It’s always easy to complain if something is bad. However, there is only useful change when someone also has ideas how to make it better. Many communities want to have street lighting that combines cost efficiency, safety, climate protection, and comfortable light. But the actual outcomes of new street lightings are mostly quite sober. Last …
Five o’clock in the morning. Lake Stechlin is dark and silent. Only a few lights are moving at the Old Fisherhut. The LakeLab scientists are getting ready to work. We get into the boats, switch off our lights, and drive out onto the lake. After a few moments the eerie glow of the LakeLab becomes …
If you’re at the sea, and it’s a warm night, what would you do? I would walk along the beach and take in the night with all its beauty. Start with the sound of the waves, savour the outlines of rocks, add some starlight and the moon. Perfect! Alas, these days this turns out to …
I often read or hear that women who walk around at night want lots of light so they can see everyone who approaches them and spot a potential danger early enough to prepare themselves. This is usually said by a man. Well, I’m a woman, and I frequently walk around after dark. Sometimes I walk …
‘Let’s kill the moonlight!’ proclaimed the Italian poet Filippo Marinetti a few years after Edison’s incadescent lamp enchanted the world. With all our light pollution, we have been quite successful in doing this. And today, some people believe they can create an artificial moonlight. The light of a 4000 Kelvin LED street lamp, so some …
‘I arrived in the provincial town of Odienné (Ivory Coast) by truck after a three-hour journey on unlit sandy roads across the bush. We first saw a few dots of light from afar; after a curve, we then saw a unique street lighting revealing silhouettes of men carrying assault rifles.’ This is the beginning of …
In today’s world, LED displays are omnipresent. We use them for computers, smart phones, e-book readers and television. And we use all these appliances until late at night, often right before we go to bed. After all, we usually have more work than we can cope with in an eight hour day, and reading a …
‘Wait, I’ll show you something!’ We are standing on a balcony, looking over the bush at night. Viktor, our South African host turns on a spotlight at the side of his house. We don’t have to wait long before we see a shadow flitting through the beam. A bat hunts for insects at the light. …
Everyday we move through our city, enwrapped in light. We are so used to this lightscape that we usually don’t think about how the light affects us or if we really need it. But this was exactly what I went out to do last week with 20 volunteers from social and ecological projects on a …
So there has been another climate conference, where the powerful have discussed how to save our world. Main topic, was usual, is the CO2-production. Let’s be honest, most countries find it challenging to reduce their CO2-output, some flatly refuse to try. But some years ago, a light appeared at the end of the tunnel of …