Latest / Sunlight Matters / Lightspiracy: The Hidden Politics of Modern Lighting with Anna Levin

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Lightspiracy: The Hidden Politics of Modern Lighting with Anna Levin · Sunlight Matters

• 0:00
  Anna Levin: I don't think the ban on incandescent lighting has sol saved energy.
• 0:03
  Anna Levin: I don't think it's contributed to the fight against climate change.
• 0:07
  Anna Levin: And I think it's caused an awful amount of damage hugely to people's lives who can't tolerate the alternative lighting.
• 0:15
  Anna Levin: And at the time of the ban, petitions in Britain from every party promised people with loopers, autistic people, and a whole different groups of people that were really struggling with some of the new forms of lighting, that there would always be incandescent lighting available.
• 0:27
  Anna Levin: Those promises haven't been kept, and that came from every side of the political spectrum.
• 0:31
  Anna Levin: It's not socially acceptable to say, well, you know, might we actually re-examine that ban?
• 0:37
  Anna Levin: There's still no mechanism for somebody to go to the doctor or go to the chemist and say, I actually need this light.
• 0:43
  Anna Levin: So once, you know, once we can't get them online anymore, I don't know how people are going to light their homes, and I don't know how people are going to live their lives.
• 0:50
  Anna Levin: We need to look at light in the context of what we now know about the environment, about, you know, like pollution and the incredible impact that's having, and every, you know, every aspect of human psychology and physiology.
• 1:05
  Anna Levin: And then we need to say what light is best for what circumstances, and how can we best make that when we look at the total environmental impact.
• 1:17
  Speaker: Welcome to Sunlight Matters, the podcast that reconnects us with the sun.
• 1:21
  Speaker: Join us as we explore the power and influence of our star, the force at the heart of everything.
• 1:27
  Speaker: Each episode, we speak with leading experts to uncover the ways sunlight shapes our world.
• 1:34
  Dave Wallace: Anna, welcome to Sunlight Matters.
• 1:37
  Dave Wallace: Uh, I'm really, really thrilled to have this conversation with you.
• 1:42
  Dave Wallace: Uh in a moment, I'd love you to kind of give a brief introduction to yourself.
• 1:48
  Dave Wallace: But uh I spent Christmas reading your book, Incandescent, uh, and was so taken by it that I thought I should have a chat with you.
• 1:57
  Dave Wallace: So um, you know, it's a brilliant book, and here am I sat with this.
• 2:02
  Dave Wallace: You'd be pleased to see.
• 2:04
  Dave Wallace: And so I just wondered, could you just give an introduction to yourself?
• 2:09
  Dave Wallace: And then you, you know, I'm I'm really keen to talk about the book and uh some of the observations that you've made.
• 2:18
  Anna Levin: Sure, yes.
• 2:18
  Anna Levin: Well, I'm a freelance journalist and editor, and was working mostly in environmental journalism and especially wildlife and natural history journalism.
• 2:28
  Anna Levin: And then this strange story of light um crashed into my life, and suddenly I was working on European legislation and physics and all sorts of subjects that felt way out of my depth.
• 2:41
  Anna Levin: Um, and at first I felt you know very audacious, and I thought I can't write about this stuff.
• 2:47
  Anna Levin: But then I came to realise, well, actually, you know, the changes of light affect everyone, and we are all recipients of light, you know, whatever we know or understand about it.
• 2:56
  Anna Levin: So um I just started asking questions, and the more questions I asked, the more I realized how little the people knew that were making decisions.
• 3:05
  Anna Levin: Um, and that's how incandescent came about, really.
• 3:10
  Dave Wallace: Well, I I mean it's it's great, and I mean we'll we'll delve into the light spiracy, as I I think I'm gonna call it in a bit, but um the the book's a very personal one though, because it was sort of your own experiences with lighting that kind of sparked all of this, wasn't it?
• 3:28
  Anna Levin: It was, yeah.
• 3:28
  Anna Levin: And I didn't um as I say, I didn't set out to be a light writer if that's the thing.
• 3:34
  Anna Levin: Um I it's light collided with my life, and I began began to learn more about it.
