Light Pollution Is Getting Worse Every Year. That ’s Bad For Your Health

Nothing has captured the march of wealth and progress like any society’s ability to light up the night—first with campfires and torches, then with gas lamps, finally with incandescent lights. Franklin Roosevelt’s 1936 Rural Electrification Act was an effort both to bring modernity to the 90% of American farms that lacked electricity and to help jolt the American economy, which was still deep in the Depression. The modern nighttime image of the Korean peninsula as seen from space, with darkness north of the 38th parallel and brilliant light in the vibrant south, powerfully captures the connection between civilization and illumination. Now, however, a new study of satellite images, published in Science Advances, suggests that we may have taken an undeniably good thing too far. The nighttime face of the planet is getting brighter and brighter, and that may be doing significant harm to the health of human beings, animals and the ecosystem as a whole. If the global glare is growing, it’s no secret why. Suburban sprawl in the U.S. and other developed countries is gobbling up once dark, quiet expanses of land, while explosive growth in China has been producing entirely new cities in what was once empty countryside. The switchover from traditional sodium vapor street lights to LEDs has brightened things further, with yellow-gold urban lighting giving way to a brighter blue-white. And since LEDs are more energy efficient and therefore cheaper to operate, place...
Source: TIME.com: Top Science and Health Stories - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Environment health illumination Light NASA nature NOAA onetime Science Sprawl Source Type: news