Defending the Dark

This program is supported in part by the Maine Outdoor Heritage Fund And, Your True Nature, committed to sharing the wisdom of the Earth through Advice for Life greeting cards, bookmarks, stickers and magnets - The dark sky, really, to me, just takes us back to a place where we can actually sit, look up and just hear nature at night, and see the sky and realize that that's one thing that the world hasn't changed for indigenous people.

- If you look on the map, the light pollution map, Maine has this black hole, and that's because we have an area that has little light pollution and we have very dark skies.

- We need to connect people as a whole with the environment and to really understand that we don't own it, we don't control it, but we have a tremendous impact on it.

- So anything that's evolved over millions of years to be nocturnal, lights will affect them.

- If we preserve the sky, we're preserving the sky that our great grandparents saw.

And if we lose it, we're losing that sense of where we are.

(gentle music) - [Nancy] I moved back home to Maine, the coast of Maine, in the early 2000s.

And one night I got out of the car and looked up and was like, oh my gosh, the Milky Way.

The stars were so bright and the sky was so black.

It was an awe moment.

- [John Meader] You know, our species has been in the dark at night forever until 100 years ago.

[John Bear] So I know when I look up at night and I'm in a dark area that really brings out the stars and have an understanding of star stories that exist within our tribes really helps me to understand what my ancestors were probably thinking, because the dark sky really tells a story and the stars are that story.

And those stories really have a relationship to who we are as a people.

- [Dave] If we lose the night sky, we lose an elemental part of who we are, and we need to find ways to make sure we conserve that sky.

(gentle music) - [Nancy] This area surrounding Katahdin has the largest areas of dark sky east of the Mississippi River.

There's little light pollution, and you can see the Milky Way, and you can see stars here that you can't see on most of the east coast.

- [John Bear] I have paddled from Mount Katahdin, Ambajejus Lake to North Haven Island, five times.

It's an enormous amount of river and ocean.

And really part of that experience was for me to look at sort of these landmarks, these things that happened traditionally before contact period, so that I could observe or understand a little bit about what my ancestors might have gone or seen.

What's the same, what's different.

One of the things that can't be changed yet, and that's great is they haven't altered the sky.

And business industry government has not altered what we see when we look up at night, what they have done though, is made it a little harder for us to see that sky at night in certain areas.

- So dark sky preservation, which sounds like it's about bringing the stars back, which it does is really about a much bigger issue.

So here's the thing.

If you can't see the stars, which by the way is true for 80% of the world's population, that's the symptom of the problem.

But that's indicative of the fact that there's too much artificial light being produced and being sprayed out in places where it's not needed.

So what are the impacts of that?

Well, yes, we lose the stars, but that's our symptom, the real problems cover many different areas.

So let me hit a few of those pretty quickly here.

One is, if you live in a light polluted area, you are at increased risk of breast or prostate cancer because it affects your body chemistry.

It has been tied to other forms of hormonal cancers.

It's been tied to problems with adolescent development because it affects sleep cycles.

So it has just direct medical effects on people.

Excessive light produces glare.

So a lot of road lights which aren't done well produce glare.

A lot of lights on parking lots produce a lot of glare.

Gas stations are famous for being grossly over lit.

All of these are creating glare and actually making it more dangerous to be on the road.

So those are just a couple of things that affect humans.

Birds and insects, pollination, which we desperately need.

It's not just for pretty flowers and trees, but your food has to be pollinated.

Some insect or bird has to bring the right stuff from one plant to another plant that can be lowered by as much as 60% in areas that are light polluted.

- [Serena] So moths are pollinators.

So a lot of times people think of moths just the caterpillars that might do damage to a crop.

But really as we start studying more about moths, we're realizing that we've really studied those diurnal creatures, there's daytime creatures, like the bees and the butterflies.

We haven't really touched moths.

So they just started really studying them.

And what they're noticing is that moths are incredibly important pollinators, unlike a bee where bees can be very specific to a plant or they find a food source and they're like gonna stay with that food source, moths are not like that.

They're actually very generalist.

And so they'll go from plant to plant and that kind of spreading of pollen across an ecosystem is incredibly important.

- [Doug] We don't have as many fireflies as we used to have.

Over a billion birds die each year trying to migrate because they get trapped in the lights of cities or get misdirected and can't navigate.

- [Serena] Most songbirds in fact, migrate in the darkness.

They migrate at night and in the places where there's cities and lights, they get really thrown off course.

So when, in fact, when the twin towers came down and they put up the two beams of light, they saw fatalities rise among birds that were flying down through the flyway of the east coast, just thousands of birds dying.

And it really was just two lights in the sky that had changed.

