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Bug Earth

Germany Plans To Dim Lights At Night To Save Insects 117

Posted by BeauHD from the insect-populations dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from MSN: In a draft law seen by AFP, the country's environment ministry has drawn up a number of new measures to protect insects, ranging from partially outlawing spotlights to increased protection of natural habitats. "Insects play an important role in the ecosystem...but in Germany, their numbers and their diversity has severely declined in recent years," reads the draft law, for which the ministry hopes to get cabinet approval by October. The changes put forward in the law include stricter controls on both lighting and the use of insecticides.

Light traps for insects are to be banned outdoors, while searchlights and sky spotlights would be outlawed from dusk to dawn for ten months of the year. The draft also demands that any new streetlights and other outdoor lights be installed in such a way as to minimize the effect on plants, insects and other animals. The use of weed-killers and insecticides would also be banned in national parks and within five to ten meters of major bodies of water, while orchards and dry-stone walls are to be protected as natural habitats for insects. The proposed reforms are part of the German government's more general "insect protection action plan," which was announced last September under growing pressure from environmental and conservation activists.
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Germany Plans To Dim Lights At Night To Save Insects More

Germany Plans To Dim Lights At Night To Save Insects

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  • Ecosystem (Score:5, Funny)

    by Sooner Boomer ( 96864 ) <sooner.boomr@gma[ ]com ['il.' in gap]> on Thursday August 06, 2020 @11:16PM (#60375647) Journal

    My porch light is part of the local ecosystem. I have Mediterranean house geckos living behind the siding on my house. They come out at night to feed under the porch light. If I get rid of the light, who will feed the poor starving lizards? Won't someone think of the lizards?

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:Ecosystem (Score:4, Insightful)

      by q_e_t ( 5104099 ) on Friday August 07, 2020 @12:25AM (#60375731)
      Because before porch lights, geckos didn't exist as there was no food for them.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by VAElynx ( 2001046 )
      There's this, and then there's the fact that with "light pollution" gone, the bugs will be attracted to the inside of your house. Which is truly great
      Don't you love it when legislation bends over backwards to favour special interest groups nobody's ever heard of?

      • You are confusing cause and effect.
        Floodlights outside were created to keep insects out of houses.
        Effect of the above: Insects kept dying and dying and dying.
        Result: insects are endangered as a whole in certain parts of the world.
        Effect of the above: legislation enacted to stop the destructive effect of light pollution to insects
        Side effect: insects are more attracted to houses.
        Efficient solution to the side effect: anti insect nets, don't light the inside of your house like a fucking Christmas tree, use Ba

      • There's a high tech invention called "mosquito net" which you can put in front of your windows. Just sayin'.

      • Re:Ecosystem (Score:5, Insightful)

        by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Friday August 07, 2020 @02:22AM (#60375925)

        Don't you love it when legislation bends over backwards to favour special interest groups nobody's ever heard of?

        Just because you haven't heard of a group doesn't mean that they aren't vital to the function of society and may even be directly responsible for maintaining your way of life.

      • Actually night sky ordinances are more about pointing nights downwards (like its done in some towns of Arizona and Idaho) as opposed to getting rid of them completely.

      • How about increased disease and death from these not-dying, house-invading masses?

    • Re: Ecosystem (Score:2, Insightful)

      by BAReFO0t ( 6240524 )

      If there were enough insects, they wouldn't need a damn liggt to not starve!

      Keeo signaling "conservative" virtue!
      (Note how nowadays, "conservatives" seem to be more about being destructive and selfish, rather than conserving. Aka psycho-libertarianism.)

  • I've seen people getting yellow-tinted porch lights lately that are advertised as being less attractive to bugs. No idea how well it works... but they also tend to be dimmer overall, that's got to help with light pollution at least a little.

    • Dim yellow lights attract fewer bugs, than bright lights. It just takes a few moments standing outside and looking at lights and how many bugs there are are, to figure it out. What we need is motion activated street lights. As electronics in general gets cheaper, it becomes possible to make more outdoor lights motion triggered lights.

    • Well, I remember all street lights being very orange. Was cheaper than white incandescents.

      • Not just cheaper, but technically usable (incandescent lights with that brightness tend to have very short life expectancies).

      • I'm seeing the orange ones get replaced with vividly blue LEDs at a fast clip. It's actually possible to make it out in the sky here when there's cloud cover. Look toward the newly-developed areas and the sky is blue, look to the older areas with lights installed 20+ years ago and there's more of an orange tone.

