“When I was little, I wanted to see the stars, but we had to get an app on my mom’s iPad to see pictures of what the night sky was supposed to look like.” Tamalpais High School senior Fiona Bailey said. “You’d hold up the iPad and take a photo of the sky, and it would show what you would’ve seen without light pollution.” 

More and more of our beautiful skies are becoming starless. 

Light pollution from houses, street lights, billboards, and more, impacts the world in many ways. It wastes energy, harms wildlife, contributes to climate change, can be damaging to human health, and takes away the ability of those in cities to see the stars in the sky.

“The Milky Way galaxy has been deemed invisible by 30 percent of the world’s population. Move to North America, and that percentage jumps to 80 percent,” long-time astronomy educator Don Jolley said. “The great alarm in that is that the Milky Way is our home. You look at the Milky Way, and you’re looking at the community of stars that our sun belongs to. It’s our community.”

Recent measurements indicate that the average night sky has gotten brighter by 9.6 percent per year from 2011 to 2022, which is equivalent to doubling the sky’s brightness every eight years, according to the National Park Service.

“I can barely see the stars most nights,” Tam senior Molly Squires said.

The DarkSky movement, founded by David L. Crawford, is a movement designed to restore the environment and protect communities from the harmful effects of light pollution through outreach and advocacy. The movement works to spread awareness about light pollution, promote responsible lighting practices, and create legislation to enforce dark skies.

Light pollution not only obscures the night sky, making it more difficult to see the stars, but it can also negatively impact animals. 

“For billions of years, all life has relied on Earth’s predictable rhythm of day and night. It’s encoded in the DNA of all plants and animals. Humans have radically disrupted this cycle by lighting up the night,” the DarkSky official website said.

The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission discusses how light pollution can alter day and night light patterns, which is essential for animals to be able to maintain their reproductive and sleep cycles.

           Moths and other insects can be drawn to artificial lighting in and around homes, leading them, in many cases, to their deaths. Light pollution can also disrupt the reproductive habits of many other animals, including frogs, toads, and sea turtles. 

Frogs and toads both croak at night to attract a mate, and excessive lighting interrupts the darkness and therefore their mating song, according to the Wildlife Habitat Council, a business that helps companies promote biodiversity and eco-friendliness.

“It really messes with the signaling of a lot of creatures, their waking and sleep cycles, and night hunting,” Tam biology and Advanced Placement (AP) environmental science teacher Quinlan Brow said. “City structures along the beach that produce massive amounts of light means that [baby sea turtles] can’t follow the moon and could head to the city instead of the ocean.”

Not only does light pollution harm animals, but it has similarly negative impacts on humans.

The circadian rhythm—humans’ inner 24-hour clock that regulates cycles of alertness and sleepiness in accordance with the light and environment—is essential for being well-rested and healthy. 

Light pollution, or a lack of darkness in life, can result in sleep deprivation.

According to the United States National Library of Medicine, the disruption of the circadian clock is linked to several medical disorders including depression, insomnia, cardiovascular disease, and cancer. It is an essential process for hormone production, cell regulation, and more. Lack of routine sleep or enough sleep can prevent the body from being able to perform the necessary cycles to stay healthy. 

In an average year in the United States alone, outdoor lighting uses about 120 terawatt-hours of energy, mostly to illuminate streets and parking lots. That’s enough energy to meet New York City’s total electricity needs for two years, according to the DarkSky website.

DarkSky estimates that at least 30 percent of all outdoor lighting in the U.S. alone is wasted, mostly by lights that aren’t shielded. That adds up to $3.3 billion and the release of 21 million tons of carbon dioxide per year.

The movement is not simply fighting for no light to be used at night, they are advocating for responsible lighting practices that would benefit everyone. The 30 percent of wasted light isn’t only harming the environment, but it is also costing money that could be put elsewhere.

Humans have been referencing the stars since around 1000 BCE, over three thousand years ago. The stars were monitored to tell time, which was fundamental for agriculture, religious rituals, and navigation, according to the European Science Agency.

“Our ancestors watched the night sky, and now we can’t. We are missing out on meteor showers and seeing planets, something humans have watched for years,” John Ginsburg said.  He is a physics teacher at Tamalpais High School, and taught AP environmental science for nearly a decade.

West Marin is currently trying to become Northern California’s first recognized DarkSky community. A Darksky community is one that has “shown exceptional dedication to the preservation of the night sky through the implementation and enforcement of quality lighting policies, dark-sky education, and citizen support of the ideal of dark skies,” according to the DarkSky International website.

Specifically, they must enact things like timers and motion sensors to turn off lights when they are not needed, blocks to prevent light from shifting upwards, and have written standards in legislation. 

According to the National Park Service, 20 to 50 percent of lighting from outdoor lighting goes directly into the sky due to bad shielding, and light-emitting diodes [LEDs] and compact fluorescents with warm-white bulbs can help reduce energy consumption.

“Pretty much all the lights around the buildings [at Tam] come on at night and go off in the morning,” Tam janitor Harold Oden said. “It’s pretty bright around here all night.”

Even Tam has an impact on light pollution, and it is important to make sure good choices are being made, including shielding light and using correct light bulbs.

“[We want to] invite participation for achieving a DarkSky designation for West Marin, so that you and I, visitors who ever come here, can begin to re-acquaint themselves with the workings overhead. Workings overhead that were common knowledge as recently as, say, 200 years ago,” Jolley said in a speech given on April 19, 2023. “It becomes a pathway, a means by which you and I, and others, can become re-grounded by looking skyward.”