Within the suburbs of Toronto, amongst the endless stretches of bungalows, cul-de-sacs, and 1920s brick houses sits a trojan horse. The houses here are nearly identical to one another. With close inspection, one might be able to identify a pattern. There are similar layouts that seem to repeat every three to four plots, perhaps with different window frames, alternative trees, and personal touches put on by the owners over the past century. But there is one house that isn’t quite right. It’s too boxy. It’s too small. Its front door isn’t wooden with a glass transom but is rusted steel. A glance behind the long stretching driveway reveals something else unusual — what starts as a sloped gabled roof in front becomes a cube behind. Robert Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown had a term for this type of architecture in their 1972 essay, Learning from Las Vegas; this building is a decorated shed.¹

A decorated shed is defined by the architects as “systems of space and structure [that] are directly at the service of program, and ornament is applied independently”. In other words, the building’s facade is tacked on separately to the structure. But this building in Toronto is no ordinary decorated shed. This building is not a motel with an elaborate sign attempting to pull visitors from the busy road. Contained within its brick walls and suburban detailing sits a power substation — a place where high voltage electricity is stepped down to a domestic rate. And this infrastructure masking as a house acts as a symbol of our treatment and regard, and misuse of energy systems.

Electricity surrounds us in our cities and towns, transported by underground utility ducts and ubiquitous power lines. It is converted to usable voltage within substations, these places hidden away and masked by high, impenetrable fences or even false building facades. It is embedded within the walls of our homes, contained within wires that bring in electricity, powering our devices and keeping us connected. It is hidden both out of necessity and desire; it can be both ugly and dangerous. But our interaction with this crucial substance is almost non-existent.

Intangible, invisible, and elusive energy maintains its mystery.

We grow up learning about sparse, abstract concepts about electricity. A tale is told of an inventor harnessing the power of lighting through a novel experiment involving a kite, a key, and a thunderstorm. Later in life, we learn of periods in which energy shortages affected us — miners’ strikes that reduced supplies, petroleum shortages leaving cars waiting for a fill-up, and brown-outs caused by overconsumption on sweltering summer days.

For much of the world, energy is anonymous. It is something that we take for granted in energy-secure places. We expect it to occur naturally and be there, much like we expect an open a tap to give us water or our lungs to breathe for us. But for much of human history, and for much of the world, this has not been the case. For too many people, energy is not the stable, always available substance that we in wealthier nations have grown used to.

This lack of visibility and understanding — this inability to see and understand how the system works — leads us to abuse and take for granted what we have. Much of the world assumes energy to be an infinite supply, so we take and we take with little regard to its provenance or its impact on the earth. Energy consumption accounts for nearly three-quarters of all global carbon emissions. This figure can be broken down further, with industrial energy usage accounting for 24% of all emissions, transport 16%, and buildings 18% of global greenhouse gases emitted into our atmosphere.²

But, there is hope on the horizon. Energy systems are modernising and beginning to decarbonise. A shift is happening. Our drift towards the horizon is happening, albeit faster in some places than others. In many parts of the world, fossil fuels are beginning to be phased out.

In the UK, renewable energy sources accounted for 42% of all generated energy in 2020. Power from these sources includes both on-shore and off-shore wind, solar farms, hydroelectric power, bioenergy, and waste to energy processing. But that only tells us half of the story. 41% of generated energy still comes from gas and coal sources. With time, this number will continue to decrease. Coal, the worst polluter of all within the energy sector, has reduced from supplying 70% of the UK’s energy in 1990 to less than 3% today.³ ⁴ ⁵

Energy produced from renewables continues to dramatically increase both within the UK and globally. This is significantly aided by the rapid decrease in costs to both build and maintain renewable energy sources. The International Renewable Energy Agency has found that in 2020 alone, the costs of concentrating solar power decreased by 16%, on-shore wind by 13%, off-shore wind by 9%, and solar photovoltaics by 7%.³

Whilst this transition is certainly good news, the reality is that much of the world is still powered through carbon-intense energy practices. And despite many living in places where the energy transition is happening rapidly, a considerable amount of what we consume originates from energy obtained from carbon-intense practices. These come from places in which the transition is happening at a slower rate, where high costs, expensive roll-outs, and significantly larger demands for energy make this transition a staggeringly slow reality

But to simply look at where and how we get our energy, only looks at a fraction of the problem. The harsh reality is that a constantly increasing demand for more energy is not sustainable. Even if we are able to create a fully carbon-neutral energy, global energy system, we would still need ways of transporting goods, services, and people in a decarbonised manner. In addition to pushing for and urging a rapid transition away from fossil fuels, we must go further and consider the weight of our own actions.

