Sustainability Project at Mercer University (I)

(I am most grateful to Sara Stitt, a freshman student at Mercer University who has granted me permission to use this text on this blog)

As this blog began with a personal statement, I feel it is only fitting that I introduce myself with one as well. I am a Liberal Arts student at Mercer University. I now live in Georgia, but grew up in a suburb of Detroit, MI. Suburbs of Detroit are not like the suburbs of Atlanta. I grew up in almost storybook fashion with the woods in my backyard and frequent camping trips to even more rural areas. Although I spent a great deal of my childhood sitting by campfires stargazing, I know little more in the ways of astronomy aside from my favorite constellation the Southern Cross (available only in the southern hemisphere) and the Big and Little Dippers. However, I have been rather subconsciously aware of light pollution and the affect it has on the night sky for years. I have over the years noticed how orange the horizon looks over the city while driving home some nights. I have been on a number of night flights and can remember looking down and seeing the light oozing from urban areas and marking human territory across countries. I also remember as a high schooler realizing that since my family had made the move from Michigan to Georgia, I had seen a lot less of the night sky. This is a poem I wrote some time around sophomore year of high school:

Humans are said to be sentient,
Because we looked up
When’s the last time you stopped
And stared in wonder and awe at the heavens above you?
Or tried to imagine the amazing
Space and unlimitedness of the sky?
When did we stop looking up?
When did the stars cease to matter?
Why does the Earth no longer command our attention?

It blossoms and grows and does
All that it can to beg us to listen and see
How can we ignore its supplication?
How can we refuse to admire that which sustains us?
Why are the mountains no longer majestic?
The seas terrifyingly appealing?
Or even the rose among weeds a sight to bring tears?

Go outside, stand in your driveway
In the middle of the night
And crane your neck, tilt backwards, lay down
Just look at the sky
And see.

What strikes me now reading back over this poem is that for many of you and even myself when here at school, to obey my poem’s plea would be nearly impossible. Not due to our inability to walk outside and look up, but because light pollution masks much of the night sky. In the next two entries I intend to write for this blog, I will be discussing a light problem that caught my eye here on Mercer’s campus.