Riverside is working to assess the village’s outdoor lighting and reduce nighttime light pollution in town in pursuit of a rare community designation from an international organization.
This year, Riverside partnered with Ken Walczak, a senior manager at Adler Planetarium, in pursuit of being named a DarkSky Community by DarkSky International, of which Walczak is a board member.
Founded in 1988, the nonprofit describes itself as “the globally recognized authority” on issues surrounding light pollution and conserving the night sky.
“Our mission is to protect a natural nighttime sky and the night,” Walczak said.
Walczak is in charge of taking an inventory of Riverside’s nighttime lighting and finding ways to reduce it. Once those problems are addressed, the village can seek to apply for the rare community-wide designation.
So far, only 65 communities worldwide can say they’ve earned the title. If Riverside applies successfully, it will become the third such municipality in Illinois, following Homer Glen in Will County and Hawthorn Woods in Lake County.
“Our goal is to implement best practices as it relates to sustainable lighting in the village,” Village President Doug Pollock told the Landmark. “It’s part of the overall village board goal of implementing sustainable practices. I’ve never been through this process myself, but my expectation is that this is going to end up in a set of recommendations for code amendments and policy changes.”
Indeed, Walczak said one “big step” of the process involves showing commitment, such as through the passage of ordinances regulating commercial and private lighting.
“There are pretty clear, straightforward recommendations that DarkSky developed … A town can follow those guidelines and say, ‘OK, our lights in our town are dark sky friendly,’” he said. “It’s not like towns have to change all their lights overnight. It’s the process and the showing of plans or an effort to, for example, have dark sky friendly ordinances.”
In an email, Village Manager Jessica Frances said the process is budgeted at a maximum cost of $5,000 to the village.
Walczak gave an hourlong talk in Riverside last March on the benefits of reducing light pollution, to which he attributed the village’s efforts this year.
Pollock said the effort falls in line with Riverside’s recent efforts to prioritize sustainability and environmentalism, including its adoption of a climate action and resilience plan last May entitled “Road to 2025.”
“It’s one of these environmental issues that I think a lot of people don’t even consider, but we always say, once you see bad lighting — once you’re introduced to it and given the vocabulary to understand, ‘That’s what I’ve been noticing’ — you can’t unsee it,” Walczak said.
For example, Riverside falls within a regional migration route for birds known as the Mississippi Flyway, he said, to which he called light pollution “a major disruptor.”
“At peak, there could be actually hundreds of millions of birds passing over our region within a migratory season. It’s starting now, in the spring, and there’s one in the fall,” he said. “A lot of them navigate by the stars, navigate by orienting themselves to the sky, and what does a lit-up city at night look like to a bird who’s evolved for tens of millions of years? Well, it kind of looks like a starry sky.”
Birds can become trapped in bright cities during their migration instead of arriving at their intended destination, he added. And birds aren’t the only animals affected by light pollution.
“There are nighttime pollinators. A lot of insects are nocturnal as well, and a lot of them are pollinators. If you have a flower garden or you enjoy fireflies, those are all creatures who help keep our ecosystem healthy, and they are highly influenced and impacted by light at night,” he said.
On top of our animal neighbors, Walczak said humans can be negatively impacted by the kinds and amount of lighting used at night, too. Alongside rod and cone cells, which enable us to see, our eyes have a third sensor that was discovered in the 1990s.
“That is a very blue-sensitive cell, and it senses blue light as a trigger or the signal for daytime. Our circadian rhythms [that dictate sleep patterns] are literally encoded into our biology and triggered by blue light,” he said. “That’s why you’ve probably heard that thing about blue light at night; it’s not very good because it’s tricking your body, chemically and biologically, into thinking it’s daytime, and we need the night.”