(insects chirping) So amphibians are nocturnal and they breed in darkness and that's what they need and want.

You'll notice actually in ponds, like if you come up to a pond that's full of frog song in spring and you have flashlights, it silences them almost immediately.

You'll see that in places where there is a lot of light, they have a harder time with mating in that area.

And those amphibians make such a big difference in all the animals, like the insects they're eating.

And they're a huge impact.

- So it has tremendous effects on the natural environment.

Then of course, to make extra light, you have to make electricity.

So here's the thing for every hundred watts of lighting that's on for a year requires burning a ton of coal in a power plant and Americans believe it or not spend $3 billion a year paying for electricity to put on lighting that's going up in the sky.

So the beautiful thing about this problem compared to many others is number one, curing it saves money.

You're using smaller bulbs that are putting light on only when and where you need it.

They use less power.

So the fixtures are cheaper.

The electricity use is down, that saves you money.

And when you do these things, the results are immediate.

If you turn the lights off everything comes back right away, the birds and the insects will find their plants.

The stars will come back.

The glare will go away.

It's an immediate result that saves money.

(upbeat music) - [John Bear] So for the Wabanaki people, the dark sky really has a significance in stories of afterlife and how we conduct ourselves through life that we're walking right now.

The term Wabanaki is specific to the Northeast region of Maine and the Maritimes.

It encompasses four tribes, the Micmac, the Maliseet, the Penobscot and the Passamaquoddy.

And in pre-contact times were all one people, one language, which considered ourselves a keeper of the Eastern door, Wabanaki means people who see the light first, the sun.

And so we refer to ourselves, our identity as based on the sunrise, people of the first light.

And so we have been in this area proven for at least 12,000 years.

And we have a number of stories that talk about the stars.

And when we are feeling hopeless, the Milky Way that we call it now in English really has a significance in that it contains a story about our ancestors who have lived and walked this earth before us, but have passed away.

And they're up there and they light these fires and they go and sit by these fires and they look down on us and they watch us and they wait for people who pass in this life to come up and they greet them by family, with warmth and love.

And these fires are each one of the stars that we see in the sky, in the Milky Way, the furthest away.

And it's a path, it's the path we need to walk once we leave this earth, we walk on that path.

We find our ancestors, we find the right fire.

And that's really comforting as humans.

(upbeat music) - [Doug] Right now, we're sitting at Medawisla Lodge, which is one of the Appalachian mountain club lodge facilities within the AMC main woods international dark sky park.

And it's the first dark sky park in New England.

- [Nancy] Katahdin Woods and Waters is designated by the International Dark Sky Association as a dark sky sanctuary.

- [David] So Rangeley Lake Heritage Trust is working with the community to conserve the night sky in the Rangeley region and hopefully fairly soon have the town of Rangeley become certified as a dark sky community as a first step towards conserving nice sky out in the broader region.

We think it's our responsibility to take some initial steps, start here at the center of population and build out from there.

- The International Dark Sky Association, which is globally recognized as the leading organization against light pollution, they created a dark sky place program, has different designation levels.

There's dark sky sanctuaries, parks, reserves, communities.

And they're working on some new configurations as well to really kind of help capture the energy around light pollution and conserving the dark skies.

- [Doug] What we have here is a dark sky park.

So an area of substantial area, region where all the outside lighting is either controlled or in our case minimized, and which is accessible to the public and has programming and activities.

So it's not just an area that's dark, but where we have ways to engage the public with the natural night sky.

And so this is a perfect place to be doing that.

As soon as they started working on acquiring land up here.

And I looked at it and went, wow, that would be a really great international dark sky reserve.

Now reserve is a higher status than a park, and we can talk about that a bit.

And we aim to get that status down the road.

We finally were able to get the commitment to say, okay, we're gonna go after this.

And it involves quite a bit of work.

It's not just a matter of, writing a letter saying, hey we'd like to be a dark sky park.

- [Jenny] In order to be a dark sky park.

You have to have an exceptionally dark sky, which we do here.

And that's proven with the dark sky readings that we took with sky quality meters.

And so that was great to see that we already had the resource here.

We had to make sure that our entire 75,000 acres of ownership, that all of the lights met the International Dark Sky Guidelines.

And then the final piece was making sure that as these regions move forward and especially for us, that we had ordinances in place so that there would be no future lighting that fell outside those guidelines could ever occur on our landscape.

We partnered with Mountains of Stars and their astronomy programming to kind of bring some of that educational aspect to our lodges.

- [Doug] The whole goal in what we do is to connect people with the environment.

And we do that through astronomy because astronomy is firstly really cool.

Everybody loves it.

And it is of course, the study of absolutely everything in the universe.

