Driving around certain parts of Albuquerque at night this month, I’ve been demoralized by the frigid, clinical, almost surgical glare of the new LED street lighting that the City and PNM are foisting off on us. I don’t remember anyone from either organization asking if people actually wanted those cold white lights in their neighborhoods, blinding them through their windows and making their nighttime world seem like a florescent-lit widget factory. I’m sure I’ll hear from somebody now that “Oh, Yes. You were told! Public comment was taken. You’ll just have to lump it.” And I’m sure I’ll also be reminded, in a reproachful sort of way, that this depressing new kind of light comes to us in the name of sustainability.
But it’s like that with most new technologies and snazzy new miracle potions and materials. How many times have I begged city and county workers not to use herbicides near my North Valley ditch or my property? How many earnest chats have so many of us had with city councilors and county commissioners about that chartreuse poison? Have we ever been listened to? Of course not. And now we see that class-action lawsuits by cancer sufferers are accusing the company that made the wretched slop of knowingly selling a carcinogen.
We’ve never been asked if we want new miracle stuff in a way that’s open to discussion that really matters. The use of most everything in the world of high invention is a fait accompli. That’s one of the tragedies of public life, the illusion of public say so. “Oh yes, for sure, we’d really love your input, but we’re going to do exactly what we want to do anyway, of course.”
When it comes to technology, I confess I’m not a Luddite. I’m as geeked up as the next guy. I depend on my Apple watch, iPad, iPhone, MacBook Pro, the digital safety features on my car, and on the amazing knowledge horde of the internet. And I willfully choose to do so. But I don’t use social media, of any kind, convinced those companies would vacuum out my memory banks right down to the deepest sanctuaries of my privacy if I let them in an inch.
I am by nature suspicious. And what Jacques Ellul once called “The Technological Society” has, by its nature, a subversive life of its own, a magic genie life that never goes back in the bottle.
Ellul wrote of high tech, “What is at issue here is evaluating the danger of what might happen to our humanity…and distinguishing between what we want to keep and what we are ready to lose, between what we can welcome as legitimate human development and what we should reject with our last ounce of strength as dehumanization. I cannot imagine that choices of this kind are unimportant.”
We weren’t given a choice about those new LED white lights all over town. And I’m sure that complaining about them will be dismissed as the nuttiness of an old crank, an anti-fluoride crusader who’s moved on to other battlefields. But LED streetlights do have credible detractors, in France, in England, in Los Angeles, where they dehumanize an already an emotionally robotic automotive environment. They do have “phototoxic effects.” The American Medical Association knows about them, and the British are particularly wary of what such lighting is doing to them. It’s frankly irresponsible not to have taken into consideration such evidence before turning our city’s nightscape into a phototoxic dead zone.
Even the center-right conservative British newspaper The Daily Telegraph, a champion of search light crime prevention worries about LED lighting, citing reports that link it to certain kinds of cancers and disrupting our biological clocks. CNN reports that the French Agency for Food, Environmental and Occupational Health and Safety is concerned that LED lighting can hasten age-related macular degeneration and other eye diseases. Yes, LED lights are less expensive and, I suppose, “more sustainable.” But now it’s appearing they might be high-tech genies let out of the bottle way too soon for our own good.
The modern world is full of magic materials gone bad. Who at the start of the Age of Asbestos would have imagined that this fire-retarding insulation material would be culpable in the deaths by cancer of millions of people, as many as 90,000 a year, or that a $30 billion trust fund would have been established to help cancer victims exposed to it? And of course, all toxic materials have their champions, usually the chemical companies that dreamed them up. But asbestos has a pal in the highest office of the land. President Trump has long maintained that the banning of asbestos use in America was caused by “the mob.” The President wants to MAGA asbestos, no silly word play intended. Next thing you know we’ll be going to gold-plated Trump Cancer Clinics to have our mesotheliomas vacuumed off our internal organs so Trump Inc. can sell them to the North Korean clothing industry as a cloth that grows on you, so to speak. Think that’s far-fetched? Not nearly as far as making the world safe for asbestos again.
And what about that most amazing genie of the modern world — plastic? It’s everywhere, for very good and very ill. And it is never going back in the bottle. Nevermind that micro plastic specks are flowing everywhere on earth, from mountain tops to human bladders and other unmentionables. Nevermind that whole continents of plastic waste worth trillions of dollars will never be recycled as long as fracking is making the world hot with cheap petroleum.
As for LED lights — are we one day going to have to unscrew them all and toss them in the leaking landfill because too many of our citizens are suing the City and PNM to compensate them for their blindness and cancers? This is not a crank question, though surely many will think it is.
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
(Image derived from photos by Adam Greig and Joey Coleman)
One more way in which there is no real citizen consultation in this system we insist on calling a democracy. As long as there’s something new and shiny that can be sold at a profit to someone, we’ll continue to be plagued with pesticides that make us sick, lighting that makes us blind, and a bus system nobody needed and that hasn’t gotten up and running for more than a year. And this is just in a single city. Multiply it by every city and town throughout the country–except for those few that have strong responsive citizen governments–and we have a nation of waste, preventable illness, and soaring profits for the rich. Thank you, once again, V.B., for telling it like it is.