To fight climate change, we must radically alter our relationship with energy.

This is an opportunity to do things differently, to change how we both interact with and consume electricity.

But there are a series of challenges we need to begin to consider when thinking about energy as an embodied practice of design. This opportunity goes far beyond the world of decorated sheds, architects, and product designers, and instead challenges us to reframe our relationship with the substance that powers our lives.

Energy can be material and tangible. Although it is not visible to the naked eye, there is an opportunity to make it visible through design. In many regards, this challenge shares a number of parallel threads with that of data consumption. By not seeing what we are consuming, we take without limit. A barrier only exists through fear of paying too much, whether made immediately visible through a smart meter, or at the end of the month when a bill comes in for our usage. How can we begin to make both direct and indirect consumption of energy visible? How might we begin to understand it through the goods we purchase, the foods we consume, or even through its usage in our homes and offices?

Energy does not have to be described in a dry, overly technical language. This makes it inaccessible and confusing for the general population. A watt, although it is a common enough term, carries little to no weight. And therefore, a kilowatt, megawatt, or gigawatt also brings with it little to no meaning to most people. If we are to reduce our consumption and alter our relationship with energy, we must explore and find ways to communicate better using simple and easy to understand terminology.

Lastly, the majority of the products that we use today demand constant availability of energy. Of course, this certainly makes sense when we think about the importance of being able to use a device or tool at any time. Still, perhaps we need to reconsider how usage may alter depending on energy availability. What, for instance, might happen if we design with renewable rhythms in mind? This requires a change in consumer mindset, but this is a challenge that can be addressed through design.

We may look at the house in the suburb of Toronto that masks a substation as either a novel form of hiding some deemed unpleasing to the eye, or we might see it as an abomination, masking its true form. But in reality, this masking of energy exists everywhere. As designers, we must consider the material properties of energy in what we make. We owe it to our planet to explore an alternative path — to develop ways for people to appreciate, understand, and balance their lives with respect, not fear of, energy systems.

Anonymous Energies is a piece written as a part of Takram’s investigations into energy systems. More information about the project can be found at Close to Home.

References

1
Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi, Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977), 87.

2
https://ourworldindata.org/ghg-emissions-by-sector

3
https://www.irena.org/newsroom/pressreleases/2021/Jun/Majority-of-New-Renewables-Undercut-Cheapest-Fossil-Fuel-on-Cost

4
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/end-of-coal-power-to-be-brought-forward-in-drive-towards-net-zero

5 https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/976000/Energy_Trends_March_2021.pdf

Anonymous Energies was originally published in Takram Stories on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This past May has been balmy and hot in London — an unusual, but welcome break from our typical slow-to-start summers. Like so many other people throughout the world, I was living a life under lockdown. I had spent so much time indoors that it was beginning to wear away at my edges. The new normal was a routine disrupted and tossed abruptly into a strange form of existence. With so much of the world social distancing and spending more time apart, this is undoubtedly a feeling many can relate to. And although I am undoubtedly lucky, in that I can do my job from the safety of my kitchen table, the claustrophobia and feeling of being trapped indoors became relentless. I had to get out.

With a long weekend with continued warm weather ahead, my partner and I made a plan to get up early and go for a ride on our bikes into Central London — a place we hadn’t ventured to for weeks, despite it being but a reasonable walk away. We mounted our bikes and set forth.

The roads we travelled on are ones that I have cycled on for years. They are not quaint backstreets. They are not the meandering paths that roll through Victorian terraced houses, passing corner pubs absorbed by flowering wisteria. They are not casual Sunday ride roads. They are utilitarian. My memory is overrun with countless days in the cold drizzle of winter, cycling alongside hundreds of other commuters to our offices. They are clogged arteries that pump users into the heart of the city at as rapid of a pace as possible. There are blockages and stops along the way — traffic jams, double-decker busses caught between lanes, honking cars, broken traffic lights. But that was then, and this is now.

The streets were far beyond calm — they were abandoned. From the saddles of our bicycles, we could see far into the distance. Not a car, bus or taxi was in sight. Just other cyclists and pedestrians filled the quiet and calm city. As we continued forward and neared the Thames river, passing it via the Westminster Bridge, the solitude heightened. Over twenty minutes of cycling, we had seen fewer cars than I could count on my hand. It was madness, it was unnerving, it was apocalyptic — and yet — it was incredibly pleasant.

