Give a F*k presented by Spark Consciousness
We're dropping knowledge bombs and answering your burning questions about Nature, animals, spirituality, mental health, women's empowerment, and other profound topics.
This podcast probably won't change your life, but hopefully, it will give you some food for thought - some guidance on this twisted path we call human existence.
A presentation of Spark Consciousness, hosted by Sarah Woodard
Give a F*k presented by Spark Consciousness
Light and Noise: Unpacking Their Hidden Environmental Costs
Ever thought about how streetlights and boat engines could be harming our planet?
Prepare to uncover the hidden impacts of light and noise pollution on our environment and health in this eye-opening episode.
Tune in for an enlightening episode that empowers you to make a difference.
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Light and sound. Are you aware that these both create their own types of pollution and are contributing to the harm humans cause Mother Earth? Join us on Season 2, episode 19 to learn more about the impacts of light and sound pollution and what you can do to be part of the solution. Welcome to Season 2, episode 19 of Give a Fuck, presented by Spark Consciousness. We're dropping knowledge bombs and answering your burning questions about nature, animals, spirituality, mental health, women's empowerment and other profound topics. This podcast probably won't change your life, but hopefully it will give you some food for thought, some guidance on this twisted path we call human existence. My role as an award-winning story keeper and catalyst for healing humanity and Mother Earth is to help you reawaken to your own connection with nature and, through this reconnection, reacquaint you with your intuition. What you do with it, how you incorporate that into your life, is up to you. I hope you'll make changes that benefit both you personally and Mother Earth as a whole. I hope you'll share what you learn here with others and that they'll make different, more compassionate and enlightened choices too. Either way, take what works for you, leave the rest. Always work to be the best version of yourself and try to leave the world a little better than it was when you arrived. If you can hear the cats playing in the background, that is because my Patreon folks need to be increased so we can afford some more cat toys to keep these babies entertained while I record these podcasts. So in lieu of answering a question today, I guess I will explain how Patreon works. Basically, it is crowdfunding to support my efforts to make this podcast and, as with all of my offerings whether it's something you find on my website or signing up as a Patreon member, buying a book, any money that you send in my direction 10% of that always goes to support charitable causes that are helping make the world a more compassionate and healthy planet. The link for that is in the show notes if you'd like to check that out. In the case of the podcast, the remaining 90% supports new technology and toys to make the cats behave and be quiet while I am trying to record a show. So I apologize in advance if they continue to be disruptive. In the meantime, let's dive into the seitan of our show.
Speaker 1:Today, like I said, we are talking about light and sound pollution, so let's take these one at a time. Let's first talk about light pollution, and I'm specifically going to look at all-night streetlights. There's a recent study that actually shows that having streetlights that are on all night actually makes leaves inedible to insects. And now you may be thinking, so what? Well, the so what is?
Speaker 1:Insects provide vital food for birds and other animals. Insects are basically at the bottom of the food chain. If you will, I think of it more as a food web, but if we think of it, regardless of how you think of it, they're at the beginning of all of this, and so if there's no more insects, there's no more pollinators, there's no more food for other animals that are relied on throughout the food web, and so this is a big problem if they don't have the right food to eat. So what's exactly going on here? What scientists noticed was that trees, specifically in urban ecosystems, showed actually less damage than those in more rural areas, and they did a study and published it in Frontiers in Plant Science, and they noticed, compared with natural ecosystems, tree leaves in most urban ecosystems showed little signs of insect damage, and they got really curious as to why. And what they discovered was that artificial light at night led to increased leaf toughness and therefore decreased levels of it being eaten, because the jaws of and the teeth of the insects were not strong enough to bite through them.
