Episode 2.0: Earth Day Relaunch

Picking up and starting over, because action is the antidote to grief.

ADDITIONAL SHOW NOTES:

I’ll talk about this more later, but if you have any doubt as to the devastating effect Artificial Light At Night has on pollinators (and other insects) look no further than to the remarkable article by Owens and Wilson “The impact of artificial light at night on nocturnal insects: A review and synthesis.” Linked below, worth the time to read. Turns out, it’s even worse than what I said in the podcast. Eeep.

SELECTED SOURCES:

JOURNAL ARTICLES (NO PAYWALL)

Owens, ACS, Lewis, SM. The impact of artificial light at night on nocturnal insects: A review and synthesis. Ecol Evol. 2018; 8: 11337– 11358. https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.4557

FULL TRANSCRIPT:

Welcome to the Relaunch Episode! Episode 2 point 1 of Starlight and Fireflies, a podcast dedicated to understanding and eliminating the harmful effects of artificial light at night. I’m posting this on Earth Day, 2021, with a moment to reflect on the past year and what’s going to happen with Starlight and Fireflies moving forward. Because We’re back! For real. For as long as I can. But first, about the elephant…

I know I said in a blog post back in the fall that I’d be up and going in October, I know there are a few listeners who are disappointed I haven’t been creating new episodes and for that I’m sorry to have let you down. I’m in a new studio, which might explain why I sound a little different I’m sure I’ll figure out the right level and all that, but we’re in a new house and a new town and, well… changes, even happy ones, are stressful at best and destabilizing at worst and we kind of landed somewhere in the middle.

And at the risk of being a downer, I want to take a moment to acknowledge that what we have all lived through the past 15 months - what we’re still living through - is a slow-moving catastrophe that has forever changed who we are. It’s OK to be Not OK.

This year has brought wave after wave of raw emotion on a such a massive scale that I don’t know as we’ve registered it yet as a species. The collective howling grief that is the background noise of this year - the spiraling death toll, the unending systemic violence against brown and black people, the daily natural disasters, the yawning and deepening chasm between plenty and poverty, the creeping authoritarianism, the accelerating runaway train that is the climate emergency - it can be overwhelming in the best of times.

And when you lose someone close to you in the midst of all of that, emotional background suddenly becomes foreground, and so much harder to keep at any distance. There are those who find it soothing to bury themselves in their work - but I found, over and over again, that the work was too close to the grief, and I couldn’t maintain my distance. It’s exceedingly difficult to research something big-picture and global and systemic and not have it touch something that feels raw and hopeless.

Hope is a thing with feathers but it doesn’t always alight in your garden on command, or stay round long enough to tame.And it took a long long time but I think I might have found a way to make hope stay.

And part of that has been reading accounts of other people who are starved for ways to act for good after a year of trauma. So many people have written and spoken of their desire to DO SOMETHING, to feel something other than helplessness in the face of a world of hurt.

They say that action is the antidote for helplessness, and I know that in my bones that I can offer you such antidotes; at least for the grief that surrounds the pain of our wilting ecosystems.

I can’t suck the carbon out of the atmosphere or untip some tipping points, but I can tell you what you can do to mitigate the effects of light pollution, from the light you don’t need around your house to the light pollution in your community. I can give you factual ammunition to help you go out into your communities and help OTHER people understand why our dark skies are precious and why keeping our skies dark at night is critical in the face of the climate emergency. It’s not just about starlight - it’s about doing small things that can have big effects on massive systems. One single case in point: Insects are critical to our ecosystems and our food web. The vast majority of insects are nocturnal, and I think around 60% of our pollinating species are nocturnal. Light sources at night - doesn’t even have to be bug light, just a regular old porch light - are *terrible* for insects: Researchers have estimated that up 30% of insects that are attracted to artificial light sources each night die, either from opportunistic predation or exhaustion. So, right there, is one thing you can do, tonight on Earth Day, to help the Earth through this crisis: turn off your exterior lighting when you’re not outside. Help the pollinators! You don’t even need to get your hands dirty.

So Starlight and Fireflies will keep telling you things like that - simple, actionable, immediate things you can do NOW; but I will also talk about the bigger contexts, like how light pollution is a matter of environmental justice, how policy decisions and market forces and architecture standards have led us to where we are. How light pollution can amplify the effects of climate change, or take away some of the resiliency that some ecosystems might have had.

Because I have tamed my hope, convinced it to stay, by finding ways to call you to actions large and small.

Thank you for having some small bit of faith in me, and checking back in after this crucible of a year. It is my goal, moving forward, to keep bringing you antidotes to helplessness.

On a formatting note: moving forward, you’re probably going to see - well, hear - shorter episodes more often, and I’m not going to try and wrangle my brain into maintaining a series to the end before I talk about something topical, or trying to fit every episode into a certain length or what have you. I know that the common wisdom in successful podcasting is all about standardization, but I’ve learned that’s just throwing roadblocks up for myself, so nope. Thank you for being flexible while I figure this all out. Shorter things, more often, that’s the gist.

If you want to stay on top of what’s happening, please sign up for our newsletter to be notified of when new episodes drop, or I suppose you could just set an alert on whatever podcast streaming platform you’re listening to this on now.

Thanks again for listening and until next time, remember: The Stars Belong To All Of Us.