  • Attention bug-loving Germans (Score:4, Funny)

    by Powercntrl ( 458442 ) on Thursday August 06, 2020 @11:47PM (#60375693) Homepage

    Please come to Florida and remove all the bugs you'd like from my yard. You're welcome.

  • This should also benefit sleep. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by BAReFO0t ( 6240524 ) on Friday August 07, 2020 @12:54AM (#60375785)

    And astronomers.

    Too bad we can't just dim the existing street lights too.

    Including annoying lights put up by store owners to advertise their store at night. For the five damn people a decade, who pass by there and don't know that that store is there, and care too.

    BTW: Anyone else can't stand those bright white LED street lights. They are the epitome of uncomfortable lighting, and feel like being cut in the eye.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Agree with you here. I live in a country next to Germany, and in the last 30 years light pollution has become a huge issue. So huge, that i barely can see stars at night even when unclouded, only the brightest can be spotted.

      I discussed this with people before. Most people seem to think that having street lights on all night makes them feel safer. If i suggest to turn them off around midnight, a bunch of excuses come not to do so. And i never really understood why, except this perceived safety.

      On top of tha

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by xonen ( 774419 )

      Agree with you here. I live in a country next to Germany, and in the last 30 years light pollution has become a huge issue. So huge, that i barely can see stars at night even when unclouded, only the brightest can be spotted.

      I discussed this with people before. Most people seem to think that having street lights on all night makes them feel safer. If i suggest to turn them off around midnight, a bunch of excuses come not to do so. And i never really understood why, except this perceived safety.

      On top of tha

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by jeti ( 105266 )
        Belgium is the worst country in terms of light pollution that I've ever visited.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by kackle ( 910159 )
        It is AMAZING that you typed not only the same ideas as the last guy, but using the exact same WORDS!

      • A railway station just up the road has lots of lights (as you'd expect). They dim when there's no one around and brighten when someone (or something) moves beneath them. I wouldn't credit our train companies with much, but they did this really well - you can still see everything when dimmed, but when you need the light to be brighter, it comes on (and goes dim again when you don't).

        Why our local councils just changed a load of orange bulbs for bright white LEDs without adding this feature is a bit beyond me

      • Most people seem to think that having street lights on all night makes them feel safer.

        Many studies have shown night lighting decreases crime.

        Light pollution is mostly caused by poor engineering. Many many lights shine not just as the ground, where we need the illumination, but at the sky, where we don't need the illumination. Pay attention the next time you're landing in a plane at night. All those lights you can see shining at you- those are all designed incorrectly. Lights that are covered towards the sky and only point at the ground do not cause nearly as much light pollution.

        Technology C

    • As an amateur astronomer I'm totally with you.
      Street lights are unnecessarily tall (10 to 15 meters, that's 33 to 50 feet tall), very bright and too close from each other. Most streets are lit like it's daylight, many of them with those cold white LEDs which scream "artificial". Of course, in many areas there's a mix of sodium lights (which are OK), bright cold white LEDs and the occasional greenish-tinted street lights which give out this spectral protoplasmic type light, spooky as hell (I like them though

      • A big disadvantage of making lampposts shorter is that you're now looking directly into the light, which makes visibility a lot worse. Ideally you shouldn't be able to see the bulb at all, but that requires reducing the width of the light cone, which means you need higher lampposts.

        • I don't know how tall are you, but 18 feet high diffuse lights are not making visibility worse.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Mashiki ( 184564 )

            Apparently you don't drive at night. A 18ft high diffuse light will blind the driver in a car or truck as they drive towards it at a wider angle and as they pass under it. You can see this with the high reflectivity-high diffuse LED lamps mounted at 30ft compared to the low or high pressure sodium lighting that was used(these had their own issues with fog and snow). The 36"x3bulb fluorescent light arrays used in some cities for street lighting suffered from the same problem.

          • If they're diffuse the problem isn't as bad, and height makes a difference too. Where I live, the 12ft high diffuse streetlights have just been replaced with 12ft high non-diffuse "look at me, I'm a LED lamp" streetlights that are incredibly annoying to walk or drive towards.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ledow ( 319597 )

        If you make them shorter, you need more of them to cover the same surface area (unless you want to change the angles of visibility which is a bad thing to do on roads, etc.).

        Bigger question:

        Why do you need road lights at all on motorways, there are thousands of miles of cats-eye / reflective paint motorway in the world, and cars have headlights.

        Why are we mandating compulsory headlights on cars if the roads are illuminated, and why we are illuminating the roads if cars have headlights?

