Don't put the cart (light) before the (horse) concrete.

[Ron Gatrelle]

From: Ron G.
To: the in-light-end
     We seem to have a great tendency, I think, to focus on mono problems
and mono situations. The question of light "pollution" has been around for a
long time. I initially "bit" on this "issue." (In Al Gore fashon, I even
initiated the issue.) However, at some point years ago I had a shift of
focus. Was the "problem" the lights or the habitat loss due to the
development that brought the lights?
    There was once this remote old gas station north of Summerville South
Carolina on Highway 78 that I would occasionally stop at to gather moths off
the white washed walls lit by a few low watt incandescent lights. It was
pitch black all around this site surrounded by nothing but forest and swamp.
There was also lots of noise from frogs, crickets, etc. They eventually
built a huge plant with lots of mega lights. Not only did the moths "vanish"
so did the noise. Noise generated by creatures far from the light. Forest
was cut, wetlands were drained.
    If one shut off all the lights in the most lit (and therefore most
polluted)
areas there would be no "return-of-the-moths." Where would they return
from -- the concrete? The factory? The housing development? The twelve lane
Interstate? The drained wetland? From under your car? From inside your house
(interesting how no one is giving up their home for environmental
reclamation.) If I have not made my point by now it can not be made.
    By the time an area is suffering from mega light pollution -- the
presence of the light no longer matters because the habitat is long gone.
    Many critters are always helped by man's environmental alterations.
Birds, mammals, insects, there is not a group without species which are now
more abundant than ever due to human environmental alterations. Have many
species become extinct by our actions? Absolutely! But species have been
gong extinct in mass long before man ever arrived on this rock. Extinction
is not only an evolutionary fact, it is an evolutionary necessity. I am by
no means saying
that there is not a real environmental fight to fight. I am only saying that
mono-vision is actually a type of blindness.



 
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