Wednesday night, scores of people turned up at a town hall meeting in the Village of Barrington Hills, Ill., 40 miles outside of Chicago. Residents are resisting a new lighting ordinance being entertained by the village government. In a bid to win plaudits from the International Dark-Sky Association—which fights outdoor lighting as a blight that blots out the starry splendor of the natural night—local officials want radically to restrict how residents use light on their properties. In response, some 200 people, out of a village of 4,000, have formed a group they call Homeowners Against Lighting Ordinances, or HALO.
Barrington Hills is an odd place for this battle. It’s not as if the village has a problem with “light trespass.” Most houses in the community are on lots five acres or larger—enough space that, even if there were residents whose mansions were blazing away like casinos, not much light would be bleeding over into neighbors’ yards. Nor is the area, near the metropolitan glare of Chicago, a vital center of astronomical research.
But there are kudos to be had for embracing what is a fashionable cause. Dimming the lights appeals to environmentalists eager to save juice as well as to the trendy types touting natural lifestyles. Astronomers may have been the first to sound the alarm about light pollution, but now the idea has been embraced by activists urging us to seize the night. In the past few years, books such as A. Roger Ekirch’s “At Day’s Close” and Christopher Dewdney’s “Acquainted With the Night” have rhapsodized the exotic delights of darkness. Thus builds a cause. And, for municipal busybodies, no cause is complete until it has been imposed on all one’s neighbors.
Read the full WSJ article here.
Leave a Reply