Slashdot Mirror
An Enlightened Look at an Over-Lighted World
Saige writes "Every night, as darkness descends, countless street lamps and lights turn on to keep the darkness at bay, bathing countless square feet of the planet in light that sometimes rivals daytime. But has anyone stopped to consider what effect all this light may have on people and animals that have evolved to fit an environment where a significant part of the 24 hour day is spent in lightless conditions? Some scientists have, and they are claiming that all this light is causing numerous problems."
Having been a city dweller for more years than I care to remember, I recently had an assignment in Mongolia. I was working about 50 miles from the nearest group of tents, which is the closest thing you get to a village in that part of the world, and hundreds of miles fom the nearest town, I continuously found myself staring upwards muttering expletives to myself, a truly awsome sight. Perhaps soon to become one of the wonders of the ancient world.
Seriously though, I think the bigger problem is from the lack of light! If you go to those same regions (north of the arctic circle), you'll find abnormally high suicide rates during the winter due to depression from the excessive darkness.
As Mikka Luttinen (the vocalist for a reasonably well-known Finnish black metal band Impaled Nazarene) put it: "In Finland, it's dark for ten months a year. You either start a band or cut your wrists".
And here where I live (a northern part of Russia), street lamps get turned off after 10 pm in August, so getting home after long coding sessions becomes an exercise in celestial navigation.
Excessive light in the summer is a bad problem, here in Alaska. While the long nights of winter cause depression in some people, the endless days of summer really screw with people's sleep patterns and cause other health issues as well. They don't get the same press as the winter cases of S.A.D., but they exist.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
the only reason i cant see the stars at night where i live is becuase of the lighting in a walmart parking lot, that is ten miles away(the parking lot is huge)
so if we can convince walmart and the city to turn off every other one of their lights maybe we could see the stars, and if we did this nationaly once a year or so, then scientist could get a good view of the sky without all the light pollution
yeah i know i cant spell
Artificial lighting can cause disorientation and misorientation of both adults and hatchlings. Turtle hatchlings are attracted to light, ignoring or coming out of the ocean to go towards a light source, increasing their chances of death or injury. In addition, as nesting females avoid areas with intense lighting, highly developed areas may cause problems for turtles trying to nest.
Guess they missed the PBS special.
Losers choose to abuse the use of "loose".
regarding the over- and underlit situations you describe in the polar regions: we humans didn't evolve to live there, and therefore our circadian rhythms are not programmed to deal with polar extremes. of course, the article referring to 100% death rates of all people that get too much light would lend credence to your theory...
Very true. I'm sure those reasons are actually much more valid than the lack of light. I've read documentaries on small small villages in northern Canada & their economies don't really exist - they live off of whaling & seal oil. The kids hear enough about the rest of the world that they want to leave, but with no money, a lot of them don't think they can. So in some areas, the suicide rate is actually highest among teenagers / young adults. However, even with all these other factors, the suicides end up happening in the 'night' season.
To tie this in to my original post, it's interesting that in areas/times where daylight levels are the lowest, death rates are much higher than in areas/times where daylight levels are the highest.
You joked about sleep disorders, but I used to run a sleep lab, and I can tell you this problem is a significant one. We have a direct path from our retinas to a subset of cells in a structure in the brain called the supra-chiasmatic nucleus. This pathway, the retino-hypothalamic pathway mediates light information to set our intrinsic sleep/wake rhythms that are normally set by light during the day. The advent of the lightbulb has transformed our society into a 24 hr/day affair that can cause problems with entrainment and now we have computer screens that we stare into until the wee hours of the night. Sleep disorders resulting from poor circadian entrainment can have influences on our lives that can be dangerous. Other than breathing or rem movement disorders, disorders of circadian entrainment can cause depression, failure to maintain alertness at important times (flying a plane or driving a car for instance), and recent evidence indicates that circadian period may also have an influence on the efficacy of pharmacologic treatments among other serious implications within our lives.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.