[Cida]

Pretty surprising.



Is Artificial Light Poisoning the Planet?
A Swedish ecologist argues that its ubiquity is wrecking our habitats—and our health.
It turns out that the strongest source of illumination on Earth is not some helpful harborside lighthouse but the “sky beam” atop the Luxor Hotel, in Las Vegas. Creating forty-two billion candlepower of light every night, meant merely as a come-on to tourists and gamblers, it unintentionally excites and undoes flocks of birds, genetically programmed by evolution to fly toward bright light—and, in 2019, attracted clouds of grasshoppers, who flew toward the pseudo-Egyptian pyramid with all the horror of a pseudo-Egyptian plague. “Every evening Nevada’s meteorologists could see on their radar screens the swarms approach Las Vegas,” Eklöf says. Whoever would have imagined that reconstructing an Egyptian tomb and sending a piercing pillar of light from it to the heavens would reawaken an ancient curse—that is, aside from every screenwriter with a spec script? The, er, black comedy of this effect is not lost on Eklöf, but he sees it as something less than entertaining. In recent decades, he tells us, the biomass of all flying insect species has, by some measures, collapsed by close to seventy-five per cent.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2...ok-johan-eklof