S3E19: Oh, those dark desert skies

UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT

0:00:00 - (Chris Clarke): This podcast is made possible by financial support from our listeners. If you're not supporting us yet, check out nine 0 mile from needles.com. donate or text the word needles to 5355.

0:00:24 - (Joe Geoffrey): Think the deserts are barren wastelands? Think again. It's time for 90 miles from Needles, the Desert Protection podcast.

0:00:43 - (Chris Clarke): Thank you Joe, and welcome to 90 miles from Needles, the Desert Protection podcast. I'm your host, Chris Clarke, and I know that at least a couple of you are hoping for an update on the situation I described in the last episode in which we had an ailing puppy dog. I am happy to report that Heart the dog is about 95% recovered from her vestibular issues. We're breathing sighs of relief around here. Thank you. For those of you who reached out, dog people are the best. You know.

0:01:11 - (Chris Clarke): We are all mortal. Life is a process of running from place to place with your hands cupped full of water, trying to keep the water from leaking out between your fingers. And dogs are no exception. And we will take the good news where we can get it. I also want to mention that we had a really wonderful weekend. MazaMar art pottery in Pioneertown, California put together a seasonal art show on our dark night skies here in the desert, and what's threatening them, what their value is.

0:01:42 - (Chris Clarke): There is a lot of really wonderful art at the show, and we were the benefactors of the show in the sense that the voluntary entry fee that was charged artists to put stuff in the show, a modest fee, was all donated to the Desert Advocacy media network, and we are extremely grateful for that. We also had a table at the opening reception of the event. Lots and lots of good feedback. Folks were saying hello to us. It was nice to chat with folks, in particular, longtime listeners and supporters. Janice and Kim, great to meet you in person.

0:02:14 - (Chris Clarke): During the course of the reception, we interviewed Mitch Miller, a local landscape photographer who has a soft spot in his heart for night sky images, and Steve Bardwell, the president of the Morongo Basin Conservation Association, a fantastic local group that, along with other folks, work to craft and lobby for a night sky ordinance in San Bernardino county. It's officially called a light trespass ordinance. Steve will explain what the difference is in our interview.

0:02:43 - (Chris Clarke): We are just really, really grateful to everybody that turned up and bought a t shirt or threw some money into the tip jar. I hope you like the interview. A little bit of the audio version of cinema Verite with conversation and happy laughter in the background, and we'll get to that in a second. But first, this podcast is made possible by people just like you who donate to our nonprofit sponsor, the Desert Advocacy Media Network.

0:03:11 - (Chris Clarke): You can join this wonderful group by going to 90 milesfromneedles.com donate there. You will find a couple different ways to help us out out. You can also text the word needles to 53555 and in response you'll get a little link that takes you to a forum where you can pick an amount to donate. Pick whether it's a one time donation or recurring, monthly or yearly, and regardless of what you choose, we are grateful. And along those lines, we want to thank Alia Rafique, Cher Townsend, Nancy Bates Derby Kim, Ron Sundergill, and Rebecca Ward for their donations and huge thanks go to Sheila Sasek and Thomas Albin from Mazamar our pottery it's so gratifying to have folks out in the world that not only value this podcast, but go to such lengths to help it succeed.

0:04:02 - (Chris Clarke): And by all means. And this is an unsolicited endorsement, but if you are in the Joshua Tree area and you have a little bit of free time and a little bit too much money that you want to deposit somewhere in the local economy, you could do a lot worse than going to Mazamar art pottery in Pioneer town across Mane Street, M A N E Street from Pappy and Harriet's. Go check out their stuff. A variety of different artists and art forms, from beautiful prints to pottery to metalwork.

0:04:29 - (Chris Clarke): It's a lovely, homey place, and if you get there before the rush shows up and buys all of the artwork from the show, you can pick something up and depending on the artist's conditions for sale, some of that money may go to desert advocacy media network. And please just say hello to Sheila and Thomas for us. They are good folks and they deserve your support. This might be an unpopular hot take, but I have to say those videos that occasionally make the rounds online that show the earth at night and feature the night side of the earth blazing with city lights, I hate those videos.

