Member-only story
The Power of Darkness
Why we need to save the night sky
On a cold Adirondack evening, several winters ago, Lake Placid attorney Amy Quinn took her dogs for a walk in her quiet neighborhood behind the village’s old railroad tracks. A lover of the night sky, she assumed her stroll would offer up the heavens as she’d come to know them during her 19 years living in this remote region of northern New York State. Instead, she was confronted with an intense ball of artificial light emanating from the town’s center. “Oh my God,” Quinn remembers thinking at the time, “this is glowing.” She took a picture of her house, backlit by the Close Encounters–like glimmering, and posted it on Facebook. One by one, villagers chimed in. “Everybody was like, ‘I can’t believe this. This is insane.’”
“The sky is light-polluted for 80 percent of the world’s population . . . a third of humanity has never seen the Milky Way.”
The light in question was not a visitation from an alien civilization. Rather, it was the brand-new array the Olympic Regional Development Authority (ORDA) had installed around the James B. Sheffield Olympic Skating Rink, or “oval,” as part of a $12 million upgrade. The setup, capable of delivering enough lumens for professional TV recording at any hour of day, had been switched…
