merely gainsay the research, but supplied no bibliography - just their prejudices. There have been very few takers willing to reach up to that switch and turn it off more often! But the good news is, there have been a couple. As Bruyner (Lance Armstrong's team manager) says in his book, if you want the prize, you have to be willing to bend a few fenders (he is notorious for his driving as he follows Lance on the tour along narrow mountain roads.)
Wholly by coincidence, at the local newsstand I see that the new November National Geographic has emblazoned on its cover: “The End of Night: Why We Need Darkness" which includes discussion of health effects for humans, and so many other animals. I've included below the relevant quotes:
Light Pollution
Our Vanishing Night
Most city skies have become virtually empty of stars.
Published: November 2008
By Verlyn Klinkenborg
Ill-designed lighting washes out the darkness of night and radically alters the light levels—and light rhythms—to which many forms of life, including ourselves, have adapted. Wherever human light spills into the natural world, some aspect of life—migration, reproduction, feeding—is affected.
For most of human history, the phrase "light pollution" would have made no sense. Imagine walking toward London on a moonlit night around 1800, when it was Earth's most populous city. Nearly a million people lived there, making do, as they always had, with candles and rushlights and torches and lanterns. Only a few houses were lit by gas, and there would be no public gaslights in the streets or squares for another seven years. From a few miles away, you would have been as likely to smell London as to see its dim collective glow.
....
Light is a powerful biological force, and on many species it acts as a magnet, a process being studied by researchers such as Travis Longcore and Catherine Rich, co-founders of the Los Angeles-based Urban Wildlands Group. The effect is so powerful that scientists speak of songbirds and seabirds being "captured" by searchlights on land or by the light from gas flares on marine oil platforms, circling and circling in the thousands until they drop. Migrating at night, birds are apt to collide with brightly lit tall buildings; immature birds on their first journey suffer disproportionately.
....
Frogs and toads living near brightly lit highways suffer nocturnal light levels that are as much as a million times brighter than normal, throwing nearly every aspect of their behavior out of joint, including their nighttime breeding choruses.
....
Unlike astronomers, most of us may not need an undiminished view of the night sky for our work, but like most other creatures we do need darkness. Darkness is as essential to our biological welfare, to our internal clockwork, as light itself. The regular oscillation of waking and sleep in our lives—one of our circadian rhythms—is nothing less than a biological expression of the regular oscillation of light on Earth. So fundamental are these rhythms to our being that altering them is like altering gravity.
For the past century or so, we've been performing an open-ended experiment on ourselves, extending the day, shortening the night, and short-circuiting the human body's sensitive response to light. The consequences of our bright new world are more readily perceptible in less adaptable creatures living in the peripheral glow of our prosperity. But for humans, too, light pollution may take a biological toll. At least one new study has suggested a direct correlation between higher rates of breast cancer in women and the nighttime brightness of their neighborhoods.
In the end, humans are no less trapped by light pollution than the frogs in a pond near a brightly lit highway. Living in a glare of our own making, we have cut ourselves off from our evolutionary and cultural patrimony—the light of the stars and the rhythms of day and night. In a very real sense, light pollution causes us to lose sight of our true place in the universe, to forget the scale of our being, which is best measured against the dimensions of a deep night with the Milky Way—the edge of our galaxy—arching overhead.
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/11/light-pollution/klinkenborg-text/
