Science From Away

Science from Away: An opinion - please lower the wattage.

I love Inverness, I love her bones, her beautiful sea shore and small homes strung along the streets rising from the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. I love her resurrection from the coal blackened town I never knew but easily imagine from Frank MacDonald’s “Forest for Calum.” I love that boardwalk. I love the sandy beaches, the shallow, safe gulf waters, surprisingly warm for a place so far north. I love the potential in this town. So what’s my problem because there has to be a problem, otherwise why write this piece? There’s no news in happiness, as Tolstoy taught us in Anna Karenina with his famous opening shot: “Happy families are all alike.” Last night was not the first time I was reminded Inverness and I were not a happy family, that I have a problem with Inverness. Three of us rode into Inverness on 19 from the direction of Mabou, from one of those parties filled with the poetry of a home full of musicians and a roaring fire made of all that wood cleared during the previous summer and fall. The warmth of Cape Breton filled us with a feeling that all is well in the world on such a snow capped winter night, still with stars to be shortly covered over by yet another storm covering us with more of that beautiful whiteness. What could be wrong? The answer for me is street lights.

Did you know that a Wikipedia web site looked up under “Street Lighting” on Google informs its readers that street lights were first introduced in the Arab Empire, by Saracens? I didn’t. If you have a scholarly bent you can find some interesting stuff on that site but here’s something I found, which I think is directed to Inverness and that caused a rueful nodding of my head and a quiet yes o’ yes: “A misconception is that installing street lights will automatically make streets safer and reduce crime, so political pressure can be a major factor in installation of street lights. Untrained officials often assume that if some is good, more must be better, and install the brightest lights possible.”

Now, I’m a from away so what do I know of local politics, much less local political pressure but I have my suspicions about that quote from Wikipedia connecting politics and street lighting. It may be right on the mark. Do I need to put it in bold caps to say that the street lights in Inverness are ugly and dangerous. Riding into town with those street lights on gives a feeling of entering a zone where the brightest possible lights were necessary to illuminate a potential prison break. Maybe that’s a good idea but prison lights are designed for the use of guards who stand in towers high off the ground and anyway, are people really going to be stopped from escaping to Alberta this way. The lights are blinding when you drive around in Inverness at night. All one can see are the lights and as soon as your eye goes back to the road or the sidewalk it is impossible to adjust and all is black. Watch out pedestrian; be aware that the drivers of those cars coming down the main street of Inverness are temporarily blinded. It’s time for another quote from that Wikipedia site about the danger of street lights: “The loss of night vision because of the accommodation reflex of drivers’ eyes is the greatest danger. As drivers emerge from an unlighted area into a pool of light from a street light their pupils quickly constrict to adjust to the brighter light, but as they leave the pool of light the dilation of their pupils to adjust to the dimmer light is much slower, so they are driving with impaired vision. As a person gets older the eye’s recovery speed gets slower, so driving time and distance under impaired vision increases.” I couldn’t say it better. That is what happened to me last night and happens every time I have entered Inverness since those wretched lights (in my opinion) were installed.

So how about it local politicians, how about turning down the wattage and maybe even considering some color variation. It might be worth finding out how people feel about living in a nightly prison of light.

Mark M. Green (w12thstreet@gmail.com) is a member of the Canadian Science Writers Association who lives in New York City and South West Margaree. Earlier “Science from Away” columns can be found at http://blogs.poly.edu/markgreen