Light Pollution and Dark Skies - And a One Woman Crusade
By Karl Grossman, Professor of Journalism, SUNY College at Old Westbury

It’s another and a pervasive form of pollution: light pollution.
For Long Island and the New York region, action against it started a dozen years ago after Susan Harder moved with her husband from New York City to The Springs in East Hampton—into “a glass house.”

Their home is modernist with, indeed, large expanses of glass, a Frank Lloyd Wright-look-alike with a wavy roof.
The problem: at night a next door neighbor’s outdoor floodlights were bathing the house in light. So Ms. Harder went to East Hampton Town Hall and explained the situation to a code enforcement officer noting that the town lighting code stated that “a light source should not be visible across property lines.” The official told her, she recalls: “I shouldn’t live in a glass house.”

“I read the code and I am smart enough and I have enough confidence in myself to know what should be right,” said Ms. Harder. Then, when she mentioned the situation to another neighbor, Dava Sobel, the author of the book Longitude, the best-selling book about stars being used for navigation, Ms. Sobel told her about a group called the International Dark Sky Association. It was founded a decade before in Tucson, Arizona when astronomers, concerned the lights of Tucson were obscuring observations from their telescopes, led what became a successful drive for “fully shielded” lighting in Tucson. Ms. Harder joined the Association and also began a Long Island-based Dark Sky Society.

“You can’t fight city hall” is a myth that some say was created by city hall. For since Ms. Harder ran into her own problem with light pollution and committed herself to doing something about lights that take away from the dark sky, she’s had amazing victories. “City hall can be our friend—you don’t have to fight city hall, you only have to enlighten it,” muses Ms. Harder.

Due to her labors, Suffolk County has enacted a law requiring the County use only “fully shielded” outdoor lighting fixtures on and near its buildings.
The Long Island Power Authority stresses in a billing insert that LIPA “is committed to preserving and enhancing the Long Island environment and that is why we are introducing the innovative Light Solutions Program” featuring “fixtures with no ‘uplight’ for all of our newly installed outdoor lighting.”

She has been working with governments all over Long Island—many of which now have passed dark skies legislation—and with New York City and New York State, too, in her campaign against light pollution.

In the case of the Suffolk County law for fully shielded lights, its genesis was a visit by Ms. Harder to the office of Suffolk Legislator Jay Schneiderman of Montauk.

The reason for the law “that captures me the most,” comments Mr. Schneiderman, who worked with Ms. Harder on the issue when he was East Hampton Town supervisor, “is that if we cannot see the stars, we lose our sense of place in the universe, that sense of wonder, that inspiration, the awareness of how small we are.”
Looking up at a dark starlit sky, he says, “is a humbling experience.”

In pressing for the Suffolk Legislature to pass the measure, Ms. Harder emphasized that energy-savings would accompany the “saving of the environment of our land and sky with appropriate use of outdoor night lighting.”
She has drawn support from environmentalists who have been deep in other environmental issues. Robert DeLuca, president of the Group for the East End, supported Ms. Harder by telling Suffolk legislators that “increasing development and much of its associated exterior lighting is noticeably changing the appearance of our rural landscape and diminishing the visibility of star and moonlight. In addition to the urbanizing effects that unshielded exterior lights impose of the visual aesthetics of our region, we are concerned about the cumulative effects that unshielded lighting can have increasing energy consumption and fossil fuel emissions.”

The vote in favor was unanimous. In signing the bill, Suffolk County Executive Steve Levy said he saw it helping “maintain the type of beautiful dark open skies that we enjoy” on eastern Long Island.

Last month, Ms. Harder was on Shelter Island emphasizing to the town board there that “light pollution can be reversed without sacrificing safety and security, and it can be cost effective.”

As editor Cara Loriz of the Shelter Island Reporter summarized Ms. Harder’s talk: “By using the minimum energy needed for effective exterior lighting, and shielding the fixture so that it illuminates the ground, not the sky or the horizon, the night environment is preserved, home and business owners save money on their electrical bills and security is not lost.”

Through her PowerPoint presentation—that has now been widely seen—Ms. Harder on Shelter Island cited studies linking the glare of exterior lights blinding drivers with accidents, the serious impacts on migratory birds and other wildlife, and to human health impacts: an increased risk of breast cancer and other maladies. Ms. Harder offered to work with the Town of Shelter Island in developing dark skies legislation. She stresses that the problem is local, regional, national and, indeed, global—that today the Milky Way is visible to only a third of the world’s population due to wasteful, unnecessary light pollution.

Karl Grossman is a professor of journalism at the State University of New York College at Old Westbury who has long specialized in investigative reporting on environmental and energy issues and is the host of the nationally aired TV program Enviro Closeup (www.envirovideo.com)