Night'’s Out!

Merry Teesdale is a field biologist and permaculture designer who specializes in win-win solutions. She manages OwlWood Wildlife Refuge and OwlWood Garden, which displays and encourages the development of sustainable food production within the community.

As a society and as individuals, we are becoming increasingly aware of the changes to our planet and our quality of life that we are incurring by our penchant for burning fuel.

What if there was a way to significantly reduce our energy consumption, help salmon, reduce crime and save our city of Bellingham over a quarter million dollars a year? A way that would equally affect everybody in such a minor fashion that most would not even notice, and which at the same time, offers major benefits to the community?

There is such a way. All this and more we can accomplish by merely turning off our streetlights from the hours of 1 to 6 a.m. While most of us are asleep, we can have five hours of natural darkness. We can call this time Night’s Out!

Lighting energy in the United States accounts for the combustion of four to five million barrels of oil (or its equivalent) every 24 hours. Energy audit data demonstrates that about 30 to 60 percent of energy consumed in lighting is unneeded or gratuitous. (Wikipedia) http//en. Wikipedia.org/wiki/light_pollution.

An interactive map of the whole earth at night can be seen at http://www.starrynightlights.com/lpIndex.html. If you stared at this map of North America’s night sky for five hours you would see the results of burning about a million barrels of oil and gas.

Our lights of Bellingham show up on this map and since most of us are asleep between 1 and 6 a.m., we can surely all agree that the light energy produced during these hours is underutilized. Let’s explore how necessary this underutilized light really is and what our lives would be like without it.

Lighting consumes one fourth of all energy consumed worldwide. Most of the light shown on the map is produced by carbon fuel, but here in the Northwest a lot of our power is produced from hydroelectric dams.

According to the excellent document “The City of Bellingham Greenhouse Gas Inventory and Climate Protection Action Plan,” signed unanimously into law by the City Council on May 7, 2007, street and traffic lights accounted for 11 percent of the city’s greenhouse gas emissions and 20 percent of the city’s power cost in 2005.

At the time, the city’s electric bill for streetlights was about $500,000. This spring, the city committed to buying all green power, which is more expensive. I asked the public liason officer from Puget Sound Energy (PSE) what would happen if a city the size of Bellingham were to stop buying a large chunk of nighttime power.

The answer was there would be no effect to PSE because its three hydro projects generate only enough power to supply the demand. With lessened demand, they simply store the water for later use, which will be a benefit for salmon. Note, PSE also contracts some electricity from other sources, green or otherwise, so in reality all power types merge together on the electrical grid.

But PSE connects certain power purchases to a particular power source, as with its green power program. By buying 100 percent green energy, the city has completed its requirements for the emissions reduction target set by the Greenhouse Gas Inventory and Climate Protection Plan.

Quoting from the Greenhouse Gas Inventory document, “It is … important to note that a significant shift in the accounting method being used occurred as a result of City Council’s decision to begin buying renewable energy credits for 100 percent of municipal electricity used. Because of that decision, all electricity use is considered emissions-free beginning in 2007.

“Typically, any conservation measures that reduce electricity use are also counted as reducing the emissions associated with that use. Following Bellingham’s choice to begin purchasing green power, there are no emissions to reduce. This does not mean these efforts are without value.

“A preliminary survey of these measures found lighting upgrades and other electricity conservation measures, which are saving the city in excess of $80,000 each year. It is likely that, under more extensive review, additional savings would be uncovered. While no longer reducing pollution, [only in terms of the targeted sector and accounting method, my comment] these efforts are a wise use of resources nonetheless.”

We must not lose sight of the fact that when we refrain from burning energy, we are not polluting and so, in reality, there is an overall pollution reduction. Also, the dollar savings gained by Nights Out! could offset costs associated with CO2 reductions in the energy use sectors of vehicles, buildings, water and sewage.

What would it be like have dark between 1 and 6 a.m.? Would crime increase? This is a fascinating question. The number one light pollution misconception held by the public is that “light prevents crime.” This is probably intertwined with fear of darkness because there are no studies that specifically prove that light prevents crime.

There are, however, many studies that suggest crime and light levels are not even connected! Apparently, only our fear of crime is reduced when we have light, but not crime itself. This begs the question, what is the validity of feeling safe if you are actually less safe? Following are summaries of a few studies, but more of them are listed and described at http://www.darksky.org/links/crsesali.

In the 1970s, San Antonio successfully reduced vandalism and graffitti in their schools by instituting a “dark campus” policy. When they turned out the security lights, their costs dropped immediately. The San Diego police state publicly that they see no real influence of lighting source on crime levels.

