Light Trash: an immersive story about light pollution

For a six year stint in my childhood, I lived in Santa Clarita; a suburban city forty-five minutes outside of Los Angeles. While it felt miles farther from the city than it actually was, it fostered a quality of life that any suburban kid could relate to. When summer would roll around and we would head to Placerita Canyon for nature camp, the imported fuzzy tarantula behind a display case and the towering water tank atop the steepest hike felt as legitimately nature as anything we had read about in our textbooks.

On the Fourth of July, we would pile into a pool or someone’s backyard and watch the Six Flags firework show light up the milky, hazed-over sky. My most remarkable initial memories under the stars were made in Santa Clarita, and no moment in nature has managed to top sitting on a boulder with fellow nine-year-olds, dipping Nilla wafers into vanilla frosting while on a night hike. 

As we root ourselves in the countries, towns and cities often chosen by our parents and grandparents, the human experience that we undergo has shifted from that of our relatives. A memory that has stuck with my grandmother for 80 years, watching a shooting star with her dad on a porch swing in Ohio, is now mostly unachievable to a resident of that same property just two generations later due to local light pollution.

What could it have been about that moment that stuck with my grandmother for so many years? Perhaps it was the striking feeling of watching the universe in action around her; a grounding, powerful experience that has inspired centuries of philosophy, creativity and artistic expression.

Some people have copious memories of standing under the stars. Others have just one. The visual accessibility of the stars varies, but its resonance is consistently memorable. A former professor of mine remembers standing in the water at Lake Michigan, looking up above for hours. For my mom, she remembers watching the International Space Station cross the moon from Lucas Valley, California. For me, I remember jumping out to switch drivers while road-tripping back to Phoenix from Las Vegas on spring break. I remember a middle school camping trip to Death Valley where four friends and I dragged our air mattresses from our tents to sleep under the starry sky. I think of the taste of Nilla wafers when I was nine, even despite our LA-adjacent light pollution, and the chill of the air on the Arizona I-10 as I stargazed through my Subaru sunroof just last week. 

 It’s hard to quantify the impacts of a lost dark sky. The stars have risen as many times as the sun. What are we losing? It’s not vitamin D, but maybe it’s something deeper. The reckless usage of artificial light is changing a core part of our human experience. Astronomers wonder if the disappearance of the stars will cause a shift in human character. We’re raising a generation of children who aren’t reminded of the vastness of the universe every night, or of the mysteries of the cosmos. When we walk outside and are instead greeted by the damaging skyglow of billboards and stadiums paid for by advertisers and corporations, it’s easy to stay wrapped up in the world around us: a world dominated by our work, social dynamics and the mundane complications of our modern lives.

Maybe you have a singular memory that takes you back to a quiet night under the bright stars. Some people I’ve talked to remember their interaction with the stars while driving at night, on vacation, or if you’re lucky, in the solitude of a space that feels like home. Modern virtual reality technology lets us capture the magic of that moment, down to recording the acoustics of the desert air or capturing the purple hue of the milky way with astrophotography. Light Trash, my 360/VR documentary which follows the work of dark sky activists, is content created for its emerging technology. While this experience will be shown in virtual reality, changing our outdoor lights from the white/blue bulbs to the amber ones (“low pressure sodium”) -- and shielding them to point down, and not out -- would immediately bring the stars back to where they belong: our backyards.