photograph by Jim Richarson:ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/11/light-pollution/richardson-photographyYiqing
Verlyn Klinkenborg, in his Our Vanishing Night, talked about the causes of light pollution and bad effect on mammals, insects’ species as well as human beings in condition of light everywhere. He wrote light pollution begun in the fast developing society. Because of willing of better lives in the evening, in the darkness, people use more and more lighting in our world. But the bad design and improper usage of lighting bring about light pollution, it is not only wasting energy and missing beauty of natural darkness, but it causes problems.
Light pollution has brought many serious troubles in animals and insects. It affects their wrong judgment of direction which some species treat light as their magnet, safety, behaviors like migration, breeding, nesting and so on. I agree with these points, because I have seen those things happened. As far as I know, some kinds of birds and insects have an instinct called phototoxy, which force individuals to move or fly towards light. I saw a group of birds flied towards powerful lights and made themselves burned. Lots of birds died, but they didn’t stop like some invisible hand was pushing them. What’s more, during some summer night, I had been waken up by noisy that cicada did. I never experienced this strange thing until more and more lightings were turned on in the city. I strongly believe it is not a good phenomenon, since I’m afraid some bad affects might happen in those insects or animals and some days later, I could not see them any more. They may disappear out of the world.
As the author said, I also admit that light pollution makes human beings sicker. The interval of darkness relates to your internal biological clock, which decides our sleeping and waking and even our health. Let’s step back for a moment. Jet lag makes us feel exhausted because of the different daytime and nighttime. The same as light pollution, it confuses your sense of daytime and nighttime. The worse thing is the time lasts longer, and causes worse damage.
Light pollution can bring about many negative effects. However, compared with other pollutions, light pollution can be reduced more easily. Producing good designed lights and using them in a proper way are both good improvements. It can also help us save energy, which will benefit a lot of ways.
In sum, light pollution do happen around us and have already made bad influences. Fortunately, according to the easy solution, I believe light pollution will be overcome as long as we face it and do our best.
reading passage is from http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/featurehub
Our Vanishing Night
By Verlyn Klinkenborg
4 comments:
We should pay more attention to the light pollution,after all we have only one earth.
It must have been a sad experience to see all those birds hurt themselves! This is an interesting and worrying modern problem. Can you think of any concrete solutions? What can we do individually and collectively to try and prevent our behaviour negatively impacting the animal world (and ours)?
I've never thought that lighting is a kind of pollution. I think that it's a bit difficult for us to reduce lighting because people prefer lightness than darkness.
I wonder your own ways to solve this problem.^^
Actually, I have no idea about individual solutions, because our using of lights is limited. What's in my mind is turning off the lights when you don't need them any more. Or, use some devices to cover lighting to focus on the certain point you want. We should ask our government or society to pay attention on this problem.(maybe this is a good idea we can do). but some improvements have been given in the daily life, like sound or heat respondent devices which will turn on automatically when people walk through.
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