The night sky is getting brighter at 10% per year, according to research published in Science. Eighty percent of the global population now lives under light-polluted skies. This is not a metaphor about modernity — it is a measurable, accelerating environmental degradation with documented effects on human health, ecosystems, and the basic navigational systems of dozens of species. The sources of light pollution are prosaic: street lights, parking lots, building facades, sports courts left blazing overnight, garage floodlights far brighter than security requires. The fixes are equally prosaic. Flagstaff, Arizona, adopted outdoor lighting ordinances in 1958 and became the first recognized Dark Sky City in 2001. Its rules regulate brightness, light type, and direction. Other communities have followed. New York state is considering a Dark Skies Protection Act that would impose restrictions on outdoor lighting statewide. The ecological damage is not speculative. Research shows light pollution is disrupting plant-pollinator relationships, shifting the timing of tree flowering, disorienting migrating birds, killing moths, and sending baby sea turtles toward parking lots instead of the ocean. Fireflies and frogs need darkness for courtship. For humans, disrupted circadian rhythms from artificial light exposure are linked to measurable health consequences — a finding supported by National Institutes of Health studies. But the newer and harder-to-regulate threat comes from orbit. More than 11,000 Starlink satellites currently circle the Earth, bright enough to draw the eye even in designated Dark Sky Sanctuaries. A separate venture proposes using satellites to provide artificial sunlight on demand, illuminating areas as large as three miles. The FCC has begun reviewing space-mirror proposals, but objects launched into space currently face no environmental review for their effects on terrestrial ecosystems or night-sky brightness. The regulatory gap is structural. Municipal zoning can control ground-based light. State legislation like New York's proposed act can set standards across jurisdictions. But satellite constellations operate under federal and international frameworks that were designed for communications licensing, not environmental protection. No authority currently treats the night sky as a shared resource requiring protection from orbital light pollution. The equity dimension is straightforward. Darkness is increasingly available only to those with the resources to travel to it. The International Dark Sky Places network preserves islands of unpolluted night — 2.5 million acres of protected darkness in southeast Oregon, for example — but these are destinations, not daily environments. Urban residents, who are disproportionately lower-income, bear the heaviest exposure to light pollution's health and ecological effects while having the least access to natural darkness. The policy toolkit exists for ground-based pollution: shielded fixtures, warm-spectrum bulbs, brightness caps, directional requirements. Flagstaff proved six decades ago that cities can be well-lit and dark-sky compliant simultaneously. The missing piece is political will at scale and a regulatory framework that extends upward — treating the night sky as the shared commons it is, rather than an unregulated dumping ground for photons from the ground and from orbit alike.