Lately, I’ve been contemplating this feeling and like so many others, wondering just what the future will bring. Will the easing out of lockdown be quick and smooth, contact tracing a shocking success, and a vaccine rapidly deployed, thrusting us back to our original routines? Or will life be a rollercoaster with no clear resolution for the foreseeable future? These are questions without answers.

And despite the lack of solutions, the constant uncertainty, the anxiety, I wonder how we might learn from this experience. There are lessons to be remembered everywhere, in every sector of work, and in every way in which we handle crisis, but we as a society have experienced something which will forever change us. But, we don’t entirely know in what ways this may manifest.

In a year, when I am cycling again into my office, on that same busy London street, full of overfilled trucks, speeding black cabs, and idling diesel engines, will I remember the feeling of cycling on that calm spring day while the world braced itself during a catastrophic pandemic? Will I remember the uncomfortable feeling of serenity spiked with the anxiety that a loved one would come down with the illness? Will I remember the air being so clean or the streets being so quiet? Or will it all just be a fever dream as life resumes?

In the mid-1990s, a biologist was exploring a novel idea he had regarding declining US fish populations. He theorised that a subtle, but significant bias was occurring amongst the scientific community that was going unnoticed. He believed that fisheries scientists early in their careers would establish a baseline understanding for fish stock populations and species composition. The scientists would go on to use this baseline to evaluate changes in the marine ecosystems they observed. However, as generations passed and new scientists entered the field, their baselines would be ever-so-slightly different from that of their predecessors. And regrettably, that meant in most cases that the counts would be lower, the populations more homogenous. The biologist, Dr Daniel Pauly, gave this theory a name apropos of this phenomena — shifting baseline syndrome.

Shifting baseline syndrome is a niche eco-psycho-sociological term used to describe a continuous change in the natural environment. It is a change that occurs slowly and often over multiple generations, if not even centuries. This results in the change itself going unnoticed. Shifting baseline syndrome has meaningful repercussions. Take, for instance, the marine ecologies and fish populations that Daniel Pauly brought attention to. In the US, many fish stock populations are determined from counts from only forty years ago. This baseline is problematic, as the 1980s were a time in which marine ecosystems were already being overfished. If the baseline for what is acceptable comes from a time in which populations were already in free-fall, then working to revert and reach this baseline only shifts us slightly back into the ‘safe zone’ — far from where populations once existed. It is a strategy that leaves ecosystems such as these marine ecosystems, constantly faltering apex between comfort and calamity.

The consequences of shifting baseline syndrome go beyond marine ecologies and fish counts. Shifting baseline syndrome can affect people in various other ways which are actively studied today. Consequences of the phenomena include an increased acceptance for environmental degradation and changes to our expectations about what we consider an acceptable state for the natural environment. For those working in the management of natural systems, shifting baseline syndrome may inadvertently result in the setting of inappropriate baselines for conservation, restoration and management.

But what if there was a chance to see beyond our baseline and experience something different? What if instead of aiming for a flawed-state, we as a population could experience an alternative baseline? What if this happened as a result of experiences so different from what we’ve ever known before? Would we embrace the good and do everything we can to preserve this new experience? Or would everything just go back to normal?

When the world went on pause, much of the world has experienced what was once deemed impossible. In March of 2020, observational data showed a 10 to 30% drop in nitrogen dioxide levels for mainland China. In Northern Italy, data showed reductions of nearly 40% below the typical output. Nitrogen dioxide is an airborne pollutant that is created primarily through a combination of vehicles, industrial facilities, and power plants reliant on fossil fuels and prolonged exposure to it can lead to respiratory diseases in humans.

At the same time, additional global observations saw decreases in other harmful pollutants. Widely shared satellite data displayed maps from the past compared with that of the present. The past was an angry cloud of red and dark orange hues looming above the geographic outlines. Whereas the maps from the recent weeks showed a softened image, the colours turned down to shades of only soft yellow and amber.

Photos also shared the experience many were facing. Coming from India, photos were shared of an empty Taj Mahal, the white outlines of the building contrasting with crisp and vibrant blue skies behind it as the smog lifted. Similarly, an image of Mount Everest, located nearly 200 kilometres to the east of Kathmandu, was seen for the first time in living memory. Photos like these made their way across social media, news networks, and between people.