0:05:50 - (Chris Clarke): You know, first couple of times I saw them, I said, well that's interesting. I can almost see my house from here. And I understand the appeal of the genre for that very reason. But that said, these days all I can think about is look at all the energy we are just beaming into space. We want to be able to see at night. That's totally legit. We want to be able to feel safe in our homes, and I totally understand that.

0:06:19 - (Chris Clarke): But every single photon that you see as light in those videos is wasted energy. And it's not just wasted energy, but it actually undermines our quality of life. Because for every glimmer of light that you see in those videos from a satellite several hundred miles up above the surface of the earth, there is at least an equivalent amount of light that is bouncing off the upper atmosphere and creating sky glow and interfering with our view of the night sky. Now, I don't like to advertise this all that much. I prefer to just count the number of years since I moved to the desert and leave it at that. But a few months after I moved to the desert in 2008, I actually moved into Los Angeles for what I thought was going to be a short sojourn. It turned out to be a couple of years.

0:07:05 - (Chris Clarke): And there are a lot of things I like about Los Angeles. The culture. The community had a wonderful writers group there, people I'm still in touch with. 15 years later, the municipal ordinance of requiring a peruvian restaurant every two blocks was definitely a good idea. And then at night, sometimes when I was not as happy as I wanted to be, I would go outside and I would look at the star. Singular.

0:07:30 - (Chris Clarke): That star was probably either Jupiter or Saturn. Sometimes it was Mars. Just being in one of the most lighting intensive cities in the western United States sealed me off from I'm a two and a half hour drive from downtown Los Angeles where I sit now, and I can still see the lights of Los Angeles if I look in the right direction at night or the wrong direction. Dark night skies don't just offer aesthetic respite from our world encompassing society and our world eating society.

0:08:04 - (Chris Clarke): Light pollution harms plants and animals as well. It upsets their circadian rhythms. There are studies that show that desert wildlife is much less active on nights of a full moon than during the new moon. That makes sense if you're a kangaroo rat. Do you want to scurry around in total darkness and force predators to rely on their other senses to find you? Or do you want to walk around illuminated by the full moon?

0:08:31 - (Chris Clarke): Easy pickings for any owl or coyote or any other crepuscular or nocturnal hunters. The brighter the lights get around places like Joshua Tree, which is an accredited dark sky park, the harder it is for that wildlife to have that respite once a month and go about their affairs in total darkness. And as the light pollution from LA and from the Coachella valley and from San Bernardino riverside grows and grows, that wildlife has less and less of a respite.

0:09:03 - (Chris Clarke): And it's harder and harder to find places where there are truly dark night skies. I mean, despite people flocking to Joshua Tree National park for meteor showers and appearances of the aurora borealis and things like that. Joshua tree does not have skies that are all that dark. It is way too close to the cities of the Coachella Valley. It is way too close to the greater La and San Diego areas. And the Mexicali Yuma area has a huge amount of light. Las Vegas and Henderson to the north. There is just too much civilization around Joshua Tree for it to be a truly dark night sky. And the fact that people go there, even in the west section of the national park, and exclaim about how beautiful the dark night skies are basically says more about how few of us have access to true dark night skies on a regular basis. I mean, I live pretty much in the midsection of Joshua Tree National park, outside of the park, obviously, but about halfway between east and west, and we see the Milky Way from our driveway on the regular. But we are about as bright compared to places that are truly dark as downtown Los Angeles is compared to us. We're right in the middle of that unfortunate spectrum. If you want to see true deep night sky stuff with your naked eye, despite the dark sky tourism at Joshua Tree, you're really better off continuing past Joshua Tree on your road trip for several hours. There are truly dark places in the deserts of North America. A huge amount of Nevada has true dark skies.

0:10:47 - (Chris Clarke): If you get away from the Interstate 80 corridor and from southern Clark county around Las Vegas, say, in some place like outside of Austin, Coaldale, Warm Springs, places like that, you can get incredibly dark skies. North end of Death Valley National Park, Grand Staircase, Escalante, parts of the Grand Canyon, western New Mexico around reserve and Pytown, the boot heel of New Mexico, Big Bend, parts of the states of Chihuahua and Coahuila, parts of both Baja California and Baja California Sur.