And that includes you and me and all the plants and animals and birds and trees and rocks and things.

And our goal is to change the way people look at the environment and how they treat things.

- [Jenny] We also have telescopes at all three of our lodges so that people can go out and experience what a dark sky is, because it's great to be able to eliminate that light pollution, but be able to show people why it's important to eliminate and just the amazing, fun, awesome experience that you get from the result which is an amazing dark sky and star gazing opportunities.

- That's amazing.

(upbeat music) - [Nancy] I read something about International Dark Sky Association having reserves around the world.

And when I heard that Roxanne Quimby owned this 86,000 acres plus in the north woods, I contacted her and said, what about if we turn this into a dark sky reserve?

And it wasn't the right time and her recreation manager, we talked and we came up with the idea of having a stars of a Katahdin party.

That was a very huge beginning.

And then the idea of becoming a national park was on the agenda.

And the National Park Service came to do some meetings, and right at the end, I thought, I need to talk about dark skies.

and said there's one resource we haven't talked about.

And I had a little pause.

And then I said, it's the night sky and people clapped.

And I just remember this sort of roar from the audience and the National Park Service picked up on it.

And he said, yeah, he goes astrotourism.

- Well Dark Sky Maine evolved from being evolved at Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument before it was a monument.

In 2014, a group of people started doing a star party there called Stars Over Katahdin.

And Nancy Hathaway who was one of the founders of Stars Over Katahdin came up to me after, she says, I think we should start a nonprofit to help other people around the state of Maine who want to work towards having good dark skies as best they can have wherever they happen to be.

And I said, that sounds like a great idea.

She says, are you in?

I said, it looks like I'm in I guess.

- So we were off and running like a herd of turtles with a great mission of saving the precious night skies in Maine.

- [John Meader] There is a benefit economically to having dark skies.

It's the old, like on a map, you paint a green and people show up because it must be beautiful.

They paint a green for a national park or a state park or something.

Well, it turns out if you get a designation, an official designation with the International Dark Sky Association, that you're a dark sky sanctuary, dark sky preserve, or as a number of different categories, then people who want to be in dark places, they will come 'cause they want to set up telescopes.

So they want to see these skies.

- [Jenny] Because if you're into astronomy, you need that darkness to be able to see that thing you're looking for that star, that planet, that alignment, that eclipse, you need to have those nice dark skies.

And so for this region, so heavily based on tourism as being the economic driver in the region, this was kind of a new thing.

Something that you could either come specifically for, or you could tag onto a trip that you were already having.

So whether or not you are a paddler or a camper or a hiker, you're a hunter, you like to fish that dark sky can easily be tagged onto any trip.

So for the community, it was really about, wow, this is a great resource that now we can market the region as being a great place to come to see it.

(upbeat music) - [Doug] So we really are at a crossroads right now with lighting.

So the lights that are going in are invariably too big, too bright and too blue.

If you look at satellite data, for example, one's widely available on the web, just look for light pollution satellite map, and look at any area from five or 10 years ago and now you'll find out that things are a lot brighter now even though we're using a much better lighting technology that should be producing less glare, it's producing more.

So if we continue down that road, what's going to happen?

The sky will be invisible to almost everybody.

Health effects will get worse and we don't really even know how bad it's going to be.

The epidemiological studies of these cancers are being done on my generation, it shows up when you're older in your fifties and sixties and things were a certain level of brightness when I was growing up.

Today's kids are growing up in a much brighter environment.

So the health effects for them are gonna be even worse, but that's not really gonna show up for a while.

So we would expect cancer rates to go up and behavioral issues to go up and learning issues to go up as more and more generations grow up in these much, much brighter environments.

If we keep going the way we're going, the stars are gonna go away.

We're gonna see fewer and fewer bird and insect species, 'cause they're gonna die off.

A bunch of plant species will disappear.

More pollution, more glare, more issues.

Flip side, people wake up to this and go, oh, this is a real problem.

It's an easy fix and I save money.

I'm in, let's do that.

And everybody goes and does that.

What happens?

Well, the stars are gonna come back because they're not gonna be glare.

Suburbs and neighborhoods are gonna be much more attractive because you're not gonna have glaring lights pouring into your bedroom.

Streets are gonna be safer for kids walking outside because you're not gonna have glare in driver's eyes.

Electricity use will drop significantly.

All of those negative effects we talk about are gonna be reduced and they get reduced immediately.

It's not just a, we cut it now and in 20 years it's better.

It's we cut it now and it gets better right away.

So those are the two extreme versions of the future.

The really, really good and the really, really bad.

(upbeat music) This is truly something that individuals and families can do something about.