From my home in London, I experienced my own alternative vision. One in which the streets were suddenly quiet and comfortable to cycle on. One in which the air felt cleaner. My fellow cyclists were no longer mainly Lyrca-clad commuters, pressing onto their office at rapid speeds, they were families with young children. They were young couples renting docked bicycles. They all rode on streets once avoided for fear of distracted and speeding drivers. Amongst the chaos, and the uncertainty, and the unease, there is quiet calm.

As the world slowly begins to restart, the future is uncertain from the perspective of the environment, but it is not looking good. Data from China and Italy shows nitrogen dioxide levels beginning to rise back to levels recorded before the lockdown. Vehicular traffic continues to increase in London, and the streets no longer feel empty like they once did. Of course, life does need to return — but will we lose the few good things we had during this terrible time?

I wonder to what degree our upcoming amnesia will affect us. Amongst the chaos, how much of what we’ve experienced will we forget? For a brief and fleeting moment in time, we have experienced a way out — a potential shift to our baselines. We saw that environmental change was possible.

Things will not stay like the way they are now forever. The world cannot eternally stay paused, and the systems that we have built will once again take over, speeding us forwards to a state of uncertainty. But I wonder what we need to remember to make things better in the future? What are we willing to sacrifice to make our planet, our cities, our lives better? What if instead of merely social distancing becoming the new normal, we made safer roads the new normal? Or we considered reduced nitrogen dioxide levels the new normal? Or speaking to and helping out neighbours in need became the new normal?

This is a moment in which for once we don’t need to imagine what a world with reduced air pollution, clearer and quieter skies, and safer streets might look like, but instead, we only need to remember.

References

Anecdotes and the shifting baseline syndrome of fisheries (PDF)

Each year, innovations by people around the world battle it out for a coveted Cannes Lions award and, as those projects undergo the scrutiny of the jury, a diverse program of talks, workshops and demonstrations are going on elsewhere. We were honoured to be invited to give one such talk this year: about how we believe the cities of our future will look and what roles we share in making them better.

Our city infrastructures are struggling — and in many cases failing — to keep their growing populations moving. PWC estimates that New York, Beijing, Shanghai and London will need approximately 8 trillion USD in infrastructure investment over the next decade to keep up with the growing demand.

We must take a thorough, critical look at — and properly address — the challenges facing transportation in urban areas if we want to improve quality of life in the world we inhabit and the world our descendants will inherit.

There are a lot of things affecting cities right now, but for now let’s start with the three key drivers and how we get around them:

1. Accelerated population growth.

2. The rise of electric transport.

3. Our on-demand culture.

Growth comes with challenges

If you spend any time in a city, you’ve probably experienced traffic congestion, overcrowded public transportation, long queues and so on. When many of our cities already feel — shall we say — a little cosy, it becomes rather sobering to look at the projected growth numbers:

Today, there are 7.7 billion people on the planet. By 2050, that number is expected to rise to 9.8 billion. That extra 2.2 billion is six times the population of the USA. While 90% of this growth is expected to occur in Asia and Africa, urban centres in the rest of the world are expected to grow in population size as people continue to move from rural to urban communities.

Today, 54% of the world’s population live in cities (that’s 4.1 billion). By 2050, that percentage is predicted to rise to 68% (so 6.7 billion).

Cities generate the vast majority of global GDP (85%), but while they’re doing that, they’re also consuming two-thirds of the world’s natural resources and producing over 80% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

If we are going to solve some of the big challenges facing our world, we must start with cities.

The unintended consequences of meeting demand

Cities everywhere are dealing with enormous challenges brought by the exponential rise in on-demand ride-sharing services. While they originally seemed like a brilliant idea, taxi apps have increased congestion and air pollution. A recent study found that 60% of Uber and Lyft users would have taken public transportation instead of using a ride hailing service, whilst the other 40% would have chosen to use their car or a taxi.

Ride-hailing services aren’t reducing traffic in American cities — and they won’t, even if they meet their goals for converting solos trips to shared rides, according to new research from transportation analyst Bruce Schaller. And they aren’t just compounding congestion; they’re stepping up driving, cannibalising transit trips and increasing traffic deaths by 2–3% nationally.

In cities, we’ve also seen a rapid rise in dockless bikes, electric scooters, and many other micro-mobility services. While they solve some problems, jump-on-jump-off bikes and scooters are causing unforeseen negative consequences in cities like Paris where scooters were eventually banned in October 2018, and Xiamen where thousands of bikes have been abandoned.

