Light pollution is everybody's problem. Even yours.

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Take a look at this image of Europe at night. Countries and their urban centres are easily picked out by, are delineated by, lights. Streetlights. Motorway lights. Architectural lights. Car park lights. Shop lights. Security lights. The combined glow from millions of bulbs, tubes, spotlights. All of those lights are illuminating something precious, something fragile and irreplaceable which they should not be illuminating, which they were never intended to illuminate: the night sky. It's all totally unnecessary.

Ever looked down from a plane at all those lights? If you can see them, they are polluting the night sky. If you can look down on lights from any vantage point where you live, they are polluting the night sky. If your local shopping centre is lit up like the proverbial Christmas tree all night, why? If your neighbour's security light keeps going on, why? Nobody pays any attention to their neighbours' security lights: their only function is to rather helpfully show burglars where the doors and windows are. So what is the point of using them at all? The average security light throws a fair proportion of its light upwards, and that part which actually hits the ground bounces back into the sky from patios and paths.

And it's not just a question of extinguishing lights: few people in towns and cities would, quite understandably, want to live in darker streets. It's also a question of redesigning lighting fixtures so that all of their light goes downwards and not up into the sky. It's a matter of reducing their brightness too: with correctly-hooded street lights, for example, you don't need such powerful light sources, because 100% of the light is illuminating the road. You can use low-pressure, low-wattage sodium lights in streetlights and cut their energy consumption by a huge amount at a stroke, while retaining their level of illumination. Local councils are wasting your hard-earned money by continuing to use wasteful and inefficient street lights.

A Natural Disaster

If light pollution were an oil spill from a supertanker, those responsible would be prosecuted and punished. If it were a major earthquake or  flood, offers of help would be pouring in from all over the world. But light pollution, at a basic level, does an equal amount of harm to our natural environment, if you define the latter simply as the surroundings in which we all live. It's another poignant example of how so many humans carelessly destroy nature, as if nature were something to be mastered, tamed, conquered, subjugated to their will. Light pollution is a natural disaster, to compare with any other which humans have ever unleashed upon the planet, yet few are ever taken to task for it. Instead of laws we have guidelines, voluntary codes of conduct, endless bureaucracy, total inertia. The Czech Republic is so far the only country in the world to have introduced strict and nationwide anti-light pollution laws. Do you know how? They just did it.

Few people, it seems, appreciate that, unless we start tackling the problem seriously, very soon there is going to be a whole generation of children who have never seen anything more in the sky than the brightest stars and planets. Already, very few people in the urban jungle have ever seen the Milky Way in all its glory, nor seen the Andromeda Galaxy with the naked eye. In Britain, for example, only in parts of Snowdonia, on the tip of Cornwall or in the far north of Scotland can one see truly dark skies. The amber glow is everywhere: it sweeps like a curtain across the sky, concealing the marvels of the Universe behind it.