• 3:41
  Anna Levin: So I felt that all I could do was to chart that journey.
• 3:44
  Anna Levin: Um, you know, I'm not writing as a light scientist or a light expert.
• 3:49
  Anna Levin: I'm writing as a normal person that's been really affected by light and especially by the changes in light and learning more about other people.
• 3:57
  Anna Levin: So all I could really do was write my own story and see if that resonated.
• 4:02
  Anna Levin: And I found that it did.
• 4:03
  Anna Levin: And it felt like it, I think when I when I realized this may be a book rather than just a blog or a rant or something, I keep talking about, I sort of saw that it went out in concentric circles.
• 4:15
  Anna Levin: There was me and my little life in Falkirk, sort of flinching from the street lights and the lights in other people's houses.
• 4:21
  Anna Levin: And then I started, you know, blogging and connecting online and realized there were people all over the world struggling with the new forms of lighting and having way more severe problems than I was with it.
• 4:33
  Anna Levin: And I started to, you know, realize that there was a job in advocacy here to speak for people that couldn't speak from selves, especially people that are digitally excluded and can't actually take part in the digital world because of their light sensitivity and their problems with screens.
• 4:48
  Anna Levin: Um and I was involved in setting up the charity lighterware and started to realize the extent of the problem of a lot of people that were socially excluded and couldn't participate in that discussion.
• 5:01
  Anna Levin: But then I realised it was bigger than that, you know, it was it was affecting the whole built environment, it was and it was affecting everybody's um minds and bodies and souls and retinas and you know whether or not you described yourself as life-sensitive.
• 5:15
  Anna Levin: And then it was quite late in the research, kind of ironically, for someone who's been involved in um you know wildlife and environmental journalism for 20 years, 25 years, it took me a while to actually realise the extent to which this was an environmental story and actually the damage that we're doing to the natural world and to every aspect, you know, from a tree to a bat to an insect to birds, everything is affected by light, and everything is being really damaged by too much light and the wrong light at the wrong time.
• 5:47
  Anna Levin: And so it got bigger and bigger from my little life to other people to a big, a big story of politics and ideology as well, that's not you know not told enough, to realising this was about the natural world, this was about the deep sea, and this was about the sky.
• 5:59
  Anna Levin: And then it's actually, you know, it's about our relationship with with space and time and so it the cosmos, and it got bigger and bigger.
• 6:06
  Dave Wallace: It became about the and then it ended up with Bob Fosbury as well, so uh who we've interviewed on it.
• 6:12
  Dave Wallace: But I I I think you know, you've also written a book called Dark Skies, which is is a brilliant read as well.
• 6:20
  Dave Wallace: So you you know, my ADHD brain, which has struggled with reading, I have to say, uh, since this turned up, was able to kind of get through incandescent and dark skies because they're so well written.
• 6:33
  Dave Wallace: And it's well what what I I really think is is is fantastic is how you you just base it on your own experiences.
• 6:41
  Dave Wallace: As you say, you're the pebble which goes into the water and you then have all these concentric circles coming out.
• 6:47
  Dave Wallace: And uh, you know, it really I think got me certainly thinking about all of the things that you're kind of talking about.
• 6:56
  Dave Wallace: But I think, I mean, just as a starting point, what what when you first noticed problems with light, what were sort of some of the things that you were experiencing?
• 7:08
  Anna Levin: For me personally, um, the problems arose with um with the CFL light bulbs that the the like a c a fluorescent light bulb curled into a a bulb shape um that's that were uh one generation of of the so-called um low-energy lighting.
• 7:27
  Anna Levin: And most of my friends and the places I went, you know, adopted these very fast because we were told they were good and green and incandescent light bulbs were bad and inefficient.
• 7:38
  Anna Levin: And I started realizing that when I went to a friend's house when they had these bulbs, or when I went to worship, um, that I started feeling yeah, really ill.
• 7:48
  Anna Levin: I felt weird, just things I've never felt before, like my head was swelling up and I got dizzy and disorientated, and I couldn't speak properly, I couldn't process my thoughts properly.