If the roads are full, let’s take to the sky?

Knowing the limitations and unintended consequences brought by the services currently on offer, the Uber Elevate team is already working on airborne ride-sharing at scale. They plan to launch fleets of small, electric VTOL (vertical take-off and landing) aircraft in Dallas, Los Angeles and an international market in 2023.

But before any flying taxis are ready to take off, officials have to be persuaded to make wholesale changes to aviation laws and regulations, and it’ll take a lot of thinking to work out how to manage city airspaces swarming with tiny aircraft. A whole host of major unresolved issues still exist with no solution — ranging from their not-so sustainable implications, potential for increased noise pollution, and sheer cost to use the service. While perhaps air taxis may one day soon make getting to a destination easier for the 1%, it doesn’t provide a suitable means for millions to travel more easily.

What does that mean for the future of our cities?

First, it’s important to understand that our cities are shaped not only by government, but also by millions of different people, organisations and companies.

Next, we need to be realistic, and look at the near-term and long-term future a bit differently. We already see problems in our urban environments today that can’t be fixed by flying cars, so while there’s value in exploring these things for the longer term, we must seek steps that we can take right now to improve the mobility systems for now and with a view that one day they may accommodate those airborne cars.

Finally, we need to accept that nobody can accurately predict the future. Our visions for the future will always be proven wrong by unanticipated technological advances, environmental shifts, political changes, economic dips and societal pressures. We can only make our best guess, based on what we do know right now and what we believe our future cities should be like. With an idea of what we want, we’ll have something to work towards.

Setting the future we want, instead of predicting it

We believe the future city must be sustainable, smart, and connected.

The future city needs to address climate change from a whole host of different perspectives. We must consider how we live, we must consider the goods we purchase, use and discard, we must explore more sustainable modes of planning and, of course, we must have more sustainable means of transportation.

The future city must be smart, with priority given to getting people from place to place, and accommodating their challenges to enable them to do it easily. We believe our mobility options will start to be knitted together to form an ecosystem in which many services will connect or merge, and the main economic and social value will lie in smart system management. To start knitting these things together, our focus must be to pull together existing and emerging services and systems so that the connections between become seamless. We’ll see city planning and design taking a more agile approach, which will bring us systems that respond to real-time data and citizens’ evolving needs.

The future city must be connected, not only allowing residents to get from A to B easier, but also connected to one another. Our future cities need to speak to one another and learn from each other. Cities all around the world are facing many similar issues and we need to look outside of our own cultures and continents into how others are successfully solving challenges.

We need to work together to achieve the future we want. We need less platforms and more partnerships. We need more open data and data sharing and less data silos. We believe that the future city must be sustainable, smart and connected. And the more we work together, the more we can make this happen.

Ahead of the curb – How mobility in cities is evolving was originally published in Design Voices on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Somewhere in South London on a bright and almost absolutely clear spring day the evening begins to slowly encroach. As the sun dips beneath the horizon and the once intense blue sky fades darker and darker towards black, something is missing; something is not quite right. What’s not there is hard to gauge. For as far as most of us urban or semi-urban dwellers can recall, the sky is and always has been just the way it is on this particular night. Sure, there are a few white dots here and there, some of them a bit brighter than others. Perhaps even depending on the time of the year or the weather conditions, a handful more are seen on this particular night than are usually visible.

But where is the spectacular performance of the night sky that has captivated humans for thousands of years? Where is the cloudy and ethereal Milky Way that is supposed to stretch above our gaze, igniting our imagination and sense of wonder? What happens when we lose our connection to something greater than us?

The reality is that the night sky that we’ve evolved under, that we’ve gazed in wonder at for thousands of years, and that we’ve always known, is still there. It’s just gotten much dimmer. Much like an old speaker, whose once vibrant and intense tones faded through the years until only barely audible, the urban night sky has been turned down to a point of near mute.

A Brighter World

All across the world, urban areas are getting brighter every year through a combination of poorly designed lighting fixtures, increased brightness levels, and urban sprawl. The result is a night sky that has faded from a window to a once unimaginably rich and complex expanse, to a soft glow of yellow and black, where we struggle to distinguish between stars, satellites, and planes. As a result of light pollution, more than two-thirds of North Americans and Europeans born today will never experience a sky dark enough to see the Milky Way. This signifies an ultimate disconnection from nature, a poetic loss and a diminution of a great awe.