0:11:24 - (Chris Clarke): You can find truly dark night skies in the desert that make Joshua Tree look like the Las Vegas Strip in terms of how brightly lit the place is. This Joshua tree is on the bleeding edge of the light dome from La and Coachella Valley and San Diego and Las Vegas and Mexicali, and to some extent from Phoenix. Even. This is where people are especially aware of threats to dark night skies, and lighting has gotten more efficient. And you would think that that's a really good thing from the climate change perspective, burning less energy to illuminate.

0:11:56 - (Chris Clarke): What we need to illuminate what happens is that it's more efficient and so it costs less money and so people add more lighting. The tourism industry has an issue, too. People come from the city, and for a significant percentage of those people, a truly dark sky is utterly unnerving. And so these airbnbs and other places where people are staying will light places, excessively putting up string lights, floodlights, motion sensitive lights.

0:12:23 - (Chris Clarke): Better motion sensitive than not, I'll say, because at least those turn off. It is said that light pollution is the one kind of pollution that if we wanted to, we could end it by the end of the day, just by turning off a bunch of lights. That pollution will speed away from us at the speed of light, and within a couple of microseconds, our eyes will start to adjust to the darkness. But until then, let's go to our brightly lit afternoon conversation with Mitch Miller and Steve Bardwell at Mazumar Art Pottery in Pioneertown, California, at the reception for our dark Skies art event.

0:13:02 - (Mitch Miller): My name is Mitch Miller, and I'm a landscape photographer living in Joshua Tree, California. We've been there since 2017, but I know the park really well. I first entered the national monument in 1980. So I've been hiking out there 44 years now. And we got married in the park in 1999. And I've been shooting on film or digital since 1981 and became interested in night sky photography about seven years ago.

0:13:35 - (Steve Bardwell): I'm Steve Bardwell. I'm the president of the Morongo Basin Conservation association. My wife and I have been out here vacationing at first, and now we live here. But since 1990, for quite some time, really appreciate the desert environment. NBCA has been very involved with the passage of the county of San Bernardino Light trespass ordinance, which is now in effect requiring that all exterior lighting be shielded and following other particulars of the ordinance. So many people come out to this area for the dark night skies, and this ordinance is really going to help in that.

0:14:24 - (Steve Bardwell): Look at the ordinance and any infractions that you see, inform those people of the ordinance and see if we can't get them to comply. If not, there's always code enforcement. Who is primed to enforce this ordinance? So we're looking forward to dark skies ahead.

0:14:46 - (Chris Clarke): Why are dark skies important?

0:14:49 - (Steve Bardwell): Well, it's for safety, for wildlife, for health. Nature evolved with dark skies, and artificial light is throwing a wrench in the whole work, so it louses up people's circadian rhythms. There's links with light pollution to certain types of cancers. And of course, much wildlife really depends on having a nocturnal season of the day. And of course, you know, for our economy, our local economy, Tez, to a certain extent, more and more, it would seem, depend on or look towards their dark night sky as a draw to get visitors out.

0:15:33 - (Mitch Miller): I'm glad you gave the scientific answer because I knew someone could do it better than me. I'll give kind of an artistic answer. I was hiking with the high desert hiking club a few years, and one of the other hikers said that he was taking classes at the Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara when Ansel Adams came to speak. And he said, landscape photography is about knowing where to stand.

0:15:59 - (Mitch Miller): And I said, well, that's a great answer or response. And I'd like to add, it's also about knowing when to stand there, which is about the light. And over time. I used to be a record collector. I had over three thousand and forty five s. And over time I came to regard or see a connection between music and compositions. When I'd be out hiking, I came to look upon shadows, deep, inky shadows, like deep bass notes.

0:16:32 - (Mitch Miller): And the high notes would be like the spectral highlights in an image. I don't know if you've ever heard of Steve Roach. He's a new age artist based in Tucson, Arizona. Saw him in concert back in 92. And we would all close our eyes and drift away while he'd play his long soundscapes. And then we'd come back, open our eyes and say, well, where did you go? It'd always be some desert. So when I'm out there, I regard the inky black skies like the deep bass notes, and the stars are like chimes. Okay?

