There's a long history of technological development eating in to who we were, turning us into different people. Before the advent of lamps and then electricity we pretty much lived and worked according to nature's clock. We've now thrown it away. We think of artificial light as being clean and enabling us to both produce more and to enjoy ourselves " after hours". Shining a light on something is seen as eradicating badness or discovering new knowledge.

We are polluting the planet and ourselves with just too much light. Circadian rhythms are out of whack. If you live in a big city your kids will only witness the wonder of the stars by watching a screen. They can't sit on a balcony or the back lawn and look up to contemplate the wonder of the universe and our place in it. Glare from city lights prevents us seeing what I think we're meant to see. We marvel at the developments in space technology and yet most of our kids don't get to really experience the sense of awe that a clear and starry night can give.

There's an International Dark Sky Reserve on the River Murray in South Australia. There should be more. Night and day is the natural order of things. We can't and don't want to go back to nothing but darkness in the night. But we can recognise the harm and modify our use of artificial light.

Driving through or near a city at night we see offices and shops with no one in them lit up. There's dubious advertising benefit in lighting your retail store to catch the eye of passing traffic at 3 in the morning. We can cut back. Aircraft obviously need tall buildings clearly identified. However we don't need every or indeed any office lights on if no one is there.

There's another impact. Migratory birds can be lured by and crash into the brightly lit buildings. In 2020 in Philadelphia, on one night, 1500 birds died that way. It's estimated that in the US somewhere between 100 million and a billion birds suffer the same fate. For what? Many other animals and insects are affected. Just because we like pretty lights. That city now has an initiative for all lights to go off between midnight and 6am during migratory seasons. Other cities have laws requiring lights to be covered and limited in their radiance. Their residents want to really see the dark sky.

Earth Day might have been a stunt but it's a good one. We should do this everyday.

Being one of the people who served in the Old Parliament House and moved up the hill to the new one means I've seen firsthand how lighting can mess with nature. The once prolific Bogong moth is now endangered. 'So what?' you might say. There were billions of them. They were an important food source for many native animals.

When the new Parliament House opened, the enormous building with so many windows and lights distracted the moths on their annual migration to the coast. The architects of the building hadn't accounted for the moths. They got in in their thousands through the air conditioning vents. You could smell them barbecuing on the lights in the Senate. One of Graham Richardson's better interjections was "Let the Bogongs be gone". You couldn't avoid seeing masses of the poor things four and five deep in the corners of the windows searching for darkness. Yes, that was a third of a century ago. But to see the Bogong moth count in the ACT go to just 34 in 2019 and a desultory five in 2021 is appalling. To be fair light distraction is not the main cause - it's probably drought - but ecosystems are extraordinarily fragile. We play with them at our peril.

When we talk of pollution we think of dirty factories and their waste or rubbish that socially irresponsible people discard. Pollution comes in many forms. Perhaps light pollution is the most insidious. Light is seen as a good thing. If we shoved you in a brightly lit room for days on end you might start to think differently. The restorative quality of a good sleep in a darkened room would seem bliss in comparison.

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Many in the environmental movement give their fellow travellers a very bad name. Violent activists and extremists do not a good look make. But there are very good people involved as well. Some will focus eventually on the fact that the reason we are chewing up so much in fossil fuels is our own greed for more and more products - many of which are in reality superfluous to our real needs.

Some things take a long time to fix. Others are easy, practical and have immediate benefit. Hopefully wise heads will see the value in just turning the bloody lights off.