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- Goose
- Cogito ergo sum
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Colorado Towns Work to Preserve a Diminishing Resource: Darkness
Colorado Towns Work to Preserve a Diminishing Resource: Darkness
WESTCLIFFE, Colo. — As people around the world stepped into their backyards or onto rooftops to peer up at the annual spectacle of the Perseid meteor shower early on Friday morning, few of them had a view like Wilson Jarvis and Steve Linderer.
At 2:30 a.m. as the light show was peaking, the two men sat on a grassy bluff here in the Wet Mountain Valley of southern Colorado, swaddled in blankets against the chilly mountain air and looking up at the stars in the torrent of the Milky Way. Every few seconds, a tiny chunk of space ice cast off by Comet Swift-Tuttle would blaze through Earth’s atmosphere, silently streaking through the darkness.
“There’s one!” the men called out.
“And another!”
“I saw that.”
Night skies like this one are disappearing across much of the world, nibbled away by the ever-expanding glow of city lights. American skies are no different. Four out of five Americans live in places where they can no longer see the Milky Way.
But here, the tiny neighboring ranching and railroad towns of Westcliffe (population 568) and Silver Cliff (population 587) have decided to tap into the dwindling natural resource of darkness. The old silver mines that once made Silver Cliff Colorado’s third-largest town are long closed, and many ranchers are retiring. But there is still the night.
So for more than a decade, the two towns and a local dark-sky nonprofit have been dialing down the dimmer switch. They have replaced streetlights and passed rules requiring that outdoor lights point down. The group built a small observatory with star guides who tee up its telescope and take people on a tour of the night. They coax homeowners to hood their porch lamps or dim a bright light outside their house.
“People out of ignorance go with whatever’s cheap or whatever’s brightest,” said Ed Stewart, a board member of the local dark-sky group. “You multiply that by 200, 300, and there goes the sky.”
He said advocates met with homeowners’ associations and held stargazing parties to sell the virtues of the night. When they gaze over the valley and see winking floodlights on a ranch or home in the hills, they see their next targets of persuasion.
We live in a time in which decent and otherwise sensible people are surrendering too easily to the hectoring of morons or extremists.
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