0:17:09 - (Mitch Miller): They're like beautiful angelic chimes. And light pollution is like bringing up the house lights during the best song. So that's my point of view.

0:17:22 - (Chris Clarke): How would you characterize what's happening with light pollution?

0:17:27 - (Steve Bardwell): In the southern California desert? We're seeing the effects of it more and more from the urban environment, more and more from the sky glow. I optimistically am thinking that here locally in the desert, people are becoming more aware of it. So there is less immediate light pollution, but there is more continuing to be more and more sky glow that we get from cities. That affects us here in the desert.

0:17:57 - (Mitch Miller): I'd like to have an app on my phone where I could turn down the lights in Palm Springs for about a half hour. Too much task, I find when I go out. My favorite Milky Way photos are in February, March, April, when I can look to the southeast, because when you look to the south, you're seeing more India through Palm Springs lighting.

0:18:17 - (Steve Bardwell): I think it's getting better, and I think it's going to continue to get better out here locally. And we hope that. I'm not sure how much traction we're going to get with the big urban environments with controlling their lighting jurisdictions there are not interested in that aspect of things. One of the things with light pollution is that so many people feel that it's safer if you have brighter light, and that is a real problem that needs to be really countered.

0:18:48 - (Steve Bardwell): It's glare that creates unsafe conditions because you can't see when you have a lot of glare. If you have shielded lights with a lower light level, your eyes can accommodate more easily. You can see what's sitting in the shadows. You can see that bad guy that's sitting in the shadows where you'd be blinded by a light if it was shielded in your face.

0:19:12 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah. The way I usually put it to people when I'm trying to explain that is you're at an intersection, it's nighttime. Somebody else pulls up to the other side of the intersection facing you in the opposite lane. Will you feel safer if they have their high beams on or their low beams on?

0:19:30 - (Mitch Miller): Low beams.

0:19:32 - (Steve Bardwell): Low beams.

0:19:33 - (Mitch Miller): When I went out to Joshua tree National Park, I think it was Saturday, May 11, I was leaving the park early because I had done a test, and the aurora was very much a dud that night. It was bumper to bumper traffic for like a mile and a half near what I call Instagram alley. So here's the Mays parking lot and then the Creosote trail parking lot, and south of that is what I call Instagram alley. And that was full of people, and I don't know how anybody could have seen it. Even if it was a good night for the aurora, it would have been a good time, a good opportunity for people to turn down the headlights because there were so much, so many people and so much light.

0:20:14 - (Mitch Miller): You could have just driven slowly with the dim lights on.

0:20:18 - (Steve Bardwell): The other part of it, of course, is the color of the light. And that's why many times you go to an astronomy event and you'll see that everyone has red lenses or red cellophane over their flashlights because that wavelength of light is easier to see with without blinding yourself. The new light trespass ordinance does address that. This ordinance replaces the previous ordinance, which was passed before leds were in wide use or really maybe even invented.

0:20:54 - (Steve Bardwell): And now this new ordinance requires that exterior lighting have a certain color temperature so that it's a warmer color. The real blue tinge. Bright blue tinge lights are really. They're damaging to your nightmares vision. Warm color lights are much easier to see with than they're your cool color lights.

0:21:22 - (Mitch Miller): The phones we stare into at night the blue light. That makes it harder to go to sleep, doesn't it?

0:21:28 - (Steve Bardwell): That's right. This affects one circadian rhythm, and that's why people talk about what you should really be very careful in your house to shield all or cover up all of your blue lights at night, because it affects your sleep patterns.

0:21:45 - (Chris Clarke): What is the coolest thing each of you has seen in the dark sky that you might not have seen if you were in, I don't know, echo park or someplace that was very, very heavily lit?

0:21:58 - (Mitch Miller): Do you want me to talk about my shirt?

0:22:01 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah. What is this shirt you have on, Mitch?

0:22:05 - (Mitch Miller): Well, this is a gift from a friend who lives in Fairfield, Illinois. That was a few miles from the center line of the path of totality of the April 2024 eclipse. And we had the pleasure and the honor of spending four nights with her. And I was receiving texts from friends down in Texas that they were being rained out, and we had clear skies. So I was able to capture 150 photos in four minutes of the total solar eclipse.