Speaker 1:Now, this study took place in Beijing, but I believe that the results can be generalized out for everywhere, because, while species of trees and plants vary, it's kind of like humans we may look different on the outside, but inside we're all made of the same stuff, kind of the same thing. So in Beijing they looked at the Japanese pagoda and green ash trees and they thought, going into this, that plants with high levels of artificial light may be focused on defense rather than on growth, which would mean tougher leaves and more chemical defense compounds. And so to test this, they did 30 different sample sites on main roads that are usually lit by streetlights all night, and they measured the amount of luminescence, the amount of light at each site, and then they tested leaves for toughness, essence, the amount of light at each site, and then they tested leaves for toughness and they tested almost 5,500 leaves. So this is pretty significant. And they looked at things like size, toughness, water content, the level of nutrients and the chemical defenses in the leaves themselves. Larger leaves would indicate that plants directed their energy towards growth. Would indicate that plants directed their energy towards growth, but tougher leaves that contain tannins or other chemical defenses would indicate that they had allotted their energy to defend themselves.
Speaker 1:What they found was that the more light in an area, the tougher the leaves were. In the brightest lit areas, the leaves were extremely tough and there was literally zero sign of insects eating them. And while they said they didn't completely understand why this happened, they believe that trees exposed to artificial light could be extending their photosynthesis duration, sort of like you can start plants inside, like over the winter, to then propagate them outside when the weather warms up, particularly if you live in a colder area. So that's certainly a viable theory, in my opinion. Now, a tree with pristine leaves may look really pretty, but it's a really bad sign for the ecosystem. Gardeners will tell you if nothing is eating your plants, your garden is not part of the ecosystem. It's the same thing for trees. It's a natural ecological process and it maintains the biodiversity of insects, which maintains the biodiversity of the entire planet because they're very vital to the food web. It could actually lead to some really catastrophic cascading effects in our ecology. Fewer insects eating plant, eating leaves could signify that there are actually fewer insects in the entire ecological system, which would then result in lower abundances of predatory insects such as dragonflies that eat things we don't like, like mosquitoes, and it could also signify or lead to decreased levels of the bird population, because many birds eat insects, and so on and so forth, all the way around the food web.
Speaker 1:If this is a global pattern which it has to be, because nothing happens in a bubble we really need to be paying attention to this, and so what can you personally do? You're obviously not likely to be in charge of the streetlights wherever you live. I get that. I don't expect you to go around shooting out streetlights either. That's not cool. Expect you to go around shooting out streetlights either that's not cool. But what you can do is be an advocate. You can write letters to the editor, you can lobby your local political leadership to have streetlights that are motion censored or that go on and off for certain periods of time, or there are any number of ways to do this, and there is a lot of different technology out there that is helpful in addressing this, what this article that I have been looking at right now doesn't talk about, and that I don't have a lot of data in front of me to talk about is that light pollution this is all looking at light pollution that's kind of directed downward.
Speaker 1:Light pollution that's directed upward, like, say, a street light that doesn't have a cover on it to aim the light down to the street, or a spotlight on your house that's just aimed in general, any of those types of things. Parking lot lights a lot of times actually aim upwards for some reason. Any of those type of lights not only do they make it harder for you to see the stars, but they frequently confuse birds and other migratory animals. So that's another impact of light pollution. And in all of those cases, unless it's your personal light, I know you can't actually turn it off, but you can, like I said, you can be an activist, write those letters to the editor, write petitions, talk to your neighbors, form committees with your town, lobby local politicians. There's a lot of different ways to do this and you just need to figure out what's your personal way. Lobby local politicians. There's a lot of different ways to do this and you just need to figure out what's your personal way of handling it, what works for you and your personality and your time and what you feel comfortable doing. Right, we're all different in that way, and that's beautiful, because we need all of those voices.
Speaker 1:So, moving on to noise pollution, now, it turns out that noise pollution affects practically everything, even stuff that we hadn't thought about, like seagrass or other plants that do not have ears. Now, to me this didn't come as much of a surprise, because I am extremely noise sensitive. I actually feel noise like in my body, as physical pain, and I have for a very long time, thought that I'm somehow feeling noise, the way that Mother Earth is feeling noise, and I've recently discovered how to start to transmute and transform some of that, so it's less painful for me and hopefully, less painful for Mother Earth too. I don't expect most people to do this. From Mother Earth, too, I don't expect most people to do this, but there are some science-backed data to help you understand why this is a problem, and then again, we're going to give you some ways that you personally can create change, even if you're not like me, and you transmute it through your body.
