| Navigation home energy, carbon and climate change transport waste and resources food and business landscape and biodiversity campaigning and communication contact |
Golden Valley Environment Group
The landscape and biodiversity. Light pollution - anyone noticed that one of the great things about this area is that you can see the stars at night? I've had friends come out from London and say that they've never seen the milky way - usually I can say "look up" and they will see it, perhaps for the first time. But, as with so much, it's under threat. More and more light is shining upwards at night and blotting out the stars. Light that is not carefully directed down to the ground goes skywards. It's bounced off particles in the air and shows up as glow over towns. Hereford is pretty obvious from here. Good design of public lighting, sensible use of outdoor lights and care to turn off the unnecessary lights can all help. There's a campaign to try to do something about it all - Campaign for Dark Skies - CfDS www.dark-skies.org . One thing we can all do is think about outside lights. Those (cheap) 500W floodlights are nothing like cheap when you think about what it costs to run one. A house nearby where I write used to have two on virtually all night every night - at a cost of £250+ a year (and that's a conservative estimate)! If that isn't enough to make you cut back then maybe the carbon will. Those two lights cause the release of almost a tonne of carbon dioxide in one year! |