Light Pollution, Light Intrusion: a Real Eyesore

Light pollution and light intrusion education is becoming a topic of more interest of late. With the ever increasing illumination of the night sky coupled with the wasted energy and the unwanted intrusion of light onto neighboring properties who may not appreciate their dark sky being ruined by stray lighting, this topic has been gaining steam lately, especially when you consider the fact that everyone moved into our forest setting for the nature and the beauty lest we forget this fact.

A thought experiment if I may. What if we replaced the topic from light to sound. Would anyone really appreciate loud music constantly intruding onto your property and into your ears? I would think not. In fact due to the abuses of over lighting we now have rules, laws and ordinances to combat this as pollution, abuse and excess. With a little intelligent design and a nod to light intrusion onto neighboring property this is an easy issue to remedy and at no cost over time. Our city engineers have already instituted this in our modern street lighting and all government buildings including schools. The next time you are driving at night note how modern LED lamps are designed to project all of it’s light energy downward. This wastes no energy and in fact it is an energy saver if less wattage is required to light the same square footage, go figure. We all can make a positive contribution today if we only use the wattage we need and direct it only onto property we own. Do we really believe others appreciate anything loud including loud lighting projected their way? I recently had to throw out a shirt because my wife said it was too loud proving loud comes in many forms. The first step we all can do is to limit our porch lights that scatter light outwards to 25 watts until it needs replacing with a modern LED down facing lamp and fixture. De-watting not only helps the environment it is plain and simple the neighborly thing to do.