My neighbours just don’t see the light

My neighbours have installed fancy new lights in their garden – not for security, mind, but for mood.

However, these lights are somewhat … dazzling. Their small lawn is now a floodlit tennis court for fairies, their path a landing strip. When I go to bed, beams of white stripe my bedroom ceiling. These lights can be seen from actual space. Mercifully, I have heavy curtains, but here’s my problem: insects do not.

Night creatures do not. Birds do not. Yes, maybe I’m exaggerating a little (they aren’t visible from space) but how do I tell my lovely neighbours to turn them down, to turn them off, for light pollution has now been identified as a definitive contributor to the current “insect apocalypse”, right alongside pesticides and climate change?

I mean, we’ve all seen moths flying at lights endlessly, mistaking them for the moon – and thus a third of them die of exhaustion, or become easy prey and are eaten before morning.

In a study, the attraction of headlights on moving vehicles at night resulted in an estimated 100 billion insect deaths in one German summer alone.

Artificial light also confuses critters trying to find a mate; it scuppers nocturnal creatures that forage for food in the safety of the darkness; it plays havoc with the insects’ age-old search for watery breeding grounds using reflection, because artificial light bounces off water-smooth surfaces like tarred roads.

Half of all insects species are nocturnal, but this doesn’t mean the daytime beasties and pollinators are spared, for man-made light disturbs them when they are at rest, while exposing them to even more predators than they would normally meet in a day’s busy, buzzy work.

Even if you like the idea of less creepy-crawlies, it’s worth noting that the first global scientific assessment on the rapid decline of insect populations concluded that the disappearance of bugs would cause a “catastrophic collapse of nature’s ecosystems”.

The latest review of more than 150 separate studies has stated categorically that the consequences for all life on earth would be devastating. And yet, unlike chemical pollution, climate change and habitat loss, the solution to light pollution is simple: just switch the damn things off!

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