0:22:32 - (Mitch Miller): So that ranks in the top three. But that photo's in the top three, too.

0:22:37 - (Chris Clarke): You want to describe what's going on in that photo?

0:22:39 - (Mitch Miller): Sure. This is my favorite title ever. Dark side of the bloom. Back in 2022, the Joshua trees began to bloom in late February, and it occurred to me this was a unique opportunity to capture the galactic center of the Milky Way with a flower, a Joshua tree flower, because they don't often happen at the same time. The galactic center disappears below the horizon in the northern hemisphere for about three months, started to reappear in late February of that year.

0:23:08 - (Mitch Miller): And so the first order of business was to find a flower on a Joshua tree at eye level, which is hard to do because usually they're way up at the top, like the ones in the background in that photo. So I backpacked 2 miles and found a tree with a branch way up high that hung down with a flower right in front of my face and my camera. But I also needed a clear view to the southeast, and I had that also.

0:23:34 - (Mitch Miller): So I set the camera on the tripod for all night, and I shot sunset light on the landscape, and the flower, went to bed, got up at 03:00 had a yummy danish, I had hot chocolate, and then started shooting the night sky. Later. I put the two versions together, and it drove me crazy, because when I've done that before and the other ones that are available for purchase inside, there's no wind. The Joshua tree was blowing in the wind at 330 in the morning.

0:24:08 - (Mitch Miller): So what looked like, shadows of those branches is the nighttime version of those branches. So I came up with the term time shadows. Okay. So when you look at it, you're seeing a connection between day and night. So, yeah, I fell in love with the photo, but it took like three months to do that.

0:24:28 - (Chris Clarke): And we can get a low res version of that for the show notes, right?

0:24:31 - (Mitch Miller): Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's on display right now at 29 Palms Art Gallery.

0:24:36 - (Steve Bardwell): I've had some really terrific experiences and relationships with the dark sky out here and up in Burns Canyon, where we first became familiar with this area with meteor showers. There's a couple of meteor showers that I remember were unbelievable. Leonid's about 15 years ago, I think was just jaw dropping with a flashing meteor. Seemed like every couple of seconds. It was really something.

0:25:07 - (Mitch Miller): My birthday, 2001. We were near Big Bear Lake at 8000 ft. Fire raining from the sky. Oh, it's 360 degrees.

0:25:16 - (Steve Bardwell): It was really something. So that was quite spectacular. And the other thing was watching Comet hail bop. And we saw it on both sides of his trip around the sun. We were able to see it at first in the northwest as it was heading around the sun, and then as it came around, we saw it again in the east and southeast. And that was really terrific. And I got a very good photograph of that. And I'll send you a low res version of that too.

0:25:48 - (Steve Bardwell): But those were pretty spectacular. But I must say, every time I'm out and see the Milky Way, you know, it's just. It's awe inspiring.

0:25:59 - (Mitch Miller): And can I add one more? In 1986, I joined some friends and we went camping at Jumbo Rocks campground in the national monument. And we saw Halley's Comet.

0:26:11 - (Chris Clarke): That's good.

0:26:12 - (Mitch Miller): And if I remember correctly, the sky to the south was a lot darker.

0:26:15 - (Steve Bardwell): Than we saw Halley's Comet. We were camping in Anza Borrega.

0:26:20 - (Mitch Miller): Nice.

0:26:21 - (Steve Bardwell): And so got a glimpse of it that night.

0:26:24 - (Chris Clarke): I have a friend, his name is Sherwood Harrington. Hi, Sherwood. I hope you don't mind me name checking you. He was an astronomy teacher at a community college in the Bay Area, Los Altos College. And in a thread on social media somewhere, maybe 15-20 years ago, he told this story about how he used to start each class by asking the students how many of them had seen the Milky Way. He says when he started teaching, he would get about half of people raising their hands.

