Lights Out!

 

Lights illuminating a hotel burned day and night, needlessly wasting energy while increasing power-plant emissions that contribute to global climate change. The 24-hour lighting of nearby plants was probably not beneficial for them.

Lights Out!

 

ALL TEXT AND PHOTOS © Marlene A. Condon

 

This year my first fireflies of the season appeared in my yard on May 20. There were only two to be seen very briefly, but I’m hoping there will be many more. Unfortunately, however, the numbers of these insects have dwindled in many places around the world, in large part to human activities.

 

Habitat loss and pesticide usage take a toll, but one factor people tend to overlook is the effect of artificial lighting on these particularly vulnerable creatures. Their courtship revolves around the flashes of light sent by both the male and female to communicate their interest in mating. But, in the glow of light pollution, it can be nearly impossible for them to detect the bioluminescence they emit to find each other.

 

Look around and you’ll notice how many people leave lights on outside houses, barns, and commercial buildings all night long, sometimes 24/7. These lights not only negatively impact fireflies, but also moths and numerous other kinds of insects that depend upon darkness to procreate. Is it any wonder, then, that insects are disappearing?

 

I imagine most folks simply don’t give these lights much thought, but they should. According to the International Dark Sky Association, about 35% of light is wasted, which equates to about 3 billion dollars spent per year on exceedingly harmful sky glow. Additionally, about 15 million tons of carbon dioxide—a driver of climate change—are emitted each year in order to power outdoor lighting, which is often nonessential.

 

Because of city lighting, birds migrating at night are killed in huge numbers every fall and spring. Lit windows invite birds to crash into them. These avian creatures don't have any conception of the glass blocking their way through the lighted rooms they believe they can fly through.

Studies show that birds cluster around brightly lit structures, just as nighttime insects do when they continuously fly around a carport or porch light. This travel delay necessitates finding food when daylight arrives, but that can be difficult in an area of concrete and asphalt. Is it any wonder many migratory bird populations have severely declined over the past five decades?

 

The World Atlas of Artificial Night Sky Brightness is written by scientists and measures what is called artificial sky glow—the reflected light scattered in the atmosphere from electric lighting around the world. Illustrative of the amount of sky glow is the estimation that the Milky Way is no longer visible to one-third of the people on Earth, especially in the most heavily industrialized regions. Sixty percent of Europeans and eighty percent of North Americans are no longer able to enjoy this natural wonder.

 

This light pollution affects human health as well. According to Richard G. Stevens, an epidemiologist at the School of Medicine (University of Connecticut), “[L]ight at night, in all its forms, can most disrupt our normal circadian rhythms...This circadian physiology has developed over billions of years. Humans have been living with electricity only since the late 19th century, and with widespread access in industrialized countries only since the 20th century. While that sounds like a long time, it’s a tiny drop in the evolutionary bucket. We are only beginning to understand the health consequences artificial light has on our circadian physiology.”

 

He goes on to write that, “Humans, like most other life forms on the planet, have...a built-in cycle for sleep and wake patterns, hunger, activity, hormone production, body temperature and a vast array of other physiological processes. The cycle lasts roughly 24 hours, and light, especially sunlight, and darkness are important signals to keep it on track.”

 

Scientists suspect that some serious health problems could be the result of circadian disruption, for which “the most potent environmental exposure that can cause [it] is ill-timed electric lighting, particularly at night.”

 

https://theconversation.com/new-atlas-shows-extent-of-light-pollution-what-does-it-mean-for-our-health-60836

 

It’s vitally important for people to recognize how harmful night lighting is to the many forms of life, including humans, on Earth. It’s high time for lights out!

 

NATURE ADVICE:

 

You can do humans and their fellow creatures a great service by letting people know they should minimize the amount of light being wasted.

 

When you notice unwarranted lighting (for example, light not being utilized by anyone in the wee hours of the morning) in parks and at businesses, let the government entities and business owners know about the harmful effects of leaving lights burning unnecessarily.

 

If you or your neighbors feel the need for nighttime outdoor lighting, consider motion detectors instead of continuously lit floodlights.

 

Finally, always use the dimmest lighting you can, but better yet, consider whether lighting is essential or whether you could do without it.

 

The Plant Police Are Coming for You

These two male Rose-breasted Grosbeaks are feeding on sunflower seeds that originated in North America, but we often feed wild birds seeds from other lands, such as niger (also spelled nyger) that is grown in Africa, India, and other places in Southeast Asia. Why is it okay to provide foreign foods in a feeder to native animals, but frowned upon to feed them by way of nonnative plants that have the additional benefit of also providing shelter and nesting sites?

ALL TEXT AND PHOTOS © Marlene A. Condon

 

In 2010, overpopulated deer herds denuded virtually every native plant in my yard. Consequently, the plants were unable to flower and produce fruits. If I hadn’t grown nonnative plants unpalatable to deer, such as Japanese Barberry shrubs (Berberis thunbergii) that did make fruits, a flock of bluebirds that visited the following extremely cold and snowy winter would not have found nourishment. 

When I excitedly reported to the state Internet bird-reporting site my discovery that bluebirds ate Japanese Barberry fruits, I was taken to task for growing “such an invasive alien plant in [my] yard!” Although my comment went out to serious birders who presumably care about these avian creatures, no-one expressed happiness that the bluebirds at least found something to eat.

 

In the ensuing eleven years, a huge invasive-plant mythology has been written to support waging an unjustified war against specific alien plants, and government at all levels has been brought on board to deny you the right to grow plants that can survive deer overpopulations, climate change, and vast alteration of our physical environment.