Speaker 1:Let's look at ocean plants, for example. So, as you probably know, first of all, seagrass and pretty much any plant with green leaves that uses photosynthesis. They are known, among other things, for their ability to sequester carbon, meaning they trap it in their leaves and keep it out of the atmosphere. This is one of the reasons that we need trees and we need green plants to pull, and we need more of them to pull the carbon out of the atmosphere and help reduce global warming, global climate change, I should say. The article I'm looking at is specifically talking about seagrass, specifically Neptune grass, which is a protected species of seagrass that's native to the Mediterranean. But again, this can be generalized out. Science has to look at one specific thing and then move on to another specific thing.
Speaker 1:But what they learned was seagrass experiences significant acoustical damage when it's exposed to low frequency, artificial sounds for even just a couple of hours. So think things like boat engine, think air guns when we search for oil. Basically, there's a lot of human generated noise in the ocean that, unless you have been out there or are a part of it, you're probably not even aware it exists. But think for a minute about how many boats are in the ocean and they all create noise. Even if they don't have propellers, they have an engine of some kind that is making noise, specifically low frequency noise, so that it doesn't bug us as humans as much, but it turns out it's really detrimental to seagrass and other plants, and, unfortunately, this damage is especially pronounced in parts of the plant that are responsible for detecting gravity and storing energy.
Speaker 1:And so what's the deal with this? What does this mean exactly? Well, the biggest detriment, the biggest problem, is that, in addition to creating damage immediately upon hearing that noise, the damage worsens over the next five days and it makes it almost impossible for the seagrass to actually do its job, which, if you don't know which I didn't until I read this article seagrass almost is like a meadow, and it builds up in layers and it will lock in carbon from the atmosphere in several meter thick mats that can persist for thousands of years. And so, if we are damaging this, not only are we preventing it for being able to do that, we are potentially re-releasing some of this carbon that has been sequestered in those seagrass mats for hundreds of years, thousands of years. So this is not a good thing, according to the person who did the study, michel Andre, who is the director of the Laboratory of Applied Bioacoustics at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia in Spain. According to him, this is just the beginning, and that's already kind of known. He was actually inspired to do this study because he was already looking at the research that focused on dolphins and other marine animals like corals and jellyfish, which possess statocysts, and while those aren't ears, they still can ingest sound in some way. And he thought, well, seagrass doesn't have status, sister ears. But I wonder, and in that wondering, he did this study and discovered what he studied, what he found. And so it really is just the beginning, and it's a humongous problem.
Speaker 1:Now, again, unless you are personally running boats or searching for oil, I don't expect you to be able to immediately make the noise stop, as lovely as that might be. But what you can do is raise awareness. Right, you can share this information with other people. That includes lobbyists and other people who are in a position to regulate these sort of things. There may be ways, with the right technology and the right brains on the matter and maybe you're one of these brains that is capable of figuring out how to do this. There may be ways to get in the sound or change the frequency of the sound so that it doesn't cause these problems. I am not that person, I'm not an engineer. I would have next to no idea of where to begin with that, but there are people that are great at that. Maybe you're that person, or maybe you know how to reach those people. Or you can write a letter to the editor. Again, there's all of these ways that you can raise awareness and be a part of the solution without having to actually change your life personally.
Speaker 1:I want to encourage you to take some time to think about what those might be.
Speaker 1:Are you a letter writing person?
Speaker 1:Are you a get out and talk there to people person and use whatever that is that you already love to do to benefit Mother Earth, to benefit the planet?
Speaker 1:Did you feel a glimmer, a spark, a light in the dark during this episode? You will love my customized free mini course, which is specifically designed to respect and respond to your individual journey, taking you from where you are right now to your next level of harmonious living. And you can get started right now by answering three quick questions, which are found at the link in the show notes. As I mentioned, you can also support the show as a Patreon member, or there's also the option to sponsor an episode. You can learn more about all of these opportunities, as well as find some additional resources about the topics we covered in today's episode in the show notes and to help you remember this in case you're out doing a million things, hang on to the word pollution to help jog your memory and remind you to hop back on over to season two, episode 19 of Give a Fuck, presented by Spark Consciousness, to find all of that awesome info. And I will see you next time.
