Light Pollution in Missouri

Missouri is my home state.  I grew up in what was then a rural area south of St. Louis, in Arnold.  Seeing the stars at night was no big deal, and something I took for granted. Arnold can longer be considered rural and in the intervening 40 years has gone through the typical suburban sprawl growth pattern along with major increases in bad night-time lighting.  During our family visit last summer (2009), it was apparent that the skies are only slightly better than here in Brooklyn, NY despite the lower population density of Arnold.  I’ll come back to that in a minute.

An article on the MissouriNet web site draws attention to this situation in the St. Charles area, just north of St. Louis.  The legislature is being asked to have the Department of Natural Resources to form a special commission to investigate the impact of light pollution.  The killer quote (in my mind) comes from James Roe who teaches astronomy at St. Charles Community College:

“Most people in urban areas have never seen the Milky Way,” he says, “I
had a jaw-dropping event with one of my classes. I had a woman come up
to me after the classes and say ‘Would you show my daughter a star?’”

Another article in the Carthage Press reports on the efforts of an amateur astronomer there, Dr. Chad Wagoner, to convince his town to start the process of becoming a dark sky city. Wagoner’s recollections echo my own:

“I can see the Milky Way from my yard but it’s dimmer now than I
remember it being in my youth,” Wagoner said, “and that’s because the
city is growing and there’s more light.

If you are living here in Brooklyn, like me, you may be thinking, "So what? What happens half-way across the country doesn’t affect me."  Here’s the thing, if you look at things like street and sign illumination in a city like New York vs Carthage, New York clearly has more.  But on a per capita basis that’s not so clear anymore.  Lighting up your block in NYC takes just as many street lights as it does in Carthage, but how many people live on your block?  New York already has plenty of room to be come more efficient in this area.  Do these small towns really want to head down the path that NYC took and make all the same mistakes with bad lighting which they have to pay for (literally and figuratively) only to have to redo it later?

The impact on energy consumption by the nation is potentially huge.  In rural areas, lighting should be kept to an absolute minimum.  Stick up a town-full of those old-style mercury-vapor lights and you drive up the electric bill, increase roadway glare, pump more carbon into the atmosphere (that electricity has to come from somewhere and thats at least 50% coal nation-wide), drive away wildlife, disrupt your own ability to sleep at night.

A couple of years ago, we visited my grandmother in the very small "town" of Acorn Ridge, MO.  One night, I walked out behind the barn to try to get a clear view of the night sky without the glare of the mercury-vapor light that sits on a utility pole just outside their house.  I was struck by two things: first was the prevelance of those lights all across the horizon.  Houses there are not close together.  While Acorn Ridge has a cluster of homes, most of the houses are scattered across the fields sitting in the middle of each farmer’s property.  Yet there were dozens of lights visible that weren’t there when I was growing up.  The second thing was the distinct glow on the sky coming from Dexter, a town only about 10 miles away.  Again, it wasn’t there when I was growing up.  And even 15 years ago, before my wife and I married, it was nearly non-existent.

Small towns are naturally worried about insuring that their businesses thrive.  Thriving businesses are good for the community, provide better opportunities, both economic and educational, for the children growing up in those communities, and result in more tax income to provide services to those living there.  But the way growth happens in these small towns comes with an unrecognized (but not hidden, it’s enough to see) long-term cost.  Light up your streets with inefficient, glaring lights and you’re pouring your tax money down the drain.

I hope Missouri takes a different path for growth than that followed by the east coast cities.  I hope they look at the big picture, the long-term picture, to preserve all of the natural resource they have; the clean air, water, and the night sky.