• 8:01
  Anna Levin: And at first people said, I can't be the light bulb, you know, that's that's ridiculous.
• 8:05
  Anna Levin: That's just some sort of migraine or some sort of thing.
• 8:08
  Anna Levin: And I went to the doctor um and she said, you know, the the technology is moving faster than the medical research.
• 8:18
  Anna Levin: And what was interesting is she sent me to um Dundee University Hospital, where they had a whole department looking at problems with CFL lighting.
• 8:28
  Anna Levin: Um they were most they were focused on dermatology, and I wasn't actually having skin problems with it.
• 8:34
  Anna Levin: But I thought, I thought at the time, gosh, there's all these, you know, doctors and medics and specialists looking at the problems of this lighting.
• 8:44
  Anna Levin: But we we should have done this research first before these things came onto the market and before we banned the alternatives.
• 8:51
  Anna Levin: Um, so it that that alerted me, I think, to the fact that, okay, this is this is a bigger thing than me.
• 8:57
  Anna Levin: Um and that's when I started asking questions.
• 9:00
  Anna Levin: We asked questions of the doctor that they couldn't answer, I asked questions at the hospital that they couldn't answer.
• 9:06
  Anna Levin: And I realized that, you know, there were physicists that were working on the light, and there were medics that were working on the human bodies, whether that was, you know, neurologists or dermatologists or psychologists, because they were also having a profound effect on people's mood and well-being.
• 9:21
  Anna Levin: Um, but they didn't, nobody seemed to be joining the dots.
• 9:24
  Anna Levin: And the people making the regulations about light and making decisions, you know, what do we ban and what do we keep?
• 9:30
  Anna Levin: They were lumping lights in with kettles and toasters as just an appliance.
• 9:34
  Anna Levin: You know, they weren't dealing with the any aspect of the physiology, and and it didn't, nobody seemed to be seeing the whole picture.
• 9:41
  Anna Levin: And I realized this was because we, you know, we drastically um underestimate light and the power of light and the effect of light on every aspect of life.
• 9:52
  Anna Levin: Um, and people say to me quite no buttons.
• 9:56
  Dave Wallace: I I mean it it's really interesting, isn't it?
• 9:59
  Dave Wallace: Because, you know, I I I think back because I can remember those curly bulbs, I remember, you know, the that sense of, oh yeah, incandescents are terrible, this is low energy, these alternatives are low energy.
• 10:13
  Dave Wallace: But you know, like like you, I mean, I don't think I I I felt had such a kind of big reaction to you.
• 10:22
  Dave Wallace: Well, some of the people you talk, I mean, some people get very sick under light, you know.
• 10:26
  Dave Wallace: So but I I I know for myself that certain lights just I'm I mean, I can't tolerate them, you know, I have to turn them off.
• 10:35
  Dave Wallace: So and I know like in my family, I'm more sensitive than other members of the family, which is but you know, that that whole sense of light being overlooked, you know, when you actually I mean you can kind of understand why it might have happened because like we're not plants, why would we why why would we ha have any kind of interaction with light?
• 10:59
  Dave Wallace: And then then you sort of abstract yourself, stand back, look at the big picture and go, well, of course we're impacted by light because we spent most of our our evolution under light and light conditions, and you know, of course we had this incredible relationship with light.
• 11:20
  Dave Wallace: So the the fact that kind of modern modern ways of thinking kind of has sort of taken that and said, well, it doesn't really matter, is actually quite a big puzzle, isn't it?
• 11:32
  Anna Levin: It is a huge and it's a huge part of the puzzle that I think people when they when we think about health and well-being, you know, we tend to think about exercise and sleep and stress levels, diet relentlessly, you know, and amount of fluids you're taking.
• 11:44
  Anna Levin: And light hasn't been enough.
• 11:46
  Anna Levin: I think it's coming now, and people there is a bit more awareness.
• 11:49
  Anna Levin: But actually the need, you know, the need for daylight, the need for sunlight, um, and so it's like the positive effects of light as well as the you know the negative effects of of some other forms of lighting that um that affect everyone.
• 12:04
  Anna Levin: You know, people say, Oh, yeah, what is this weird condition you've got?