In the grand scheme of human life, light pollution is a rather recent problem. Looking back, one can find the earliest mentions of it in popular astronomical literature. In 1866 the French science author Amédée Guillemein wrote that the dimmest nighttime skies were located in “great centres of population, by the illumination of the houses and the streets.” But at this time, the dimming night sky was caused by something other than simply poorly lighting fixtures. After all, Guillemein wrote of the illumination of urban areas thirteen years prior to Thomas Edison’s incandescent bulb. A considerable amount of the light pollution was caused by what we today consider air pollution. Cities such as London and Paris were being slowly suffocated through street dust and excessive wood and coal smoke.

A Western Problem

Following World War II, the problem quickly worsened as lighting fixtures became cheaper and more accessible, and cities throughout North America and Western Europe began to sprawl outwards. As air pollution decreased and became more regulated, light pollution went unchecked. Observatories moved out of urban centres, citing a lack of proper viewing conditions and generations born in rapidly developing urban areas grew with no reference to the once bright heavens above. A furthering dependence on the car brought lights to once darkened rural areas to light a way for the occasional car while stringing together ever expanding, ever brightening clusters of urban light.

Overly bright, poorly targeted and often unnecessary lighting across commercial properties, offices, factories, streetlights, and illuminated sporting venues amounts to light pollution with drastic effects. It disrupts nocturnal ecology, altering breeding rituals, reproduction and reducing populations, in particular among amphibians and endangered species such as turtles. Humans, too, experience disruption to circadian rhythms through the suppression of melatonin — a hormone critical to proper sleep, a healthy immune system, balanced cholesterol, and the functioning of key glands. But light pollution is not an inevitable problem that simply happens as the world becomes more urbanised. Light pollution is a problem that can not only be slowed, but also reversed with a combination of communication, awareness, and better design decisions.

Remembering the night

One of the greatest challenges currently faced is not merely how to solve light pollution, but rather, why should we? Two-thirds of North Americans and Europeans born today will never experience a sky dark enough to see the Milky Way. Communicating the possibilities of a better night sky poses a significant challenge: how can we convince people care about something they’ve never seen?

2015 was the International Year of Light. However, just because it has passed, doesn’t mean we should stop caring. For everyday citizens, the first step in improving their skies is to demand better urban lighting from local authorities. Preferably ones approved by the International Dark Sky Association, as these lights have been designed to decrease their impact on the night sky. These lights are at the simplest, shielded from above, directing light to where it needs to go and not into the sky.

Designing for Darkness

There are a number of other ways of improving the design of outdoor lights. Fixtures should not shine light above 15º below the horizon, and preferably the target area should be determined via adjustable side shield. Furthermore, the light should only hit the area that is needed. While that point seems obvious, pay close attention to urban lights. How many of them point upwards into the sky, shine unwanted lights into unwelcoming windows, or create glare in our eyes?

Proper outdoor lights should only be on when needed. This is a problem easily solved through the integration of cheap sensors that read light levels to determine when the light is actually needed, or furthermore, how much light is needed; a much improved method to simply switching on at a set time of the day.

The luminaire itself should not be brighter than necessary. Over the past sixty years outdoor public lighting has been getting brighter and brighter in many municipalities, owing to the belief that brighter equates safer. The reality is that when lighting at night is too bright, it causes us to only see what is lit, thereby reducing our eyes’ ability to render objects in the dark.

Lastly, the light should minimise blue light emissions as much as possible. Numerous research studies demonstrate that blue light penetrates further into the eye and can cause damage to the retina. Additionally, some wavelengths of blue light affect our body’s ability to produce melatonin, leading to disrupt the body’s circadian rhythm.

As the sun falls, and the night sky appears again, look up and see what you can discover. If you’re in an urban or semi-urban area, chances are the discoveries you can see are hidden away by bright lights not in the sky, but on the ground. Pay close attention to the street lights you pass and ask yourself, ‘what are they lighting?’ Are they succeeding in hitting their targets, or are they also spilling excess light into the night sky? Once you’ve noticed a bad light, you can’t stop noticing them. They’re everywhere — but perhaps with a bit of communication, a push for awareness, and optimism that soon we’ll begin to slowly remediate our night sky — the night sky can be reclaimed.

Additional Sources:

• Let There Be Night
• History of Light Pollution - The Catholic Astronomer

http://www.darksky.org/