So, your favourite YouTuber just moved to Los Angeles… What’s new? Celebrities and now, influencers as well, have been migrating to Los Angeles for decades in hopes of chasing after their dreams in the Mecca of entertainment – HOLLYWOOD. The city of Los Angeles has long enamoured many as being THE dream city, contributing to high rates of urbanisation.
A characteristic of large cities like Los Angeles are their bright lights. An issue with this is that bright lights are being seen as an indication of development and prosperity. We discussed this in class too near the beginning of the semester (Week 3 lecture). Basically, areas that have bright lights are seen as prosperous and conversely, unlit areas are seen as less developed.
Sure, bright lights might seem innocent or even necessary for modern life. They look great in photos and videos and are important simply for nighttime visibility in general. But are they any good for the environment? Well urban areas contribute to what is known as light pollution, an often overlooked form of pollution that is also bad for the environment. The association of bright lights with development and prosperity hence normalises this form of pollution and results in the negligence of its negative impacts.
To discuss light pollution and all its negative impacts I will be referring to this video below. Yes, I know… I watch a lot of videos. All the videos that I share here, I have seen at least twice before I even created this blog. Well for me, watching these edutainment videos are a really good way to pass time and learn something new in an easily digestable and comprehensive format; which is why I want to share them with you! Once again, the video is quite long because it covers may different aspects of light pollution so you don’t have to watch it if you don’t have the time.
The video starts off with discussing the ubiquity of lights. Lights are all around us and I’m sure you have noticed this if you live in a city like Singapore. They cover buildings, billboards, streetlights, stadiums and roads. It is nearly impossible to find true darkness in cities today. They also define light pollution as the adverse effects of excessive artificial light that comes in different forms. We learnt about ‘skyglow’ in the Week 3 class and how it has been regarded as a proxy for development. According to the International Dark-Sky Association, Los Angeles’ skyglow can be seen from an airplane 200 miles away! The International Dark-Sky Association also defines the different types of light pollution as :
- Glare – excessive brightness that causes visual discomfort
- Skyglow – brightening of the night sky over inhabited areas
- Light trespass – light falling where it is not intended or needed
- Clutter – bright, confusing and excessive groupings of light sources
Which is illustrated by the diagram below
So how is light pollution bad for the environment? Artificial lighting is incredibly energy intensive. The video mentioned that a 2008 survey in Austria found that public lighting was the largest source of their government’s greenhouse emissions, accounting for up to 50% of all emissions! The country’s two million public lights consumed 1035 gigawatt hours of electricity and emitted over a million tons of carbon dioxide into the environment. Furthermore, carbon dioxide is not the only thing being released into the environment from energy production and also contributes to air pollution. The video also goes on to describe the different ways wildlife are negative impacted by light pollution. Clearly, the impacts of bright lights are not only limited to the benefits it presents modern life.
If you are interested in learning more about light pollution by watching more videos like this I recommend this other video from a different edutainment channel:
(It also features the Singapore nighttime skyline in the thumbnail!)
International Dark-Sky Association. (n.d.). Light Pollution. International Dark-Sky Association. Retrieved from https://www.darksky.org/light-pollution/.