Not that we need an excuse to link to them on any given day but today we have a special reason - David Owen’s fantastic piece on light pollution. Long considered a ‘soft’ environmental issue, light pollution is still important and more vital to our everyday life than we often think.

Although nighttime lighting has seldom been a priority of environmentalists—one of whom described it to me recently as a “soft” issue—bad or unnecessary lighting not only wastes billions of dollars’ worth of energy every year but also can wreak havoc on ecosystems. Migrating birds can be fatally “captured” by artificial lights, a fact that was made obvious a half century ago, when early versions of a common meteorological device called a ceilometer—which used a powerful vertical beam of light to measure cloud ceilings—sometimes killed thousands of migrating birds in a single night. Artificial light can be especially lethal to insects. Gerhard Eisenbeis, a German entomologist, has written that outdoor lighting can have a “vacuum cleaner” effect on local insect populations, causing large numbers to be “sucked out of habitat.”

Great stuff. Click here for the entire article. And click here for more on the International Dark Sky Association.