Parts of America Can Still See the Stars

FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. -- Stores in a new mall here found a way to get around one of the USA's toughest lighting ordinances. That's how Chris Luginbuhl sees it anyway.

The stores hung big round globes inside their front doors that shine bright white light outside on the sidewalk and beyond. Retailers think lights attract customers like moths, Luginbuhl says, even though these "glare bombs" actually make it harder to see.

They also waste light — and energy — shining it into the night sky, he says. The lights of most urban areas in the USA erase the Milky Way and many stars from nighttime views.

"People have become estranged from the night," Luginbuhl says. "We're trying to remind people that darkness is a natural condition, not something pathological that needs fixing."

Part of Luginbuhl's job as an astronomer at the U.S. Naval Observatory here is to keep the night sky dark — or starry — and he has help. A movement to promote ways to keep the sky dark may still be small, but when a growing number of cities and towns study how to cut glaring lights and save energy costs, they look to this city of 58,000 south of the Grand Canyon as the model.

After Luginbuhl and John Grahame, co-founder of a local dark-sky coalition, complained about the mall lights, city officials got the developer to try getting the stores to change them.

"The vast majority of people grow up in a city and don't know what a dark sky looks like," says David Crawford, co-founder of the International Dark-Sky Association in Tucson. "I've never seen anybody who wasn't deeply impressed, their souls struck almost, by being out in a really dark place."

A half-century-old campaign

There's passion about dark skies here, in no small part because of the observatories that for decades have quietly lobbied for pristine viewing of the stars. Lowell Observatory was the first here in 1894. Percival Lowell came from the East looking for life on Mars. A Lowell astronomer discovered Pluto in 1930.

Next year, Flagstaff will celebrate 50 years of campaigning to protect dark skies. Signs proclaim Flagstaff is the "world's first international dark-sky city," and people are proud of it, Grahame says.

"This isn't just about astronomy, it's about a love of the dark sky," he says. "We don't want to lose it."

Flagstaff's first step was banning advertising search lights in 1958 after astronomers complained that they interfered with their observations. In 1973 came an ordinance, since amended several times, requiring low-intensity lights in businesses. Lights must be shielded and directed toward the ground.

Any light shining above horizontal "just lights up the bellies of bats," Grahame says.

Commercial signs must have opaque backgrounds with little white light. A business's total amount of outdoor light is restricted.

The goal is lights bright enough to see but not cause glare, which reduces visibility. Dark-sky fans talk about how less light at night provides greater security, because the lack of glare makes it easier to see prowlers and harder for prowlers to avoid being seen.

A regional jail and a hospital here, institutions typically bathed in bright lights, have won awards from the dark-sky association for their dimmer, yet effective, lighting.

"You can see everything. In the absence of light, areas you want to see are illuminated," says state Rep. Tom Chabin, a former city councilman here. "You see every sidewalk, every entrance. You see where you need to go, but there's not light shining directly in your eyes, shutting your eyes down."

Many flagpoles around town are lit from the top instead of the bottom, so light isn't wasted in the sky. Car dealers here don't leave lights on after they close. Many gas stations have greatly reduced bright lights under their canopies, rejecting the notion that a brighter station attracts more business.

Businesses whose lighting existed before the ordinance don't have to comply, though some have been persuaded to change fixtures, Grahame says. The coalition's goal is to raise enough money next year to pay the costs for "grandfathered" businesses to switch their lighting. Grahame thinks less than $100,000 is needed. The coalition also hopes to get a home lighting code passed that would ban bright white security lights and "brass and glass" porch lights that shine light skyward.

Little opposition to dark-sky efforts

What Flagstaff has achieved can't be duplicated everywhere. Tucson had one of the nation's earliest and strictest lighting ordinances, but in that metro area of nearly 900,000 seeing the Milky Way is tough, Crawford says.

"No matter how well you do lighting, you're not going to make the Milky Way come back in New York City," Luginbuhl says.

Driving around Flagstaff, a visitor is struck by how the lack of flashy, bright lights seems to shrink the footprint of a community.

"It's interesting how lighting and the sky and the revelation of the sky and the stars out anybody's back door gives you this quiet sense of place," Chabin says.

City Councilman Al White says that aside from a few who don't like the government interfering into their affairs, the dark-sky effort has stirred virtually no opposition. "The politics of the dark-sky movement is like recycling," he says. "Recycling just makes good sense because it's a waste-not, want-not philosophy. So is dark skies."

Energy conservation is the movement's natural ally — less light means less electricity, which means fewer greenhouse gases contributing to global warming, goes the argument.

"In a sense, dark skies is one of the canaries in the mine about the whole concept of unlimited resources and expending things without any limits," says Wes Lockwood, a Lowell astronomer."

Astronomers, however, are the first to say that a dark sky is about more than scientific research.

"Just like seeing a redwood or a beautiful landscape in Yosemite or Grand Canyon, a starry sky can be an inspiring thing," says astronomer Luginbuhl. "Whoever thinks we preserve the Grand Canyon so geologists can do research?"