Wild skies

Wednesday, September 05, 2007

By Brooke Williams

Last week, Dave, a friend from Salt Lake, and I found ourselves talking in the Murie Center parking lot late one night. The sky was lit with stars as the nearly full moon hadn’t yet made its appearance. We found ourselves looking up toward the heavens, lying back against his truck to keep from kinking our necks.

Dave knows more constellations than Orion, the Big and Little Dippers, and Cassiopeia, and he was eager to point them out. I found myself thinking how I take the dark sky for granted. Before coming to Jackson Hole, I was living in Castle Valley, Utah, a small town separated from Moab by a high cliff. Castle Valley is typical of many small western towns in that it is fairly divided on most political issues. Protecting dark skies, however, is one issue on which nearly everyone in town agrees.

I’m sure there are places as dark or darker than Castle Valley, but I can’t imagine them. It’s against the law to have outdoor lights that aren’t focused down at the ground. Because there wasn’t much else to do at night, we spent countless hours on our backs, gazing upward. One cloudy night after working late in my office – which was 40 steps from my main house – I got turned around and lost my way trying to get home.

A recent article in the New Yorker (“The Dark Side” by David Owen, Aug. 20, 2007) makes the observation that most Americans cannot see the Milky Way, not because the stars are getting dimmer, but because the atmosphere is more polluted and therefore less transparent and because there are too many lights.

An organization, the International Dark Sky Association (www.darksky.org), promotes the idea that the star-filled sky is as important a resource as the wild lands we all care so much about. They work on government regulations while helping manufactures develop lighting products that are not only less polluting, but more effective.

By coincidence, I recently received an email from Bambi Smith, a graduate student at the University of Alabama and former participant in a Murie Center event. She attached the abstract of the thesis she wrote for her master’s segree titled “Grassroots Policy Prescription: A Case Study in Light Pollution and Night Sky Preservation and Natural Resource Policy Making.” Bambi dedicated her thesis to Mardy Murie, who was a source of inspiration.

Bambi makes numerous references to “overnight outdoor recreationists,” whom she considers the group of stakeholders most impacted by light pollution. The term “recreationist” might not give this issue the weight it deserves. Reading Bambi’s abstract reminded me of a deep ecology workshop I attended years ago, hosted by the Norwegian School of Nature Life (www.OutdoorCenter.org/).

One of the presenters insisted that too much lighting was keeping modern humans from experiencing the dark, a complete and important dimension of life. “Outdoor lighting,” this speaker said, “might as well be a government conspiracy to control us by cutting off access to the important information that might otherwise come from gazing at the night sky.”

Think about it. Our species has been on Earth for 150,000 years. We’ve lit up the night for, what, the last 150 years? It’s safe to say that our species did a great job of surviving all those years without much in the way of technology, especially compared to how it has infiltrated our lives today.

It also may be safe to say that besides sitting around a fire telling stories, our ancestors didn’t have a lot to do at night. I’d be willing to bet that our ancestors spent more nights gazing up at the heavens than they didn’t. What did they learn from the night sky? Did the night sky play a role in their survival? 

The New Yorker article ends in Utah’s Natural Bridges National Park, (less than three hours from Castle Valley), which is so dark that the I.D.A. has recently designated it an International Dark Sky Park. I think I’ll check to see what it would take for Grand Teton National Park to get this same designation. What role might this kind of wonder play in our lives?

PERMALINK:
Wild skies | Planet JH News Article: Left Wing Local

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