• 12:07
  Anna Levin: And and you know, is is it contagious and is it hereditary?
• 12:11
  Anna Levin: And and I say, well, you know, um I I don't have a condition, I'm just a bit more sensitive to light uh and to certain aspects of light.
• 12:20
  Anna Levin: And that's that's one of the things that makes it so complicated, is that um you know there isn't a thing called light sensitivity.
• 12:27
  Anna Levin: You know, some people um are very much affected by flicker more than others.
• 12:32
  Anna Levin: Some people are affected by the glare, some people are affected by the intensity.
• 12:35
  Anna Levin: Um, some people, as I say, have have skin problems and quite severe um you know dermatology issues from where you know light interacts.
• 12:42
  Anna Levin: Because light interacts with every bit of us.
• 12:44
  Anna Levin: It's not it's not one and it's not one thing.
• 12:48
  Anna Levin: And I think um, as I say, on that on the journey to incandescent, you I did take myself off um and have some physics lessons for complete beginners with a um a Cambridge physicist.
• 13:01
  Anna Levin: And um and yeah, I bought pints and he get went right back to basics because I I hadn't even done the basics at school.
• 13:09
  Anna Levin: And the I think the two most important things I learnt um A was that it's complicated.
• 13:17
  Anna Levin: You know, light is a multifaceted mystery, really, so we cannot reduce it to lumens per watt.
• 13:23
  Anna Levin: We can't, any measurement that you take, you're missing something else out.
• 13:27
  Anna Levin: So you've got to really, if you're making regulations about light, you've got to be really aware about um who you know what you're measuring and what you're not measuring and who that impacts, because um, you know, lumens per watt is a pure purely human concept, but the light that we put into our towns and cities and gardens, that's affecting you know every tree, every plant, every insect, every bat, you know, um what kind of light and what aspects of light are the most have the most impact on them?
• 13:58
  Anna Levin: And it's you know it's going to vary a lot.
• 14:00
  Anna Levin: So we can't take one measurement and say that's light.
• 14:03
  Anna Levin: Um and the other thing I learned that really surprised me is that you know it it is a mystery right up to that Cambridge University physics level.
• 14:13
  Anna Levin: You know, there is only so much we understand about light, and that um and that this was the complete mind boggle of my life.
• 14:20
  Anna Levin: He said to me that you know what the way we talk about light is metaphors.
• 14:24
  Anna Levin: You know, we're using metaphors, all this stuff about, you know, whether waves and particles.
• 14:29
  Anna Levin: It's not either, it's that they're just wet metaphors to help us think about it and the way it behaves.
• 14:34
  Anna Levin: And that was like, up till that moment, I thought, you know, scientists knew stuff and they had the facts, and righty arti people like me did the metaphors.
• 14:44
  Anna Levin: Um and then I realized, you know, there it we are just all trying to find ways of understanding.
• 14:51
  Anna Levin: Um and so you've got this really complicated, mysterious phenomena that we're still learning about, and you know, sort of the recent revelations.
• 15:00
  Anna Levin: Um, you realize, you know, what else don't we know?
• 15:03
  Anna Levin: What don't we know about it?
• 15:06
  Anna Levin: And then you've got bodies, which are in, you know, and minds and human beings and life forms, which are incredibly complex, multifaceted things as well.
• 15:15
  Anna Levin: So you know the interactions between those two are so um so complicated and so amazing and so underestimated when you you cannot regulate like like you re regulate a toaster.
• 15:30
  Dave Wallace: Um I mean, and it's it's so true, isn't it?
• 15:34
  Dave Wallace: Like, and it's all so intricate.
• 15:36
  Dave Wallace: Like you, you know, I guess it's what one of the things that is incredible is actually that intricacy.
• 15:43
  Dave Wallace: We can't even, as you say, we haven't got the words, we haven't even got the the paradigm within physics or biology to really kind of uh be able to kind of fully comprehend all of this stuff.
• 15:56
  Dave Wallace: But you know, life from its earliest beginning was having to deal with light changes in light, you know.