 

The City of Cape May, New Jersey, almost passed Ordinance 404-2020 in December of 2020 “relating to the control and elimination of invasive plants”. It was much supported by the Cape May Environmental Commission, a member of which wrote a letter to the editor which contained the usual misinformation that, nevertheless, often convinces unknowledgeable government officials to act in a manner that harms, instead of helps, nature.

 

The letter writer spoke of kudzu to say that “It outcompetes all native vegetation and creates a monoculture made up of itself. This is true of all invasive plants [emphasis mine].” This last pronouncement is simply not true.

 

So-called invasive plants grow where conditions are especially suitable for them, but not for native plants, which means aliens aren’t “outcompeting” natives. Rather, native plants are not growing there in the first place. Additionally, “all invasive plants” do not necessarily create a monoculture. Autumn Olive (Elaeagnus umbellatus) shrubs often share fields with Eastern Redcedar (Juniperus virginiana) and other species.

 

The next sentence of the letter reads that “You may control an invasive on your property, but if it has seeds, both the birds and the wind spread the tree, bush, or plant.” What does this statement tell you? It declares that the so-called invasive plant provides food for birds, and if it’s a tree or a bush, it goes without saying that it also supplies cover and perhaps a nesting site for them.

 

Yet the sentence following the declaration above tells us that “Monocultures do not feed our bees, butterflies, or birds.” This kind of conflicting information is extremely common in letters to the editor and in articles in which the author wants to convince us of the evils of supposedly invasive plants.

 

Continuing, the writer says that, “Planting native trees attracts insects that are needed to feed the birds [but] [a]lien tree species do not attract these specific insects, so they may be pretty, but as far as the environment is concerned, they might as well be stone statues.” Wrong.

 

Native trees may support more caterpillars and sawfly larvae (an animal commonly considered a “pest” when feeding in people’s yards) than alien plants, but that doesn’t mean the pretty nonnative plants “might as well be stone statues”. Flowers are typically what make a plant pretty, and many so-called invasive plants make flowers that attract a huge number of pollinator species. These insects are dwindling in number, undoubtedly due, at least in part, to the vast amount of lawn area in this country that is devoid of "weeds" (interpretation: flowering herbaceous plants) that could feed them.

 

The conclusion of the letter writer is that, “We need this ordinance as a way of supporting the need to educate and control invasive species.” Amazingly, the local government tabled the ordinance, but you can bet the Cape May Environmental Commission will be back pushing for some version of it yet again, even though the “facts” provided by this member of the commission are inaccurate.

 

Unfortunately, some states have fallen under the spell of the mythological “invasive-plant” narrative. In the state of Washington, “plant police” are authorized to charge you with a crime (harboring an illegal alien!!!) and assess fines should your yard contain a plant on the “Noxious Weed List”.

 

https://www.nwcb.wa.gov/washingtons-noxious-weed-laws

 

The Environmental Protection Agency is working to bring this reality to backyards everywhere across the land of the free. Susan Gitlin, Office of Sustainable Communities at the EPA, writes of “refining lists of plants that are regulated at the state and federal level”, positing that such plants “have moved from their native regions into new areas where they crowd out native vegetation.”

 

https://www.astm.org/standardization-news/?q=update/invasive-plant-listing-ja13.html

 

This now entrenched, but false, belief of nonnative plants crowding out native plants has been made “factual” only by perpetual repetition by native-plant societies and other special-interest groups, including invasion-biology scientists, but it contains serious errors of omission. For example, people ignore the factuality that growing conditions in many locations are no longer hospitable to most native plants.

 

Alien plants, such as Autumn Olive that these folks are determined to eradicate, are especially noticeable along highway edges created by construction of roadways or in fields abandoned by farmers. Like native colonizers, such as Virginia Redcedar, they can grow just fine in soil compacted for centuries by cows weighing a half-ton each or road-building crews that bulldozed the land, removing topsoil.

 

If you weren’t paying attention for the past forty-five years and now notice the abundance of nonnative plants in such areas, you could easily believe that nonnative plants pushed out native plants. This misperception forms the basis for the entire field of invasion biology.

 

But the actuality is that abandoned fields, roadsides, hiking trails, and clearcut forest not replanted filled eventually—I’m talking many years—with colonizers, whether native, nonnative, or a mix of both. I’ve been watching it happen since I was a college student in the 1970s, and you don’t even need a scientist to explain why this scenario makes sense.

 

Any avid gardener knows the saying, “right plant, right place”, meaning that every plant has specific growing requirements that must be met for it to thrive. Most native plants cannot grow in the corrupted soil profile of disturbed areas, which includes homeowner yards that have been cleared and graded. When I moved into my house 35 years ago, the gray-clay subsoil had been exposed and the yard looked like the surface of the Moon.

 

Alien plants quickly provided wildlife habitat, and my moonscape became a nature-friendly garden supporting a larger diversity and abundance of wildlife than had existed when the land was deeply shaded by forest. Over the decades, these plants rehabilitated the soil and numerous species of native plants have moved naturally into my yard, but I refuse to remove the alien plants that have been—and remain—so helpful.

 

I’ve seen far more wildlife—in species and numbers—in my yard over the past 35 years than most folks will ever see in a lifetime of visiting wildlife refuges and national parks. I know for a fact that nonnative plants are beneficial to wildlife by providing them with food and shelter and to native plants by rehabbing the soil for them to return.

 

If you want to truly aid our wildlife and the environment in its entirety, you must ignore the mythmakers of plant-invasion biology. But don’t ignore your lawmakers! Please let your congressional representatives know you don’t want laws restricting alien plants on your property—and tell them the excellent reasons why not.

 

 NATURE ADVICE: 

Before taking advice from those folks who may have their own agendas for pushing you to remove alien plants, make notes on which animals are making use of them, as I have done for many years. It may well change your mind as to what’s in the best interest of our wildlife.