Wilderness Interface Zone

Although Turtle is a trickster of the highest order, it is true also that Turtle may be tricked.  When this happens—when the trickster’s trickster is tricked—you may be sure the world has tipped out of balance.

Every year along the southeastern and gulf state coastlands of the U.S., females of several sea turtle species such as the loggerhead turtle, the green sea turtle, Ridley’s turtle, and the leatherback, their bellies full of eggs, approach land from the Gulf and the Atlantic Ocean, flapping through the water like short-billed birds.  Migrations begin in March and, one species following another, last through September (1).

These turtles follow pathways mapped in their brains by genetic memories of turtle forebears.  Perhaps the knowledge exists also as an imprint of each hatchling’s experiences of scrambling from its nest above the tide line down to the surf.  However they find and follow them, these routes are millions of years old—older than human consciousness and human memory, some say—and are calculated upon frequencies and intensities of light: moon- and starlight (2), along with other urgent signals.

The turtles flap toward land, dreaming of warm sands with dazzling night skies above and a million-dollar view of the sea surface filled with stars. And that’s where the trouble starts, because people flock to this same real estate.  Thinking not of turtles but of investments and lifestyles capitalizing upon those same views the pregnant turtles crave, people also build above the tide line, sometimes a little farther back from where turtles build.  Nevertheless, that urge for excellent sands that turtles strive to fulfill is becoming an endangering desire, especially since humans feel uneasy in that very darkness turtles equate with survival.

Resort, condo, and parking lot glare now pollute select nesting sites.  Scorning the lit beaches, some gravid females choose darker if in other ways less advantageous places to dig their nests.  Some wander in confusion in the water, where pushed past their limits they may drop their eggs in the sea (3).

Despite the light, many turtles do come ashore (4), make their depressions in the sand, lay their hundred or so eggs then bury them.  Now weary and vulnerable, they seek shiny visual cues from heaven to guide them home to the sea.  Instead, streetlights seduce some onto roads where automobiles injure or kill them (5).

Even more devastating is the effect random gleams have upon the babies.  Experiments and other evidence demonstrate that, flapping their tiny turtle wings, hatchlings fly toward the nearest luster.  This ought to be the ocean’s surface, resplendent with stars and moon glow.  Instead, many threatened or endangered fledglings flutter into parking lots to pile up in confusion beneath lamps (6).  There they die of exhaustion, exposure, or are eaten by predators.  Some attracted by outdoor swimming pool lights turn away from the sea and tumble into concrete pools where they are trapped.  Or instead of scrambling toward water and a chance at life, they angle off toward abandoned beach fires where they crawl into the flames and die of their burns (7).  Or following streetlights, they tumble into roads and are killed by passing cars.  In many instances where hatchling disorientation by light pollution occurs, a hundred or more baby turtles may die.  And if, indeed, baby turtles imprint upon their birthplace for future reference, then the disruptive effects of bad lighting, even when hatchling are rescued and taken out to the sea, could prove disadvantageous to future generations.

Disorientation resulting from bad lighting doesn’t happen just to turtles.  In 1954, workers on the ground at Warner Robbins Air Force Base in Georgia discovered the bodies of tens of thousands of night-migrating birds that had flown straight down the shaft of a guide light into the ground (8).  In 1981, around ten thousand birds died when they tangled with the Ontario Hydros Lennox Generating Station’s floodlit smokestacks (9).  In 1998, Lapland longspur larks migrating at night across Kansas hit lighted radio transmission towers.  The body count in this instance: five to ten thousand birds (10).  Often, migratory birds become caught in this moth-to-a-candle trap because of bad weather, circling intrusive lights until exhaustion claims their lives (11).

Birds, turtles, and many other animals and insects depend upon cues of natural light to make important decisions the way we humans depend upon honesty and good judgement to make choices that work to our advantage. The celestial positioning of moon and stars; reflections of the same off bodies of water or off the leafy canopy of an ancient forest; slickrock on canyon rims mirroring moon- and starlight; silhouettes of mountains, dark and corrugated against the horizon’s shimmer: for animals, these all “read,” marking out through air or overland well-worn trails essential to their species’ survival.

Some states have passed lighting ordinances to reduce amounts of destructive and distracting glare in public places and on private property, but ignorant of how light pollution interferes with ancient thoroughfares animals and insects have used for generations, many people continue to culture light in inefficient gardens everywhere they live.  Closer and louder than heavenly lights, these weedy beams crowd out native stars and shout down entire constellations.  For nocturnal insects and animals, the volume at which we broadcast electric light after sunset is comparable to our human neighbors for a block around turning up televisions, car stereos, and high-tech home stereo systems to a mind-boggling blast.  In this way we render incoherent this gorgeous energy that some of our own origin stories deem an organizing power.

We might think of the problems light pollution causes other species as being an unfortunate trick of circumstance our dominant presence plays upon the “lesser orders’” abilities to cope with our technologies.  True tricksters use irony or higher understanding to set right a bad situation, teach a lesson, or restore balance.  Light pollution, on the other hand, is nothing more than a careless but compelling lie.  And so almost offhandedly we lead astray the genetic futures of many species of life—even trickster Turtle, carrying within her out of the sea guruwari, the resonant turtle past and vibrant turtle future.

Old wives’ tales hold that lies come back in some way on the liar that made them, since lies, even careless ones, set into motion series of events that break free of the liar’s control.  One thing we know: careless lies become the hunting ground of irony, enabling the great tricksters with their insatiable appetites to break out of the dance of balance and harmony and set out once more on the prowl.