Lighting may have made progress in mitigating obtrusive light pollution, especially within highway lighting and in protecting dark sky reserves, but there is still a long way to go. As Jack Ellerby writes, leadership and collaboration are now needed on tackling urban light pollution, especially poor domestic and commercial lighting.
The first thing I want to emphasise is that I’m a dark skies officer, not a lighting professional. So, I come at this issue – of light pollution and obtrusive light – from a broader, outside perspective.
This article is built from a presentation I gave this month to LDC Durham – and so my thanks to the team there for their hospitality and extremely warm welcome, and for giving me the opportunity to speak.
I am also very aware that, to an extent, my message both in Durham and here in the pages of Lighting Journal is preaching to the converted, but I still hope these reflections will help to spark discussion, debate and drive further improvements.
Furthermore, I want to emphasise right from the start that this is not about me ‘having a go’ at lighting professionals, far from it.
I’ve over the years met and worked with many wonderful lighting designers and engineers who really want to make a difference. In particular, I’ve learnt a huge amount from Ian Harker, lighting manager for Cumbria (latterly Cumberland Council) and of course an active ILP member. Moreover, I know organisations such as the ILP also ‘get’ this issue, and I am grateful for the Institution’s leadership on technical and guidance notes in this area.
Having said that, we still have a long way to go when it comes to reversing the growth of light pollution and obtrusive light.
Back in 2016 barely a fifth (22%) of England still has the darkest skies (with Northumberland still the darkest area of England). In fact, I’d go as far as to argue that around 95% of lights being installed today are not good from a dark skies perspective. They’re over-illuminated, they don’t meet GN01, poorly fitted and left on when not needed. So, there is still a lot of change needed throughout the industry from manufacturers to installers.
Mentioning GN01 highlights, too, that it is not that there are not effective standards and guidance to follow. I’d also cite 2020’s BS 5489-1 Design of road lighting – Lighting of roads and public amenity areas and, even if it’s now going back a few years, 2014’s BS EN 12464-2 Light and Lighting: Lighting of Work Places: Outdoor Work Spaces as valuable in this context.
Yet, too, often we still end up with a situation where a designer will look at a project and, if it isn’t specifically in a dark sky reserve or community, assume they just don’t need to worry about or even properly consider dark skies.
RETHINKING ENVIRONMENTAL ZONES
There can also be blinkered or tunnel thinking around environmental zones. Inevitably, a greater amount of development, and a higher proportion of lighting, goes into E4 and E3 zones: the urban areas and towns.
Yet, again, because they’re not specifically ‘dark sky’, you can end up with thousands upon thousands of poor lights – what I term ‘death by a thousand poorly fitted lights’ – often ill though-out commercial, industrial and domestic installations that erode the quality of whole settlements and the wider surrounding landscape.
They add to the skyglow and the erosion of sky quality, with light too often spilling out into the surrounding countryside, which then has a negative effect on both urban and neighbouring wildlife habitats.
It’s understandable that a lighting professional working on a scheme for, say, an industrial estate is not going to thinking too much about how their scheme is going to be looking five or ten miles away; they’re going to be focused on the specific environmental zone they’re working within and meeting the needs of their client.
But we need to get beyond that narrowness of vision, to recognise that light pollution and obtrusive light are as much an issue for urban areas as for ‘dark skies’ areas.
I think that, as a profession, lighting needs to revisit the upward light output ratio thresholds in the current standards. A It is still eminently possible to achieve functional goals for lighting within your project or community without adding to skyglow.
One of the problems here, I’d argue, is our perception of what we mean by ‘dark skies’. Historically, the dark skies movement has been very much driven by astronomers and astronomy.
So there can be an assumption that dark skies needs only to be about protecting pristine night-time environments in the countryside whereas, in fact, it should be about ensuring all of us, wherever we live – whether we live in an urban environment or not – have at least some sort of access to night skies.
Urban dark skies often get overlooked. Yet in many ways it is a bigger priority to get your lighting right in urban centres than it is in the sticks. We need to do it right everywhere, obviously, but it needs to be an equal priority.
Alongside this, I’d like to see the various lighting bodies and organisations (including the ILP) coming together to reconsider or rethink the standards and to look at how environmental zones are defined and applied.
I know it will be a challenge. But if lighting bodies, including the ILP, SLL and LIA can come together with wider perspectives to think about the standards and the way they’re applied a bit differently, then I think we can achieve better outcomes than currently being delivered..
Jack Ellerby is dark skies officer for Cumbria
Image: Light pollution over Teesside from Lordstones in the Cleveland Hills. By Steve Bell and NYMNPA
This is an abridged version of Jack’s article in the November/December edition of Lighting Journal. To read the full article, click on the page-turner on this web page.
