Fri 20 Apr 2007
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- Friday, Apr 20th, 2007 at 3:28 pm
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Content copyrighted Will Raymond
Sorry you didn’t come join us at the Morehead Planetarium on Tuesday night for Our Vanishing Sky program: http://www.moreheadplanetarium.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=news_item&id=389
Barry Jacobs started the evening off by discussing the Orange County Light Pollution Ordinance and expressing his wish that Chapel Hill and Carrboro would adopt the ordinance as Hillsborough has recently done. Our tour leaders for the walkabout after the program were from the NC Green Building Council–an architect, an engineer, and a city planner from Raleigh where they also have an ordinance.
http://media.www.dailytarheel.com/media/storage/paper885/news/2007/04/18/OnlineExclusives/Earth.Day.Events.Light.Up.Town-2848360.shtml
Cree set up a display out on the porch and also came to campus for today’s Earth Day fair on Polk Place.
Completely blipped on it (had a Preserve Lincoln Arts Center meeting). Wish I’d known about it – very cool. Was it part of the Dark Sky week celebration or just a fortuitous coincidence?
Do you have a link to the ordinance, I’ll be happy to feature it Terri.
Turned out we were celebrating Earth Week on campus simultaneously with the national Dark Sky Week. I have the ordinance in a Word document but I only have your old email address. If you’ll send me a message, I’ll send the attachment back to you.
Bill Strom told me that Chapel Hill is working on an ordinance, but then I learned that the planner assigned the task resigned so no progress being made at this time.
The Energy Information Agency (EIA) estimated outdoor lighting consumption to be 326 trillion BTU back in 1993. So not only is outdoor lighting ruining our dark sky, but it’s also consuming a lot of unnecessary energy/wasting tax dollars. The point of Our Vanishing Night program was to educate the general population to the fact that we can improve safety, save energy, and see more stars by reducing the amount of outdoor lighting. It’s a message that will need to be repeated many times before it’s heard/believed. I’ll let you know when I have the handout added to our Save Energy website.
Thanks Terri – campaign AT willraymond.org still works.
If there’s anything I or anyone else following the lighting issue can do to move local leadership along on this, please post…
BTW, I did bring light pollution up as an issue as a member of the Horace-Williams Citizens comm. We were in the midst of sketching out a recommendation when the Mayor pulled the plug… I also brought it before the Carolina North LAC once… I was going to ask about it at UNC’s next rollout of their CN plans.
Hey Will–did you see that Our Vanishing Sky program made the lead story of the N&O today?
http://www.newsobserver.com/102/story/566766.html
Maybe that will help motivate more of a discussion about adopting a Chapel Hill and a Carrboro ordinance!