Potluck & Film Screening – The City Dark

Hello friends,

Join us for a vegan potluck and film screening of The City Dark by Filmmaker Ian Cheney, who goes on a journey of interviewing astronomers, biologists and medical experts about the long-term impacts of light pollution on Migratory, Marine and the human species.

-Please bring a dish that is free of animal products, including honey.
-Potluck will begin at 12:30, with the movie (70 min) starting at 1:15.
-$3 cover charge
– This Event Will Take Place From 12:30 – 3:00 @ The Richmond Hill Central Library, Meeting Room C on the second floor.

Film Synopsis:
The world’s first light bulb was switched on in 1879, and since then artificial illumination has spread across an increasingly urban globe, radically changing humanity’s relation to the night. Yet light pollution is a phenomenon little noted except by those, like astronomers, whose endeavors have been directly hindered by the changes. Meditating on his dwindling connection to the stars, Many wonder about the global consequences of artificial lighting, and in The City Dark he sets out to discover what ecologists, cancer researchers, astrophysicists, philosophers and designers have to say about it. Filmmaker Ian Cheney weaves these interviews with time-lapse images of the night sky, culled from tens of thousands of high-resolution still images shot around the world.

But astronomers are far from the only researchers affected by the worldwide retreat of the night. Biologists along the Florida coast have determined that thousands of hatching sea turtles die every year because they fail to make it to the ocean after they confuse the light-polluted horizon of the land with the starlit horizon of the sea and head the wrong way. Similarly, millions of birds, evolved to navigate by the stars, crash into brightly-lit city buildings each year during migration season. This raises the question: Do humans also need the dark?