0:26:55 - (Chris Clarke): And then that number lessened to the point where for a few years he would have one or two people raise their hands and maybe other people had seen it. And just not realized that they were seeing it. But as things got brighter and more aggressively developed around the Bay Area, the farmlands of Silicon Valley stopped being farmlands. And eventually, he said he just stopped asking the question because nobody knew what he was talking about. And I wonder at the effects on people's emotional health and feeling of connection to the rest of the universe. If you go out and you see like, Jupiter and the moon, and I like seeing both of those things, don't get me wrong. But for people that will never have the opportunity to see something like Gegenschein, which is a reflection of sunlight being bent around the earth through its atmosphere on a layer of interplanetary dust, and it's something that you can see at Racetrack Valley or oasis or places like that. I keep thinking that this thing that happened every night for me when I was a toddler, I knew what the Milky Way was. I knew pointed out, and that's an experience that people don't have anymore.

0:28:13 - (Chris Clarke): I just kind of wonder how unsettling that is for folks.

0:28:17 - (Steve Bardwell): Well, that's a really terrible story to hear that people don't see the Milky Way. I think it's a symptom of the nature deficit that so many people suffer from. And just know that if people were to be able to get out and experience nature in the outdoor, it's good for your health. This hearing that we attended yesterday, Chris, you and I, I'm not sure if you were there, Mitchell, about Chuckwalla National Monument. There were many comments from people talking about the advantage and the health effects of being out in nature.

0:29:02 - (Steve Bardwell): And I think this is why it's so important to get people out in nature and be able to see the wonder of the night sky.

0:29:10 - (Mitch Miller): Well, you've made me realize there's another side to what I do. I sometimes joke it's those doggone photographers that make it so crowded in Joshua Tree National park, but still, it's a necessary evil. That said, listening to what you said about that professor and the answers that he got less and less that people had seen the Milky Way, I'm glad that I'm reminding people this is out there. And I'm happy people are enjoying the park than the night skies, because I just can't imagine life without stars. I remember, have you ever heard of Pacheco Pass?

0:29:48 - (Mitch Miller): Okay. I was lucky to have a father that would take me camping in Yosemite Valley in Tuolumne Meadows in the late fifties, early sixties. And I can remember getting out of the car at Pacheco Pass and I was dumbfounded by the stars. I was probably seven or eight at the time. On our way to Yosemite Valley. He liked to get up at two in the morning and go. And I loved it because I loved the night. It's great to share and, you know, motivate people to come out and experience it in person.

0:30:20 - (Chris Clarke): So we were talking a little bit earlier about the county ordinance, and, you know, I'm always in a position doing this, of asking questions that I know the answers to already cause full disclosure, I was working on the ordinance, too, but I wonder if you, Steve, would be willing to characterize the public response to the ordinance, both pro and con. How did that work out over the course of the decades long campaign to get that ordinance updated?

0:30:50 - (Steve Bardwell): Thanks, Chris. It was a decades long ordinance that started back in, well, at least 15 years. I guess it started with the various three different supervisors taking it under their wing to really push this forward. We're very appreciative of the support that we got from the county in passing this. At the time we were advocating for this, we were a little concerned. We thought, is the county going to go for this stargazing approach to things?

0:31:20 - (Steve Bardwell): We were very surprised to find that that was, in fact, the approach that they liked. Whereas in a pitch that we made to the planning commission, to the county, we stressed the energy saving of led lights, we stressed the health effects of it, and we really tried to minimize safety effects, and we really tried to minimize the quote unquote stargazing, thinking that that would not strike a strong enough note with him. And we were surprised to find that. To the contrary.

0:31:56 - (Steve Bardwell): We find that my experience has been that people are really excited about having a light trespass ordinance. I am not sure, and I haven't checked with code enforcement or with the county to see just how, you know, have they been acting a lot on these things, on complaints? I don't know just how much reaction there has been to complaints or if they've had to react to complaints, but I know the general public, they're all in favor of it. Everyone I talk to says, shield that light.

0:32:30 - (Chris Clarke): So why is it called a light trespass ordinance instead of a dark skies ordinance?

0:32:34 - (Steve Bardwell): Well, it's because of light that originates on one property and affects other properties, becomes effectively a trespass of that light. There are some real easy hacks one can use to address unshielded lights. It can be as simple as you see so many light fixtures that are for sale in our local home improvement stores that are this lovely looking carriage lantern with clear glass all around it and exposed bulb in there and totally noncompliant because you can see the light bulb and the source of light.

