12 replies to this topic

[DanMiller]

I was out today to buy wood off some friends from my local restraunt I go to.  Actually, the owners.  I live on top of a mountain where you see farm fields all over.  But driving out to where they live, you could see new houses going up all along the way which use to be farm land.  None of these farms were cooperate, all family farms.  Even if they had a large acrage.  

 

I understand people wanting to move away from the rat race.  Shoot, I am one of those people.  But I am staying on a farm, so I am not putting up new housing and causing more light polution.

 

I just found it sad in a way.  I do not begrudge anyone for doing this. But I see something I enjoy being taken away.  I am in bortle 4, I wonder how long this will last.

 

Dan

[ButterFly]

so I am not putting up new housing and causing more light polution.

Houses don't cause light pollution.  Lights pointed upward and to the side cause light pollution.  It may be a good time to try to get some lighting codes in place.  Just complaining doesn't solve anything.
 

[Couder]

Same all over the place, even in the Missouri Ozarks. you can still drive for miles without seeing a house on some roads. The little town we live in does not even have a stoplight, but it does have new places going up here and there.

[Jethro7]

Hello Dan,

This is happening all over. People are fleeing the deteriorating cities and suburbs and I can hardly blame them. I can certainly understand the reason alot farmers are selling out. When they are offered more money for their land than they could ever realize in farming it. I have access to my Bosses farm as a dark sky site and am pleased that he and a number of his neighbors have been buying up properties all around them to preserve the land. 

 

HAPPY SKIES AND KEEP LOOKING UP Jethro

[aatt]

Just be glad you did not grow up in Florida. Vast areas of swamp, woods, ranches and citrus groves have been largely obliterated at a mind boggling pace for so called “ development” and the skies have gone from pretty decent to awful. I, for one, intend to never move back as a result. Your scenario is pretty ubiquitous particularly with zoom workers moving to areas like Maine where they will destroy the last bastion of Bortle 1 skies on the east coast searching for and destroying the good life as they proliferate.

[ShaulaB]

A housing developer tried to get our county council to rezone an area from "rural/agricultural" to residential. The goal was to build 525 houses on about 100 acres of land. The area has family farms and horse operations up to 200 acres, and it is scenic. Our club has an observatory out there.

 

There was so much outcry from residents that the council voted down the rezoning. It is bad enough as it is. In the past decade, subdivisions of houses on tiny lots and apartment complexes have popped up like mushrooms near the rural-designated area. There are now traffic circles which the farmers and horse owners find hard to navigate with their equipment and livestock trailers.

 

With more residential housing, schools become overcrowded. Current roads will not be able to handle increased traffic from Mom and Dad both working to afford these new, and not cheap, houses.

[Old Speckled Hen]

A housing developer tried to get our county council to rezone an area from "rural/agricultural" to residential. The goal was to build 525 houses on about 100 acres of land. The area has family farms and horse operations up to 200 acres, and it is scenic. Our club has an observatory out there.

 

There was so much outcry from residents that the council voted down the rezoning. It is bad enough as it is. In the past decade, subdivisions of houses on tiny lots and apartment complexes have popped up like mushrooms near the rural-designated area. There are now traffic circles which the farmers and horse owners find hard to navigate with their equipment and livestock trailers.

 

With more residential housing, schools become overcrowded. Current roads will not be able to handle increased traffic from Mom and Dad both working to afford these new, and not cheap, houses.

All those issues you mention are occurring all over the western world just not the US.

 

It's a plan. I mean what right do you have to follow such an individualistic hobby/pastime when you can see all of that via the [free for now] internet. 

 

This is what you [we] are coming up against. Not to mention overpowered domestic lcd lighting.

[Old Speckled Hen]

Houses don't cause light pollution.  
 

Yes you are correct. It's what they bring that does.

Edited by Old Speckled Hen, 01 October 2023 - 08:46 AM.

[KI5CAW]

We have been struggling for years with a developer who wants to build 4000 houses in the East Mountains near Albuquerque....without any guarantee of water supply. Only the State Engineer's Office, which realizes that the water supply is over-allocated, stands in the way. Wells are drying up, farms are blowing away, yet some towns continue to build and expand. And while the houses themselves don't produce much LP, their exterior lighting certainly does.

[ShaulaB]

All those issues you mention are occurring all over the western world just not the US.

 

It's a plan. I mean what right do you have to follow such an individualistic hobby/pastime when you can see all of that via the [free for now] internet. 

 

This is what you [we] are coming up against. Not to mention overpowered domestic lcd lighting.

What's happening, at least here in the US, is that the cities and inner suburbs are no longer attractive to what is left of the middle class. Instead of building new, up-to-date housing in the city and its inner suburbs, people are fleeing to farther out, affordable for them, suburbs. Rural areas get turned into suburban rabbit warrens of houses crammed together. Parents have to spend hours each weekday driving to and from work. Their children don't get the attention and care previous generations had.

 

I hope you are being sarcastic asking what right we have to engage in a "selfish" individualistic hobby.

 

Ridiculous LCD lights on huge, high passenger vehicles don't help either.

[DanMiller]

I will admit that the hobby is a part of what makes me sad about this.  But sitting outside at night and just hearing the silence.  Being able to walk 100 yards and you can take a stroll through the woods.  Seeing horses and other animals in the fields. 

 

Running because you see a bear, snake, or other wild animal. lol

 

There is more to being out in farmland than just the darkness of the sky for our hobby.

 

Dan

[DanMiller]

You must be a really young guy..  

 

Paving over farmland and rural land development with suburban tract housing has been going on since the end of WW 2 in the late 1940s.  Cheap VA loans -only for new house construction - attracted millions and millions of familes with enough job income and savings for a down payment,  out of the big cities. Leaving the cities to the lowest economic 'classes' of immigrants and minorities, who couldn't get cheap loans for new or any renovation construction of cities.  Then the Fed Interstate system was built so they (white middle class) could drive back into the big cities for their jobs.

 

Every generation since of people who 'pay attention'  bemoans the paving over of the U.S.A. farmland and rural areas.  In the west, billions spent on water infrastructure turned rocks and cactus into more housing tracts.   And of course all those suburbs brought on the enormous increase in LP decade after decade.  As long as the pop. is 'encouraged to leave the cities, Economic slowdowns happen but only last a few years at most.  

 

I used to see M 33 naked eye where I've lived or 30 years.  Now I'm lucky to see M31 and a faint Milky Way compared to what it used to be.  And I'm still in a "rural' area."  Bortle 4 where ever you are now won't last long.  But talk to the guys living in upstate NY and part of New England which have been 'de-populating' as  those 'old people' die or move to the sun-belt as former industries are lost.  

Naaa, 63. But lived in cities and towns all my life. Sure, I have gone for rides in the country.  But, when you live there. I notice things I didn't before.

 

Opps, sorry. My birthday just happened. 64. ****, I am getting old. i can't even remember how bloody old I am.

 

Dan

Edited by DanMiller, 01 October 2023 - 10:19 PM.

[csa/montana]

Folks, this thread's responses is touching on off topic replies that have nothing to do with LP.  So let's remember which forum we are in.

 

Thanks