        Pedestrian paths need

      • Why can't there be PIR based motion detection street lights, 12 to 18 feet tall, I have no idea.

        Presumably because having them on permanently is the lesser evil by far. Compared to them coming on at random intervals as cars drive by or pedestrians trigger the PIR detectors.

        I know for certain that that would drive me absolutely bananas.

        • I guess there's no universal solution.
          But here's this specific issue: I live on a side, dead-end street which has one car passing through maybe once every half an hour at the busiest time, and a couple cars throughout the night. Yet, the administration installed these huge streetlight pillars, most of their lights flooding people's courtyards and the rest illuminating a mostly empty street. All night long.

          My front windows are flooded by 6 or 7 different streetlights, not counting those further than 300 feet

          • I live on the second floor in an apartment, and the street lights are pretty much level with our windows. Meaning they shine directly into our bedroom, and blackout curtains only do so much. That in itself is very annoying.

            But it would make matters a hell of a lot worse if they kept going on and off in unpredictable patterns.

    • Those extra white LEDs have the super harsh blue spectrums in spades. I'm a permanent glasses wearer (contacts don't work with my astigmatism, they just float around on my eye) so I've taken to wearing blue light filtering glasses if I need to go anywhere at night. They also help when driving to filter out the extra bright headlamps some cars are using now.

      If you're not a glasses wearer, it may be a pain to obtain them, but it's no more expensive than a decent pair of sunglasses and it helps tremendously.

  • With current infrastructure? I don't think so... Its not like all streetlights have dimmers.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ledow ( 319597 )

      They do mostly have timers.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by hipp5 ( 1635263 )

      With current infrastructure? I don't think so... Its not like all streetlights have dimmers.

      My Canadian province has basically replaced all streetlights with LED versions over the last 10 years. These include dimmers. So it may be that they’ve done something similar and the infrastructure is indeed already there in Germany. Or if not, now there’s a double incentive to upgrade streetlights (energy savings + ability to comply with insect directive).

  • So what about company signs along the highways for example?

    • Re:Company signs (Score:4, Informative)

      by jlar ( 584848 ) on Friday August 07, 2020 @05:01AM (#60376133)

      I believe you will already find these much more regulated in Germany and many other European countries than in the USA (we don't have them in Denmark for example).

      • Like everything with the US, it depends on the state. Some have absolutely no regulation at all it seems, and others have near complete bans.

      • The regulations depend on the state. From our European perspective we often see the US as one country as say us Swedes see Denmark or Finland or Poland, but that's not really correct. A better way to think about is to consider each state as something like a country in Europe, but without foreign politics and all states speaking the same language. Actually, I think that Europe would be a lot better off if we had a common official language. Since Sweden and Finland already use Swedish, and Norwegian is simil
  • Live in a rural area an hour + outside of a major US city. We and, save one elderly couple, no one around us use outside lights. That includes landscape lighting. Mostly as it destroys the night sky, but also as we've a huge crop of "organic" insects who swarm to lights. They also support an eco system including a thriving community of barn swallows who visit each summer. So back to "banning." why lights in the first place again? - "crime?" - this seems to be the most reasonable one. Not here but in citi

  • Light pollution is horrible (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bradley13 ( 1118935 ) on Friday August 07, 2020 @07:54AM (#60376471) Homepage

    Once you start to be aware of it, light pollution is really horrible. Also almost completely unnecessary.

    We're building a new house. The electrician wanted to install the typical outdoor lights that light up the whole fricking neighborhood. We told him to find models that pointed their light downwards, and only downwards. That's what you need, in order to find your keys, open the door, or whatever. There's no need to shine in the neighbor's windows or light up the sky.

    Stand somewhere, where you can look across your neighborhood or city. Every light that you can directly see, should not be visible. At most, you should see indirect light reflecting off of whatever is supposed to be illuminated.

    Dimming lights is all well and good. Prohibiting polluting light fixtures would be even better.

  • I thought they were attracted to Infrared light, not human-visible light. Hence, why LED lights don't attract insects (or at least, not nearly as much as other light sources.) Couldn't they just switch to LED's, which they should probably do anyway for a lot of other reasons?

    That said, visible light pollution is a problem in general, not just for insects. I suspect it affects humans in ways we don't yet understand. There's nothing quite like a clear night sky when out in the middle of nowhere with littl

  • Germany has too little wilderness and too high population. Most of the area is either a city, a town or farmland. There are very few places in the country here you cannot see artificial light somewhere.

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