Bag Those Beams

By Dan Cray/Los Angeles

For years, the towering buttes along Interstate 40 in Arizona were surpassed in majesty only by the desert's night sky--a ceiling of ink glittering with stars and frosted with iridescent wisps of Milky Way. Today, however, the once pristine views from I-40 and various scenic byways across the U.S. are being whitewashed by floodlit roadside businesses whose commercial glow obscures the heavenly lights for miles around.

"The stars are an endangered species," complains Wini Brewer, a Morongo Valley, Calif., artist who purchased five acres of desert property for its starry vista in 1996 but is now mired in squabbles with the owners of what she considers grossly over-lit homes and businesses. "Ruining the sky," she says, "is no different from ruining the view of Yosemite."

Light pollution, a term coined by astronomers trying to protect mountaintop telescopes from the encroaching glare of urban sprawl, is fast becoming a national concern. Legislation to "bag the beam," as one campaign refers to it, is pending in four states, including New York and Massachusetts. Last summer Texas and New Mexico enacted tough laws to restrict outdoor lights, and just last week officials in Fauquier County, Va., joining hundreds of regional enforcement efforts, voted unanimously in favor of similar restrictions. Even Inuits living 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle have reportedly begun to complain about the lights.

Thanks in part to the publicity surrounding Comet Hale-Bopp and other heavily hyped celestial events, "light pollution went from a nonissue to something that's on everyone's mind," says Maryann Arrien, a documentary-film maker and an amateur astronomer in Putnam Valley, N.Y. Efforts to curb light pollution are under way from the Australian Outback to Britain's Sherwood Forest, according to the International Dark-Sky Association (I.D.A.), which boasts 3,600 members in 70 countries.

The lights won't wink out without a fight. Homeowners view brightly lighted streets as a crime deterrent and tend to feel more secure when their property shines like a Hollywood stage set. And business owners who pump a lot of money into outdoor signage insist that increased wattage is frequently all that sets them apart from the competition.

But there is such a thing as shining too much light on a subject. The Illuminating Engineering Society of North America studied commercial lighting and concluded that many companies use five times the amount of light necessary for effective marketing. "Business lights are out of control," says Nancy Clanton, a lighting designer who helped the I.E.S. draft new guidelines recommending that outdoor lighting be reduced as much as 80%.

Antilight activists say it's possible to fight crime in residential areas without whiting out the sky. "We're not suggesting you live in the dark. We're saying it's time to keep lights on the ground where we need them," says Tim Hunter, co-founder of the I.D.A., who contends that at least 30% of all light is needlessly cast into the sky. Indeed, the solution to many light-pollution problems may be as absurdly simple as putting shields around outdoor bulbs to prevent their beams from traveling above the horizon.