0:33:16 - (Steve Bardwell): So if you one were to be so simple as just to paint the inside of the fixture, that would shield the light, or just build a little shroud that can go around your light. Something very simple, just a bent piece of sheet metal can work very nicely. Another hack is to take an old rusty can and drill a hole in the bottom of it that's the size of the neck of a light bulb, and then screw the light bulb into the fixture inside the can and you get a shielded light fixture. Easy too. Very simple.

0:33:55 - (Chris Clarke): So next time you're out on BLM land and you find a rusty can dump, think of it as lighting supplies.

0:34:01 - (Steve Bardwell): Exactly. There's one thing that is one component in the light trespass ordinance that is of real concern, and many people talk about this, is the use of string lighting. And string lighting was put in. I believe the motivation for putting it in came from a lot of the Airbnb, the short term rental owners, because they feel that string lighting provides that certain ambiance and look to their rentals that they wanted to have.

0:34:37 - (Steve Bardwell): So there is a component or an exception within the light trespass ordinance that allows the use of string lighting. These are individual light bulbs that are on light Christmas lights, basically. And the ordinance limits the intensity of the light bulb. And the intensity of light bulbs is now not by watts, because now that we're dealing with leds, it's all by lumens is the measure. So no light may exceed 40 lm within a string light.

0:35:15 - (Steve Bardwell): So it's very difficult to. That's a pretty dim light equivalent. 60 watt incandescent light bulb in LED puts out about 800 lm. So it really, it's a pretty low light level. So the use of standard light bulbs such as these would not comply in string lighting. Because each one of these Edison type bulbs that you see, they definitely exceed that 40 lm. Now one can have a circle, quite a few lumens. Through string lighting, you can have actually 4000 lm over your entire property.

0:35:58 - (Steve Bardwell): It sounds like a lot, but if you spread it over the whole property, it's not so much. But those lights are unshielded and there's a hack for those too. If one likes the idea of having string lights, you can place them up behind the fascia of your house so that you still get the effect of the light without seeing the actual exposed bulbs.

0:36:24 - (Chris Clarke): So in getting this ordinance crafted and then passed. Did people have assistance from any outside experts? Were there organizations that promote this kind of thing that were helpful?

0:36:38 - (Steve Bardwell): Well, first of all, it was, as you said, your being part of the committee that worked on this, the National Parks Conservation Association, just by virtue of your participation in this, they contributed to it. We had also a good deal of input from the International Dark Sky association, and they provided a lot of the data and a lot of guidance during the drafting of the ordinance. The head of code enforcement at the time, a fellow named Andy Wingert, was a real spark plug in this, and it was so great to have him involved.

0:37:17 - (Steve Bardwell): We were so disappointed that he passed away before this thing really came into being. The International Dark Sky association and members of other conservation organizations.

0:37:32 - (Chris Clarke): Just a quick note to say that after we recorded this, Steve reached out to me and said that he had missed a few of the organizations that had contributed to the success of the night sky ordinance. So let me just say that important contributors to the success of that ordinance were the Joshua Tree Astronomy Art Theater. Its members put in loads and loads and loads of work over the course of many years to make this a success.

0:38:01 - (Chris Clarke): The National Park Service, the at the time, chief physical scientist of Joshua Tree National Park, Luke Sabala, was a die hard member of the group. The Joshua Tree Chamber of Commerce was involved. The US Marine Corps, through their base in 29 Palms, had a significant interest and gave us lots and lots of good advice and spread the word throughout the base. It was definitely a team effort, and my own predecessor at NPCA, Seth Shteir, definitely deserves the majority of the credit for NPCA's role in getting this thing passed.

0:38:42 - (Chris Clarke): Back to the interview, Mitch, you have.

0:38:44 - (Chris Clarke): Any plans for night sky photography trips in your future?

0:38:49 - (Mitch Miller): I do. It's an interesting time to ask that question. I'm having cataract surgery on the focusing eye July 9. That could affect a trip in late July and maybe the one in August. I need new glasses and you can't order those till a few weeks after the cataract surgery. But I'll probably go out for the new moon in July, probably not near the western end of the park, because we'd be looking even more to the south, towards Palm Springs and those lights in July than we did in June or April.

