About Those New LED Street Lights….

A few days ago we wrote about the new LED streetlights that have been appearing throughout Greater Flatbush, and were installed in Kensington last Fall. Readers had many interesting things to say about the new lights, especially their impact on street-level visibility and our ability to sleep at night.

But WNYC brings up a whole other angle on this topic — our local ecology.

WNYC got in touch with us to share a story they had run last December, which highlighted the concerns of groups like the International Dark-Sky Association and the Zoological Lighting Institute that the new lights could permanently disrupt urban wildlife in New York City.

James Karl Fischer, the founder of the Zoological Lighting Institute, told WNYC that the switch from the old sodium-vapor street lamps to LED lights was “a disaster in the making.”

WNYC explains why:

“While these [LED] lamps save energy and brighten the street, the light they give off is different. LED wavelengths are shorter; the light is bluer.

According to Fischer, the bluer light with shorter wavelengths will lure insects and nocturnal creatures out of edge areas — whether that means shrubbery along a curb or the more distant wilderness.

Next, predators, such as bats and birds, may follow. Fischer says those subtle migrations, repeated thousands of times across the metropolitan area, could knock fragile ecological systems out of balance.”

“LED technology has a lot of potential to reduce light pollution if it’s done right,” says the International Dark-Sky Association on its website. “If not, it can make things worse.” The group says that municipalities should consider “all the issues” before implementing a LED street lighting retrofit.

In its recommendations for LED use, the organization points out that municipalities can try to minimize blue light emission by using “warm-white” or filtered LEDs, for instance.

Time will only tell whether our birds and bats will be impacted by the lights, and clearly many things in this city continually disrupt wildlife. Think of noise, for instance. It is also hard to imagine how the impact of the lights on wildlife could actually be isolated and measured.

We are sure this discussion will continue.