West Sussex, an unlit town in the U.K., did a very fine experiment in which they lit some areas and not others. They found that even though the residents reported feeling safer, the crime in the lit areas went up 55 percent. They subsequently decided against all night lighting.

A point that addresses the concerns of residential areas is the city of Calgary Police Service conclusion that most break-ins occur when a property is unoccupied (homes during the day, and businesses at night, with or without security lights.) Police report that darkness can be much safer because neighbors can learn to alert them if they see lights on in buildings.

Bellingham currently has a mostly unlit neighborhood and another which is very dark. On the city of Bellingham’s Web site under “Police,” there is a table showing the number of calls to the police department per month from each neighborhood for the past several years (http://www.cob.org/PIRCrimeStatistics/CallsForm.aspx.) Looking at the Web site even without subtracting out time of day and purpose of calls, it’s still obvious that the darker neighborhoods make the fewest calls by far.

The city of Bellingham has a crime analyst who informed me that the “available light” in an area is not considered as a factor in their analysis. Analyzing for light is possible and would not be hard to do since the department keeps track of their data by block. We could get an answer by subtracting out the daytime calls, ranking the neighborhoods in terms of available light and comparing them with the calls. This might be a great project for a student at WWU.

It seems logical that turning out lights would very likely abate crime. Even switching to motion sensors on the streetlights could be a great crime deterrent. From a place on Sehome Hill, such as the fifth floor of WWU’s Viking Union, one can see practically the whole of Bellingham and a spotter stationed there could easily monitor a criminal’s escape route.

But what about those who feel uncomfortable with the dark? They can certainly have their own light and I suspect most already do. And for the downtown businesses who stay open later than 1 a.m., the streetlights nearest them can stay on until after they close.

We’ll probably need to make a few more tweaks to the system; for example, lowering streetname signs to be more visible in headlights and placing a few motion detectors in strategic spots. Even though there will be an initial cost to implementing the timing of the system, and making the tweaks, I expect the cost will be less than the first year’s savings.

Let’s explore the benefits of having a darkened city using Nights Out!

•We’ll sleep better if it’s darker,

•We, the taxpayers, will benefit from decreased utility expenses,

•There’ll be fewer greenhouse gas emissions and/or there will be saved water for salmon,

•We’ll be amazed to learn that our scenery at night is just as fantastic as our scenery during the day; we’ll gain a spectacular natural nightscape of stars,

•We’ll be safer with decreased crime, plus we’ll have additional savings of justice system costs, and

•We could become the first city in the nation to do this and we’d get a lot of positive press.

I was both touched and thrilled this year on Earth Day when I saw two major cities turn out their lights for a moment. The Eiffel Tower in Paris darkened 20,000 bulbs for five minutes and, on this side of the earth, New York’s Times Square gave up its false daylight for a few minutes as well. So I say it’s time we get serious about this. Some of our future choices may be tougher, but this is one big energy expenditure that we can “easily” do without.

If we become the first city in the nation to turn our lights out and, by our example, we encourage other cities to adopt a Nights Out! philosophy, we will have conserved even more energy than we could possibly use ourselves.

How can we implement this? Alex Ramel, the principle author of the “Greenhouse Gas Inventory and Climate Protection Action Plan,” told me the city could not accept an idea like this from one person. He suggested the best way to implement Night’s Out! would be for a neighborhood association to request it.

Rather than visit every single neighborhood meeting and make presentations, I gift this idea and background information to the community through this paper, the Whatcom Watch. So, neighborhoods, please think about turning out the street lights between 1 and 6 a.m., talk about it, put it on your agenda, call me and I’ll come to your meeting. Let’s ask the Bellingham Police Department to do a light analysis with their statistics. Let’s come up with more ideas.

Jennifer Barlow, founder of Dark Sky Week states, “The night sky is a gift of such tremendous beauty that it should not be hidden under a blanket of wasted light. It should be visible so that future generations do not lose touch with the wonder of our universe.”

Here’s how I envision Night’s Out! happening, imagine …

The first Night’s Out! coincides with the start of a fantastic astronomical event such as (for example) the Perseid Meteor shower. Or a comet or interesting planetary formation. For weeks we have been learning about the sky or the phenomena we are about to experience through our media.

That evening, everyone stays up late. Eventually, people wander outside and gather with their neighbors to chat and laugh. Then the street lights dim to nothing, and night is out! It’s dark at first. After a few minutes, our eyes adjust and stars pop out one after another like they do on the Fourth of July. Someone spots a shooting star. Another points out constellations.

Someone spies a satellite … a friend has a telescope, people see things they have never seen before … the universe humbles us as we sense the age of this planet and, by the turning of the stars, see and feel the earth spinning through the night. §