by frog
There is a fascinating article in National Geographic on light pollution:
We are diurnal creatures, with eyes adapted to living in the sun’s light. This is a basic evolutionary fact, even though most of us don’t think of ourselves as diurnal beings any more than we think of ourselves as primates or mammals or Earthlings. Yet it’s the only way to explain what we’ve done to the night: We’ve engineered it to receive us by filling it with light.
This kind of engineering is no different than damming a river. Its benefits come with consequences—called light pollution—whose effects scientists are only now beginning to study. Light pollution is largely the result of bad lighting design, which allows artificial light to shine outward and upward into the sky, where it’s not wanted, instead of focusing it downward, where it is. Ill-designed lighting washes out the darkness of night and radically alters the light levels—and light rhythms—to which many forms of life, including ourselves, have adapted. Wherever human light spills into the natural world, some aspect of life—migration, reproduction, feeding—is affected.
The article continues on to list the impact on bats, bugs, birds, turtles and of course frogs. As you would expect though it’s the sort of problem we can easily resolve. The article notes that:
Simple changes in lighting design and installation yield immediate changes in the amount of light spilled into the atmosphere and, often, immediate energy savings.
Apart from the frogs the species that you would expect us to know more about the effect of light pollution upon is of course humans. But we are only just beginning to unravel that story:
Darkness is as essential to our biological welfare, to our internal clockwork, as light itself. The regular oscillation of waking and sleep in our lives—one of our circadian rhythms—is nothing less than a biological expression of the regular oscillation of light on Earth. So fundamental are these rhythms to our being that altering them is like altering gravity.
For the past century or so, we’ve been performing an open-ended experiment on ourselves, extending the day, shortening the night, and short-circuiting the human body’s sensitive response to light. The consequences of our bright new world are more readily perceptible in less adaptable creatures living in the peripheral glow of our prosperity. But for humans, too, light pollution may take a biological toll. At least one new study has suggested a direct correlation between higher rates of breast cancer in women and the nighttime brightness of their neighborhoods.
Although when we consider design standards to address issues of this nature it is normally slated as a nanny state invasion of our right to have our biological wellbeing and circadian balance altered without us knowing.
Published in Environment & Resource Management | Health & Wellbeing by frog on Sat, November 1st, 2008
Tags: , darkness, light pollution
on the trolls and those who are unable to keep on topic
ah, the ever high scientific standards of the national geographic! …never mind the factual accuracy of what you report…, …and never mind that you intentionly misrepresent the data to make it look to the unthinking that a correlational relationship is causal…
Like or Dislike:
0 
0 (0)
>>The ‘cum hoc ergo propter hoc’ fallacy? Of course, philosophically, ’cause’ is very hard to pin down.
Like or Dislike:
0 
0 (0)
Actually if you reread the quote carefully you will see that National Geographic made no such claim that correlation entails causality. Correlation does however present a prima facie case for causality that needs to be investigated more thoroughly.
Like or Dislike:
0 
0 (0)
kiore,
my point was that, although they do not dirrectly state a causal relationship in the article, the article is clearly implying that there is when the research shows only correlation (and infact several things they say are blatently incorrect while others, such as the cancer, are easily explained through well known causes).
The National Geographic, much like the New Scientist, is not a journal and is hardly ment for an academic audience able to distinguish correlation from causation and as such this article is writen with extremmly poor academic integrity. It is almost an image of the infotainment which we call ‘news’.
Like or Dislike:
0 
0 (0)
Have people been living in the Arctic circle for only the last century?
I take it the Swedes who put up with months when the sun never sets have short life spans and succumb more frequently to cancer that those who live near the equator and hence enjoy a stable night/day cycle.
Which planet to the authors of this stuff live on when they talk about “the regular oscillation of night and day.”
Like or Dislike:
0 
0 (0)
whoa, for once owen mcshane is completly correct.
).
Our sleep/wake cycle is determined by our suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) and will continue to function without reguard to being day or night, as evidenced by a massive amount of studies conducted where people are put in constant light or darkness for months on end. The SCN does not run at exactly our day length though, it varies by about an hour depending on the person so without the light changes in day and night we eventually get out of synch with the accual day an night, though that is relativly irrelivant. The SCN however does detect light through special photosensitive cells in the eye which allows it to keep itself in synch, which is why you can use a bright light to prevent jet lag if you know when to use it.
The only disorders more prevalent in or around the artic circle is the increaced incidence of Seasonal Affective Depression which generally affects almost everyone in the winter (though some people get it in the summer
Infact the most effective non-drug/non-ECT therapy for depresion in the short term is to (ironiclly deprive the individual of sleep for a night and then allow the individual, the next day, to sleep from 5pm to midnight and then repeat for a week. lol.
The more likley causes here are that of stress and class. Probally due to an associated increaced activation of the sympathetic nervous system.
Like or Dislike:
0 
0 (0)