Lights Out

Last night, I was about an hour into writing a posting when I decided that I needed to look up something on Google. I opened a new tab, typed in my search, and hit the enter key. Unfortunately, I had somehow gotten back to the tab with the blog site, and when I hit enter, I lost all of the posting that I had written. It's kind of like, "the dog ate my homework". Anyway, here I am, rewriting last nights' posting. Of course, I can't recreate it just as I had written it, and it's just as well, because it had become a little too cumbersome for my taste. I'll start out where I left off last night. That is, with the statistic that I was looking up.

Here's a big number for you: Three hundred and eleven billion watts. That's the total amount of electricity that is used to power all of the commercial, governmental, and street lighting that is on every night in this country. In order to produce this much electricity, it takes the equivalent capacity of over one hundred McGuire Nuclear Stations. When you finish reading this posting go to http://www.nightearth.com/ to see a composite photograph of the earth at night, taken from a satellite.

I hate all of this unnecessary lighting that we use in this country. It gives us a false sense of security, it pollutes the night sky to the point that we cannot see the stars, and it wastes tremendous quantities of our money and natural resources.

I remember one nice upside to Hurricane Hugo. For four nights, I could sit on my front porch in the dark, without the glare of a high pressure sodium street light in my face. It reminded me of staying at my grandparents' house on Lake Lynn Road when I was a kid. They didn't have any street lights around, and they went to bed early. It was so dark, you couldn't see your hand in front of your face. No stranger could have possibly found their house at night. If it were not for street lights, "In cold Blood" could never have been written, and the Clutter family would still be alive.

There were three street lights on my block when I was young. They were the kind with the metal hood with a porcelain reflector and an incandescent bulb. They were set fairly low on the utility poles, and they produced a pool of light that you could use to perhaps read a newspaper headline. These lights were more of a means of navigation rather than a source of illumination. I could ride my bike or walk up the street with out getting lost or hitting anything as big as a parked car, by simply aiming at the next murky island of light. They produced just enough light that I could find trouble, instead of trouble finding me. I never looked around and wished there was more light.

I don't expect that we will ever go back to the nineteen fifties level of lighting. If we do, it will be because the world has gone to hell in a hand basket, and we will have far bigger things to worry about. I do wish that we could tone down the lighting some. Perhaps street lights that are lower to the ground, with light that is more downwardly directed, and of lower wattage. And maybe, for example, the car dealerships could cut back on lighting in excess of that at the Panthers Stadium, or at least cut the lights off at some point each night.

I know that the opportunities are few and far between, but I hope that you get a chance to "see" the dark again one night.