There are a couple of good ways that folks can proceed to make improvements.

- We can have our lights, our outside lighting.

It's important for the shield to come down so that the light doesn't go out to the sides so that the light goes where we want it to go.

- People are on the ground for the most part, from my experience.

And so you need the light down where people can see it so they can walk and not trip and fall and hurt themselves.

And they find their way.

So shield your light, so that's an easy fix.

- [Doug] The Illumination Engineering Society and the International Dark Sky Association came up with five very simple guidelines that if you follow will give you the best possible lighting, but the principles are very simple, which are light should be useful.

That light should only be as bright as necessary.

It should only light the area you need.

So if you have a walkway, by all means light the walkway, it should only be on when you need it.

And lastly, it should have as little blue light in it as possible.

So you can imagine all these office spaces people work in that have these bright fluorescent lights and everybody hates them.

That's because they're so blue it's a very intense light, comfortable lighting is much yellower.

And it's the blue light that actually creates most of the health and glare effects.

And there's a whole bunch of physics behind why that happens.

So the way to eliminate that is the bulbs you buy should be what we call the lowest temperature possible.

So every bulb you buy, every fixture has a number on it and it might be 3000K or 2,700K or 2000K, the lower that number, the better it is, the higher the number the worse it is.

So you see those really bright blue headlights on cars.

Those are like 5,000, so for comparison.

Wherever possible, you follow those five guidelines, have only as much as you need, have it where you need it, have it on when you need it and so on, that will solve the problem.

- So we can all make a difference and I'll use myself for an example.

I love dark skies, but I hadn't really thought much about outdoor lighting.

So right now I'm going through my residence and making sure that my outdoor lighting is shielded downwards.

And number one, number two, I only have it on when I really need it.

So that's one thing any one person can do.

The other thing is reach out, find other people in your community that are interested in dark skies.

You'd be surprised.

People may not know how much they love the night sky, but when you bring it up, they remember that it is important to them.

- My next door neighbor does have a telescope.

So he's aware of the night sky.

But I went out to look at the night sky one night and he had his barn light on.

So I got up the courage to call and ask him, and I said, I'm going out to look at the stars.

Would you be willing to turn off your light?

And that light has not been on since.

And that was a number of years ago.

So maybe the sentence is I'm going out to look at the night sky.

Would you be willing to turn your light off for an hour?

- [Doug] And then you can promote that to businesses.

You do it at home, go to the company you work for, look at your parking lot light, look at your building lights and say, hey, look, we can increase our profits, make it more comfortable, make it safer.

Why don't we make this improvement?

- [Nancy] Part of the education is that we show people that we can save the night sky and have lighting that provides safety.

And then we can go to our towns and our cities and make proposals and make ordinances.

- One year I went around to all the town offices surrounding Katahdin Woods and Waters to talk to them about dark skies.

And the next year I went around and the doors opened up wide.

- [Jenny] If you eliminate a light or you redirect a light or you change the color of that light bulb, the result is you get to see the dark skies immediately.

- [Doug] There are benefits to doing dark sky compatible lighting wherever you are, and it's better for the environment, it's better for your health and safety, it's better for glare issues, saves money.

So I mean, it helps in every possible level.

- [Jenny] I hope that the amount of light that's coming from this region stays consistent if not, is diminished over time.

And I also hope that the people that come here to see the dark skies take that experience and that information and take it home with them.

- [Nancy] It means for the future that we stay connected to ourselves and our environment.

- Get outdoors, look at the bugs and look at the sky and try to make the connection between the firefly and the stars.

'Cause they're connected.

- [David] If we lose these certain, just elemental parts of ourselves being outdoors, experiencing the night sky, seeing wildlife, hearing bird song, we lose part of who we are.

- [John Bear] The dark sky is extremely important to us.

It is our prehistoric internet.

It's really important to us culturally, it's really important to me and my understanding and my experiences are based on that.

And I want to kind of keep that going.

- [Nancy] The dark sky impacts the world by cultivating and nourishing a sense of wonder.

- [John Meader] I love lying on the grass or lying on a blanket that ticks around you on a blanket now with a child, especially, but anyone and you lie, they're looking at the stars and your son or your daughter, your niece, or your whatever says, wow, how far away is that?

How long would it take us to get there?

That's the ticket.

That's what it's about.

And if we lose our dark skies, it's not that those questions will go away, but we'd lose an important catalyst.

(upbeat music) This program is supported in part by the Maine Outdoor Heritage Fund And, Your True Nature, committed to sharing the wisdom of the Earth through Advice for Life greeting cards, bookmarks, stickers and magnets To learn more or to schedule a screening of Defending the Dark in your community visit dark sky film dot com