A Belgian peculiarity, the highways are illuminated, meaning you can distinguish the flat land from space. The Belgian magazine “Médor” explores the challenges of artificial lighting in public spaces: from astronomers and naturalists who urgently demand a return to darkness, to those, especially women, who fear, in the dark, for their safety. Between respect for nature, light pollution, energy sobriety and fear of the dark, an enlightening walk.
This article comes from Courrier Weekend. Every Saturday morning, find stories from the foreign press that will take you elsewhere and take a break from the news.
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Chapter Ieh. Hello, Martians!
In 2017, astronomer Thomas Pesquet will end his stay in the International Space Station. From there he has a crazy view of the Earth. He tweets: “Night flight: a glittering carpet that passes without interruption. Belgium and its illuminated highways are easy to identify!”
Seen from space, our country stands out clearly. In the 1960s and 1970s, Belgium actually wanted to play it American style. She bet everything on the car and undertook to build a modern, dense and fully lit road network.
Now seen from above is ours “glittering carpet” make a stain. And our interstellar pride has become a laughing stock. Lighting creates two colossal problems: energy consumption, which accelerates global warming and burdens society’s budgets, and “light pollution”. This term denotes both the abnormal or annoying nocturnal presence of light (overlighting, glare, sky luminescence, halos) and the harmful effects of this artificial lighting.
The first to raise awareness of this problem were astronomers. Gilles Robert, director of the Center Ardenne Observatory, and Francis Venter, president of the Association for the Protection of the Nocturnal Sky and Environment (Ascen), have been campaigning for more than fifteen years for political measures to be taken in Belgium against light pollution. . For example, a ban on
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The source of the article
Medor is an independent magazine founded in 2015 that publishes investigations and stories on topics related to Belgium. This quarterly magazine aims to create “a new process for constructing information”. It is organized as a cooperative and its editor-in-chief rotates. Its graphics are produced using free software, and part of the distribution is done by bicycle. Medor also commit to deducting only 3% of a topic’s budget from advertising and limit ads to “products, events or structures that is worth promoting”. He became particularly well known thanks to his investigation of the pharmaceutical company Mithra, published in its first issue.
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