Keep the Burren in the Dark
An orange light is dawning in Burren. The only problem is that it’s dawning around sunset and staying on all night.
When I first moved to the Burren from Dublin, one of the things I most enjoyed were the incredible night skies. Unless you’ve experienced the two, it’s kind of hard to describe the difference between a night sky near a big city or town, and the night sky somewhere really dark. On a moonless night in the Burren the sky is full of stars. I have no idea what an objective measure might be, but my impression is that there might be a hundred times as many stars visible. You realise that there are stars between the stars and as you look longer, stars between the stars between the stars.
I often go into the mountains to sit and watch meteor showers (the predictable displays of falling stars that occur as the Earth’s orbit intersects with a stream of cometary debris). Such nights can be spectacular, but on any reasonable clear night I can go outside in the Burren and if I wait long enough, say 10 or 20 minutes, I will see falling stars. What’s strange is that I have often talked to people who have never seen a falling star, and who had no idea that they occur all the time, and that one only has to wait and watch long enough in a sufficiently dark place to see them.
But it’s not so surprising if you live in or near a city. Light pollution, which could be loosely defined as light that doesn’t serve the purpose it was intended for, brightens our night skies and dramatically reduces the number of visible stars. Light pollution includes the light from street lights streaming in the windows of your apartment and making it hard to sleep; intrusive, glaring advertising that you don’t need and would rather not have to endure; and also necessary lighting, like street, footpath and roadway lighting, that has spilled over to where it is not needed.
When a street light lights the sky as well as the street, it creates light pollution, and it also means that energy is being wasted. I think that much of the orange glow that hovers in the skies above Irish cities and towns is caused by the use of large low pressure sodium lights in drop lens fixtures that allow light to spill out and up. Sodium light is often used for street lighting, as it is energy efficient, yielding 80-200 lumens per watt (compared to 8-25 lumen per watt that a conventional incandescent bulb yields). However if a large proportion of that light is not being directed to where it is needed, then it is inefficient, just as it would be inefficient to turn your heating system on in your home while leaving all the doors and windows open. It doesn’t really matter how efficient your system is, if you’re heating the garden and the neighbourhood as well as your house!
Modern lens and fitting designs are being used in cities that are trying to reduce light pollution (and save energy and money at the same time). These ensure that light falls where it is needed and only there. There are also regions of the world that are declared as ‘dark sky preserves’. In these areas, and in protected regions around observatories, light pollution is deliberately controlled to keep the skies dark.
The Burren is definitely not as dark as it used to be. Even on clear, moonless nights the skyline above the hills
around the Perfumery is punctuated with orange glows: Gort, Corofin, Lisdoonvarna, Ballyvaghan, Kinvara and even
Galway all contribute. In addition to asking whether we can reduce light pollution
(and energy consumption) through
better technology, I think we could also ask: how much lighting do we need and for how long? The handful of streetlights
in our tiny village of Carron burn from twilight until dawn. However nobody walks around Carron in the middle of the night.
A very few people might drive through, but they have their own headlights. From midnight to 6am – do these streetlights
serve any purpose other than to muddle moths and befuddle badgers?
So we’re thinking of starting a campaign to make the Burren a Dark Sky Preserve.
If you think this is a good idea and would like us to petition our county council, please let us know, using the form below. I will publish the responses on our site and if we get sufficient interest, we will pass your comments on to the local council and see what can be done.