Making Darkness a Place-Based Resource: How the Fight against Light Pollution Reconfigures Rural Areas in France

Abstract

Light pollution refers to the degradation of darkness through the use of artificial light at night (ALAN) in and around human infrastructures. This pollution is intrinsically related to urbanization and spills out from urban areas to affect both rural and protected areas. Several countries are organizing the fight against light pollution. There, local communities are experimenting with environmental policies designed to protect darkness. The challenge is about preserving biodiversity and fostering the energy transition. In France, a number of pioneering rural areas are experimenting with mechanisms that include this dual implication. Two of them provide the case study for this article. We show how these areas turn darkness into a specific resource. We identify three specification processes. The first obeys an anthropocentric utilitarian rationale and is part of the "economicization" of the environment in the line of shallow ecology. The second follows a rationale of ecocentric conservation and is part of the radical ecologization of the economy, in line with deep ecology. The third is in keeping with an integrated socio-ecosystemic rationale enshrining the interdependence between development, planning, the preservation of biodiversity, and energy savings. Local areas are plagued with specification controversies. These areas become incubation rooms, that is, spaces for resolving these controversies. These are reflected in a transition operator enabling the local area to take a fresh trajectory in terms of development and planning.

Geographies of night work

“…Delving further into the complexities of night work might open up a more subtle picture of what constitutes both day and night, as well as how they interact and perhaps crucially how capitalist practice continues to spread and/or to reach limits. Here, the decline, for example, in LGBTQ venues in London, connected to gentrification which increases rent and imposes noise restrictions at night (Burchiellaro, 2021), can be understood as an example of a 'victory' for the expansionary day, but resistance can be found in other spaces, for example, in informal uses of night-time urban 'between-spaces' (Ebbensgaard, 2019), in the dark-skies movement (Lapostolle and Challéat, 2021), in the work of lighting designers who have sought to counteract inequalities through design practice (Entwistle and Slater, 2019), and of course in the ways in which sleep and rest can be used as modes of resistance (Crary, 2013). Bringing these questions to work, geographers might help reflect on the night as a time of volunteering, of social care, in which people who work through the day donate labour differently.…”

Grasping darkness: the dark ecological network as a social-ecological framework to limit the impacts of light pollution on biodiversity

“…For example, the development of dark sky tourism and other territorial marketing strategies can lead to a purely utilitarian understanding of the starry sky as a new assessable economic good (Mitchell and Gallaway 2019). In this logic, the aesthetic or utilitarian criterions and considerations often muddle the ecological and health stakes of preserving darkness as a resource (Blundell et al 2020, Lapostolle andChalléat 2021). Acting this way, in a field that should be a new front in the construction of conservation policies, proves to be a methodological step backwards with regard to the convergence efforts made since the 1990s in the field of conservation and the creation/evolution of protected areas.…”

“…The geographical concept of "nocturnal territoriality" (Raffestin 1988, Lapostolle andChalléat 2021) underscores the role of nighttime darkness in the change in our daily relations with the places we experience. Knowing nocturnal territorialities implies grasping in a situated way the daily practices and uses in and of the nighttime .…”

“…In addition to defining space in terms of the production of figures and procedural standards, it takes into account actual uses and experiences of spaces as two elements that contribute to shaping the sense of places Knapp 2015, Hausmann et al 2016). Knowledge of nocturnal territorialities enables us to move toward the "right way of lighting" (éclairer juste), a set of practices condensed into a new urban lighting doctrine that seeks a settlement between our needs for artificial light and the set of ecological, health-based, and socio-cultural needs for darkness (Challéat 2019, Lapostolle andChalléat 2021). In France, for example, these new practices are brought together within the éclairer juste doctrine, which includes integrating environmental constraints into the economic logic of many lighting professionals.…”

“…Social sciences tools and methodologies make it possible to probe this territorial thickness by analyzing connections between the spaces and actors involved in the protection of the darkness and biodiversity couple (Challéat and Lapostolle 2014). By examining, as well, the mediation logics at work in lighting policies local redefinitions (Lapostolle et al 2015, Lapostolle andChalléat 2021), the integration of biodiversity issues into public controversies and debates, social, economic, and scientific issues related to the protection of nocturnal spaces and species, or pioneering practices that foreshadow new forms of organizing nocturnal socio-ecosystems. https://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol26/iss1/art15/ Fig.…”