Robert Parrish is a member of the Cass County Parks Board and lives in Edwardsburg. He can be reached at rbtparrish@comcast.net.

As a Delegate to the International Dark Sky Association, I’ve submitted past articles for the protection of our shared natural resource, the night sky.

Mother Nature is beautiful, and I’ve always professed that nature’s beauty extends past the setting sun. No matter your belief, that we are the creation of an all empowering spirit or the product of happenstance through science, we are all constructed of star stuff. Given this, an unobstructed view of the heavens gives clues to our origins.

The problem is that modern mankind, for the past 100 or so years, has worked hard to vandalize the beauty of the night sky. Since the invention of the incandescent bulb, we’ve labored hard to stifle our fear of the dark. With the endless proliferation of man-made illumination, we have effectively tagged the beauty of the cosmos by obliterating it with light. It’s called light pollution.

Light pollution is insidious and born out of misconception. It’s harmful to plant and animal life. As for humans, the American Medical Association has chimed in by stating that this extra light is harmful to our health. If my claims seem doubtful, feel free to Google my position.

I bring up this subject as locally our utility companies are replacing streetlights with the new technology of LEDs. LED lighting is far more efficient and does reduce our carbon footprint, but they do have a dark side. Pun intended.

The high energy efficiency of LED lighting had led to an unforeseen problem. Many municipalities, seeing that they are saving on their electric bills, view this as an opportunity to install additional, more powerful lamps. This shortsighted decision only adds to the increasing problem of light pollution.

Most people harbor the belief that more lighting leads to less crime. This fallacy has been dispelled from a variety of scholarly studies. To those that hold firm to this belief I ask the following: “do you believe crime only happens during the night?” In many cases, we are only providing work lights for the nefarious inclined by highlighting potential targets.

One component of light pollution is glare, a problem that is magnified to those with older eyes. An example of glare would be an oncoming car at night that refuses to dim its bright headlights. It could also be those annoying blue tinted LED headlights that many newer model vehicles utilize. Glare is an insidious danger that is temporarily blinding. Improperly designed streetlights amplify glare and its attending danger.

Locally, the utility company has begun to replace old streetlights with LED fixtures. The glare these new lights create is problematic to night driving. I’ve noticed that I tend to squint when passing by these new fixtures. At intersections, those same lights produce similar reactions when trying to gauge oncoming traffic. Both examples create safety issues.

One of these new lights was a personal concern because it brightly illuminated my bedroom. This condition is known as light trespass, to which I registered an online complaint. To the utility companies’ credit, they quickly installed a partial shade, a solution I offer to anyone who might be experiencing similar issues.

But the brightness of these new lights is only part of the problem. The color corrected temperature of the light is also of concern. As stated earlier, the AMA is on record linking adverse human health issues that are affected by light pollution. Their findings are magnified with lighting that produces a CCT over 3000 kelvin.

Studies show that lighting rich in blue wavelength output (above 3000 kelvin) reduces the body’s ability to produce melatonin which helps us sleep. In today’s modern world, sleep is a valuable commodity. To encourage a decrease of the same though improper lighting practices has been proven to lead to a wide variety of medical maladies. Again, I invite you to implement your own research.

To summarize, the miserly energy consumption of LED lighting is their main attraction. It reduces our carbon footprint and saves money. The downsides are dangerous conditions such as glare, light trespass and detriments to human health. Proper lighting management can mitigate these negatives and restore our beautiful night sky.