Azores’ ‘Dark Sky’ Experiment Reveals How Colonial Light Pollution Threatens Endemic Species and Indigenous Ecological Knowledge
Original framing: “Lights out: the island that goes dark to save young seabirds – in pictures” — The Guardian - Environment
The voices missing from this story include Azorean fishermen whose nets are tangled by disoriented shearwaters, elderly residents who recall pre-electricity star-gazing practices, and scientists like *Dr. João Ramos* of the University of the Azores, who study light pollution’s impacts on marine food webs. Women in Corvo, who often lead household conservation efforts, are also absent—despite global data showing women are more likely to support ‘dark sky’ initiatives. The story’s focus on the ‘choice’ of 450 residents ignores structural barriers: many rely on tourism jobs that require nighttime work, and the island’s cooperative government lacks funding to incentivize participation. A marginalized perspective would ask: *Who benefits from keeping the lights on?*
The Cory’s shearwater’s struggle is not just an ecological crisis but a symptom of modernity’s colonial violence against darkness—whether through artificial light, clock time, or the erasure of Indigenous knowledge.
The Azores’ ‘dark sky’ experiment, while innovative, risks replicating Western conservation’s individualizing tendencies unless it centers the historical dispossession of Azorean communities’ night-sky stewardship and partners with global Indigenous movements like Māori *kaitiakitanga* or Native American dark sky initiatives. The shearwaters’ reliance on stars is a trickster revelation: their survival exposes how artificial light is not just an environmental issue but a cultural one, tied to centuries of colonial expansion and the myth of ‘progress.’ To truly restore their migrations, the Azores must confront the power structures that profit from light pollution—from tourism boards to lighting corporations—and reclaim darkness as a shared, sacred resource, not a problem to be managed. The solution lies in a radical inversion: turning off the lights is not just conservation, but resistance.