At the Berkshire Bioblitz at BCC last Friday, participants found a Swainson’s thrush, dead on the ground after colliding with a building. Right now, songbirds like these, including the young of the year, are near the peak of their southerly fall migration. Using celestial cues to navigate, they fly at night. Up to a billion birds each year are estimated to die from window collisions. One cause of this is artificial light at light, which disorients and traps migrating birds, wasting precious energy and often causing them to slam into buildings and windows.
The LED revolution of the last few decades is responsible for the explosion in light pollution—creeping outward into rural areas at an astonishing 10 percent a year. “Dark sky” campaigns to reign it in are gaining traction across the country—and in the Berkshires. Last July, Berkshire Environmental Action Team (BEAT) brought in astronomer and president of DarkSky International’s Massachusetts chapter, James Lowenthal, to speak in Sheffield, sparking action in at least a few local residents. Last winter, Sheffield followed New Marlborough and joined 50 Massachusetts towns in passing a dark-sky bylaw at a special town meeting. And Becket residents are currently working on a bylaw that they hope will go before voters next spring.
It is not just migrating birds at stake: As Lowenthal made clear in his talk (available on YouTube), artificial light at night (ALAN) has worrisome implications for human health. Melatonin, produced by our bodies when the sun goes down, suppresses cancer, but exposure to the blue light present in LEDs (as opposed to the orange-spectrum light of fire or incandescent bulbs) suppresses melatonin production by 80 percent. Studies have shown a significant increase in cancers like breast and prostate in people exposed to blue light at night over long periods.
Wildlife, too, require darkness at night for their biological functions, as Lee Buttala highlighted in his “Self-Taught Gardener” column about nighttime pollination by moths, in response to Lowenthal’s talk. As Buttala also summarized, excessive, blinding, poorly shielded lights don’t actually make us safer and waste energy, but they do have easy solutions. Lowenthal spoke about shifting the narrative, the culture of fear, and “reclaiming darkness as a good thing that’s important for our souls and our actual safety and health.”
Neal Chamberlain is one Ashley Falls resident inspired by Lowenthal’s talk. He determined that many of his outdoor lights shined outward, producing glare, and wrote in the Sheffield Times about replacing “fixtures that send light up into the night sky with fully shielded fixtures that cast their light downward.” He is also making sure his LED lights are “soft white,” no cooler than 2700K.
Chamberlain has been leading a monthly moonlight stroll in advance of the full moon. “It’s a pleasure to see the smiles on folks’ faces as they discover how well they can see. What opens up is the night sky,” he writes.
Chamberlain calls Sheffield’s artificial-light bylaw, which only applies to new installations, “a start” but was encouraged by the hearty discussion at town meeting, due to some over-the-top holiday lights. “I thought the town meeting would have a bunch of ‘nobody going to tell me what to do’ types. Not so. It passed overwhelmingly.”
Sheffield Planning Board member Brittany Ebeling, who is also deputy director at BEAT, agrees that “the spirit of [the Sheffield bylaw] was right,” but regrets that, while it has a provision for neighborly disputes, it “has no governing teeth in the short term for existing structures.”
“When we as a Planning Board started working on it, we were much more aspirational about creating something like New Marlborough’s dark-sky bylaw, after which it was modeled, that actually has enforcement teeth. It would change existing lighting structures to make them better for wildlife and people.”
She thinks Sheffield voters “could have pushed ahead something much more progressive” than the pared-down version that passed but notes that “it has the potential to be replicated and strengthened in towns that want to make stronger moves.” Ebeling, who has a degree in urban policy, remarked, “It was amazing to me that rural communities were working on this issue in some ways with more stringent, rigorous bylaws than probably a city would be likely to enforce.”
Becket’s dark-sky bylaw
Destin Heilman, an astrophotographer and chemistry professor who has worked with several towns to create dark-sky bylaws, bought a house in Becket because “it’s one of the darker places that’s left in the Berkshires.” He thinks only a few towns in the Berkshires have acted on light pollution because people think it’s dark in the Berkshires, so why do they need light bylaws? “But that’s precisely why they’re needed. I’ve been telling everybody in Becket that they have a gem right now that’s fast going away, in that you can actually see the Milky Way when it’s clear outside, but only just. Fifteen years ago, it was really obvious, and now it’s right at the border of losing it, to the point where one person turns their backyard light on near you, you can’t see it anymore.”
“Becket has an opportunity to be a dark-sky destination in Massachusetts,” Heilman claims. “It’s not something that a lot of people appreciate, but there’s money to be made there, for one thing, but not if the dark skies go away.”
He began working on a bylaw, aimed mostly at commercial entities, prompted by “equal parts environmental protection, human health, and preservation of dark skies,” he explained. “It’s weird to think about, but we don’t have a precedent for artificial light blasting us with blue light.”
Heilman discovered that, compared to most other towns, Becket had hardly any bylaws in place. Some people “are just adamantly opposed to this,” he says, so he has been handing out FAQs at the dump in addition to holding astronomy nights, trying to dispel inaccurate perceptions that the bylaw would “tell people what to do” or that it would cost a lot of money for them to get new lights.
Simply put, he says, “When somebody puts a backyard light up, that means it’s a light for your backyard, not for your neighbor’s, not for the woods behind your house. You do have a right to put lights on your house. You don’t have the rights to put lights on somebody else’s.”
Other towns have found that “the most critical part of it is enforcement,” but he noted that Becket did approve a budget line item for enforcement of their bylaws generally.
Heilman believes Becket’s work on this issue can be a model for other towns in the Berkshires, as long as bylaws are matched to the culture of the town. He gave a talk in Monterey by request, and half their Select Board was there. “They were very curious as to what we were doing in Becket and how they could do the same.”
The website of Becket Dark Skies has copious resources for those interested in taking action at the level of their town, as does Dark Sky International. Bylaws aside, light pollution, relatively speaking, is easily remedied by individual home and business owners via cheap, common-sense adjustments that properly contain and shield lights. That information is available there too.
BirdCast, a tool that uses bird radar to forecast the intensity of nocturnal migration on a given night, swells to 392 million birds predicted to fly over the continent on the night of September 19. Whether it is the safer passage of those birds, or last month’s Perseids meteor shower, or the far-flung displays of the aurora borealis, which will likely appear again over the Berkshires with the help of dark skies, there are many reasons to turn off a few lights.
