Environmental Conservation After Dark

Drew Carhart, Illinois Coalition for Responsible Outdoor Lighting

Drew Carhart, Illinois Coalition for Responsible Outdoor Lighting

Wednesday April 17, 2013

7:00PM

Riverside Public Library


Humans have been adding light to the night for a millennium. Over time, light-making technology has changed, going from various forms of combustion, through numerous electrical and electronic devices; the amount of light created from a given amount of other energy has increased tremendously. But our society’s energy consumption for outdoor lighting has never gone down along with this increased efficiency; it has instead, also steadily risen. Each decade we flood the outdoor environment with more light.

But we have rarely stopped to ask just what all this light is doing to our environment. In many areas, natural night is being increasingly replaced by perpetual twilight. In his presentation, Drew Carhart of the Illinois Coalition for Responsible Outdoor Lighting will look at some of the many effects man-made light is having on the environment, and even on ourselves, and at what lighting which is both environmentally and socially responsible looks like.

To learn more about Drew and the work of the Illinois Coalition for Responsible Outdoor Lighting, visit their website at: www.illinoislighting.org