Save our stars

On February 2 this year Aotearoa earned its fifth Dark Sky Sanctuary certification with the announcement of the official Tāhuna Glenorchy Dark Sky Sanctuary, compromising 200,000 hectares around the head of Lake Wakatipu.

This is thanks to the commitment of a coalition of people around Glenorchy who built their submission to the non-governmental organisation DarkSky International over several years.

DarkSky International is now a large international organisation, founded in 1988 in the United States to promote responsible outdoor lighting practices (and associated legislation). It began as a local attempt to reduce unnecessary light pollution around Flagstaff, Arizona.

Today, the awarding of DarkSky designation is intended to help protect the darkness of night skies and spread awareness of light pollution, through the protection of specific sites of significance across the globe. To qualify you must measure the “darkness” of your night skies for the international organisation, demonstrating specific criteria. There must also be proof of your community’s ongoing commitment to responsible outdoor lighting and public education about light pollution.

Official DarkSky places are major drawcards for tourists, with local and international visitors seeking out these places in Aotearoa to view the stars at night. There are nine officially designated places across New Zealand, with numerous proposals under consideration by DarkSky International.

This push to protect the integrity of the night sky has aligned with a growing public awareness of our celestial realm through, for example, the establishment of Matariki as a midwinter public holiday.

Yet, only last week, One NZ launched its satellite text services, which operates using Elon Musk’s SpaceX-owned Starlink telecommunications services. There is a growing incursion of privately built infrastructure into the Earth’s orbit, and an escalating number of satellites that distractingly illuminate our night sky.

Scientists as well as wildlife enthusiasts are drawing urgent attention to the detrimental impacts of increased light pollution on our flora and fauna. Research at the University of Auckland recently mapped these impacts on sea birds who have crash landed in the city’s central business district after being disoriented by light.

Light pollution and the preservation of tātai arorangi (Māori astronomical knowledge) is also of deep concern for Māori. Starlink satellites have already directedly interfered in the enactment of ceremonies taking place in relation to the stars.

The expansion of satellite activity has, in part, led to the increased push by certain communities to seek DarkSky certification. The other, more local prompt is excessive and unnecessary sources of lighting – such as brightly lit commercial buildings and outdoor advertising such as electronic billboards. Recognising these threats to the night sky is triggering an appetite for change, and a quest to regain some public control over what is happening in our night skies.

Starlink has provided much-needed internet across Aotearoa in times of crisis, particularly in the wake of Cyclone Gabrielle. However, we should be aware of our growing reliance on privately owned infrastructural systems for our basic services that are contributing to light pollution.

Nick Dunn, a professor of urban design in the United Kingdom, has talked about the idea of “nocturnal commons” as a way to envision our shared responsibility to maintain night skies as a public good.

Whether DarkSky certification will be an effective way of resisting the privatisation of the celestial realm is debatable, given the gulf in power between corporate and community interests.

Community-led efforts to bring attention to light pollution and our night skies (including through the use of DarkSky designation) is one of the ways in which people are trying to change how we think about the universe above and beyond Earth.

Potentially, successes such as the Tāhuna Glenorchy Dark Sky Sanctuary reflect broader action to push for change on a range of other scales too – including national and international regulation –to maintain our dark skies as a collective good.