YOU ARE A STARGAZER...
WE ARE ALL STARGAZERS
YOUR ancestors were stargazers, too. The stars you see tonight are the same stars your ancestors saw thousands of years ago. Imagine your great, great, great, great, great grandparents gazing silently into the dark sky realm, awed by the starry spectacle aloft.
IMAGINE how dark their sky must have been. No streetlights, no business lights, no lights at all to intrude upon their magnificent view of the cosmos.
STARGAZING is unique among human activities. It bonds you, links you, fuses you to all the people who have ever lived on this planet. Every time you gaze into the heavens you reaffirm your cosmic connection.
YOU are the stuff of stars. The atoms that shape you were once the dust and gas of ancient stars. The stars are your ancestors.
NATURE intended the night sky to be dark. It’s not, and it’s unacceptable! Our distant ancestors saw the sky in absolute, consummate darkness; but our night sky is littered with light. Nighttime lighting does some good, but... it also destroys our connections to the universe. That is no longer acceptable! It must change! NOW! The people who are responsible for inappropriate nighttime lighting must be held accountable and forced to change their ways!
WE are on the brink of a celestial catastrophe!
IF light pollution continues to increase at its current pace, by the year 2020 there will be no place in America from where you’ll see starlight in a pristine dark night sky, not even in the desolate deserts! The magnificent Milky Way will be extinct! The constellations will be nothing more than memories in the minds of star-geezers like me and nothing more than phony light shows in fancy, upscale IMAX theaters and planetariums--more damned technology leading to more and more nighttime lighting Real stars are much more enjoyable than fake stars on screens!
WE humans are the first and only species on Earth capable of celestial extinction. We have the means and the will, it seems, to vanquish the night. We possess the ultimate antidarkness weapon--light--and we seem unwilling to control our appetite for more and more light! We are addicted to light!
LIGHT--bazillowatts of blazing, glaring, wanton, reckless, upturned light--light that shines up, out and all about! And worse, we seem obsessed with using it to cloak, cover, and conceal every photon of starlight!
WHAT value the night? What worth the sky? What merit the stars? Why save these twinkling beacons from heaven's portal? Have we not already disturbed every ecosystem on this planet in search of money and profit? Is our addiction to money so strong that we must destroy the heavens, too?
WE slash and burn rainforests, contaminate water, desecrate air, and foul land. Is not the sky a worthy sanctuary, refuge, preserve? Must we annihilate the night sky to satisfy our lust for light? Have we no conscience, no restraint? Are we so obsessed with our power, our dominion over Nature, that we must conquer the cosmos, too?
SPEAKING of dominion and control: It’s the so-called christian dominionists (stepped on a few toes there, didn’t I?) and their numerous apologists who are cheering on the destruction of Earth and Sky with their blasphemous, irrational and ridiculous myths and fantasies, just so they can have complete and total control over the planet, all its lifeforms, including you and me, and the cosmos--all in the name of their wacko god (more bloodied toes!)!
TONIGHT, to satisfy our lust for light, large cities will spray fountains of light skyward, and only a few of Nature's brightest luminaries will defy the malefic glow.
TONIGHT and every night, a halo of wasteful light hovers over every small town. Even the sky over farm and field is already tainted by a sea of shimmering security lights, most of which provide a false sense of security while wasting money and Earth.
WE are trapped in a web of wires and poles, marquees and signs, streetlights, blazing business lights, and billboards beaming more and more wasteful light skyward.
FEW Americans have seen a truly dark night sky. Indeed, so few people know the night sky's starry patterns that many mistake Venus and even the Moon to be the agents of alien abduction, destruction, and extinction!
TO behold the starry spectacle of a genuinely dark sky, stargazers are forced to travel ever greater distances to the frontier, the outback, the hinterlands of human colonization, and even there the ghostly specter of our castaway light hovers on the horizon, stalks the stars, and devours the darkness!
WHAT will motivate you? What will activate you to cease your silence?
You already know more than enough about light pollution! Now what you need to do is get out there and act! Do something! Anything! Stop the SOBs (Satans of Brightness)!
If you are not doing something to eliminate light pollution, you are doing everything to eliminate starlight!
Stop reading your glossy astro-magazines and stop sticking your eye to the eyepiece of your computer-controlled telescope!
Get off your astrobutts and launch a Dark Sky Revolution tonight or it's the end times for starlight!
NO EXCUSES! NO EXCEPTIONS! NO COMPROMISES!
© Jack Troeger, Dark Sky Initiative. troegerj@raccoon.com