0:39:27 - (Mitch Miller): So nothing specific.

0:39:30 - (Chris Clarke): It gets dark every night, so there's always an opportunity. Right?

0:39:34 - (Mitch Miller): One of the most interesting night shots I ever got, I was out in the park about twelve years ago and I was in beautiful rocks in the foreground with the full moon low on the horizon behind me casting shadows towards the dawn light. You ever heard of Pushwalla Plateau? Did a night hike there, got to the top and we turned and we looked at the dawn light over the Salton Sea, below which in our foreground was a cliff lit by the moon.

0:40:10 - (Mitch Miller): And we turned over this way. And here's San Jacinto's snow lit by the moon above the city lights, be it full moon, new moon, or in between.

0:40:19 - (Chris Clarke): Okay, Steve Bardwell, Mitch Miller, and thank you so much, both of you, for joining us on 90 miles from needles.

0:40:26 - (Mitch Miller): Thank you very much, Chris. This was a lot of fun.

0:40:28 - (Steve Bardwell): Thanks, Chris. It's great to be here with you and love what you do.

0:40:35 - (Chris Clarke): And that brings us to the end of another episode of 90 Miles from the Desert Protection podcast. Thanks for listening. I especially want to thank Mitch Miller and Steve Bardwell for spending some time talking during a really wonderful event at MazaMar Art pottery in Pioneer Town, California. Here's a tool for those of you who are new to the dark sky thing, check out a very handy map called the World Atlas Night Sky Brightness, which is available at darkskymap.com/nightskybrightness you can see the entire world in this map. It's pretty easy to find places that have darker skies than you are used to. It's interesting to me as someone that lived in coastal California for a long time, just looking at that part of the world, which seems like it's got a lot of wide open spaces, just seeing how little of it is actually dark. But there are plenty of places in the desert and arid land region between, say, Dodge City and Bend, Oregon that have really dark skies and are worth your attention.

0:41:37 - (Chris Clarke): Maybe one of them is near where you live. Maybe one of them is easily accessible to a place you're planning to go to again, darkskymap.com/nightskybrightness also important, go check out Darksky International, formerly the International Dark Sky association. Their website is darksky.org dot only is there material there to teach you about light pollution and why it's best avoided, but you can also get a list of dark sky compliant lighting fixtures for inside and outside your house.

0:42:11 - (Chris Clarke): And you can also find good destinations in their list of dark sky places. Darksky.org again, I want to thank the folks at MazaMar Art Pottery in Pioneetown, California, specifically Shiela Sasek and Thomas Alban. Thank you so much for the support. And I will get the proper size of t shirts to both of you really soon. I also want to thank Joe Geoffrey, our voiceover artist and Martine Mancha, our art artist, for their contributions long term to the podcast.

0:42:49 - (Chris Clarke): Our theme song, Moody Western, is by Brightside Studio. Other music heard in this episode, Black Desert and Dark Skies, in order of appearance, are from Dscrypt's Library of Stock Media, which is provided without creator credit. Not getting enough? 90 miles from needles? You can check us out on Facebook at 90 spelled out the word ninetymilesfromneedles and on Instagram @90mifromneedles if you'd like to do something to help the podcast, and you've already given us all the money you can afford, why not write a review on your favorite podcast app or subscribe to our YouTube channel?

0:43:29 - (Chris Clarke): Or just spread the word? Got an episode of ours you especially like? Share it around, email it to your friends, post links to it on social media. Every little bit of effort that brings more eyeballs, or maybe I should say earballs, to 90 miles from needles is much appreciated. It is remaining hot in the desert and things are catching on fire throughout the southwest. Keep an eye on those weather reports, not only for the temperature, but also for the air quality. Might be a good time to bring out those masks that you told yourself you're not going to quit wearing just yet because of COVID but then you don't bother to put them on. Please stay safe. The desert needs you, and I will see you at the next watering hole.

0:44:18 - (Chris Clarke): Bye now.

0:46:27 - (Joe Geoffrey): 90 Miles from Needles is a production of the Desert Advocacy Media Network.