• 16:03
  Dave Wallace: So I think it's Luca, which was the first life form, it had to deal with light and darkness, basically.
• 16:10
  Dave Wallace: And you know, so our relationship is so kind of built into us, it's such an amazing thing that we haven't stepped back and gone, oh my god, what we what are we doing?
• 16:23
  Anna Levin: You know, and it's been the one it's been the one constant through evolution.
• 16:27
  Anna Levin: Yeah, we've got this changing climate, we've got changing land masses, we've got, you know, changing seasons.
• 16:33
  Anna Levin: But you know, light and dark has been the constant that that's been the beat that everything on earth, all life on earth has, you know, has evolved to live with.
• 16:42
  Anna Levin: And um, and you know it's in very, very short space of time that we've utterly messed with that.
• 16:48
  Anna Levin: And we don't really understand the consequences, but we've also utterly underestimated that.
• 16:53
  Anna Levin: We sort of think, oh, we've got electric light now, we don't need to worry about that stuff, we don't need to worry about dark and light, and and then we're finding, oh, actually, actually we do.
• 17:02
  Anna Levin: You know, this is this is really fundamental.
• 17:04
  Anna Levin: And I think people, you know, there's been a lot of talk on on body clocks and circadian rhythms in recent years, but I think people still think of that as just being about sleeping and waking, and they don't think about how you know every system in your body is is circadian and trained, and it affects your blood sugar and it affects your cell and you affects your immune system, and and it affects your mood and your you know your your psychology and your capacity in all sorts of ways.
• 17:32
  Anna Levin: And when we start to, you know, work with light that works for us, you can I think it's you know really important when we're talking about the problems of light and the technical term shite lights I use for a wide range of what we currently have to encounter.
• 17:47
  Dave Wallace: I've got a shite light here, so we'll uh we'll do an unboxing of this because I bought it thinking it was a nice light, but it's a shite.
• 17:55
  Anna Levin: I think we should I think we should have a sort of awards for the shite light of the um but yeah, I think it's also really important to you know talk about the positive effects of you know of good light and of sunlight and of natural light um and of darkness because you know every time that we're talking about light, we're also talking about darkness.
• 18:16
  Anna Levin: And you and every time we talk about darkness, we're talking about light, and the whole issue is the balance between the two.
• 18:21
  Anna Levin: And I think we're um yeah, the book's dark skies, it's about celebrating darkness, but on the the beauty of the light that's in the sky, the natural light, um, and you know, we've got the stars, we've got the moon, we've got the you know, views of the Milky Way, we've got the aurora, we've got an amazing amount of light going on up there.
• 18:43
  Anna Levin: So sometimes I think dark skies is a bit of a misnomer, um, because you know, those are all part of being human as well, you know, our relationship to light and dark, but it's also our relationship to the night sky.
• 18:54
  Anna Levin: And that's been setting humans dreaming and wondering.
• 18:58
  Anna Levin: And, you know, we've built myths and stories around that night sky as long as we've been human.
• 19:04
  Anna Levin: And if you've got generations now growing up in cities that have never seen the night sky, you've got to think about how that's actually affecting them.
• 19:11
  Anna Levin: Some psychologists talk about an awe deficit, you know, this lack of the wonder and the wow.
• 19:17
  Anna Levin: That maybe we actually need to contemplate something that's bigger than ourselves.
• 19:24
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• 19:31
  Dave Wallace: You can also search Sunlight Matters on Google to find more episodes, guest information, and further insights about sunlight analysis, solar exposure, and the way light shapes our spaces.
• 19:45
  Dave Wallace: But I I think this is you know one of the things I've ri really started thinking about is I think light and darkness becomes a way of understanding how disconnected we are from our origins and nature itself.
• 20:01
  Dave Wallace: And I think, you know, one of the reasons I'm so passionate about the whole topic of sunlight is you know, getting out into sunlight probably means getting out into nature, appreciating you know, this awesome thing, which um, you know, as long as you're sensible, fills you with vitality, and uh and you you know, it it's opened my eyes, reopened my eyes to th you know.
• 20:30
  Dave Wallace: So I I think I was telling you before about kind of I saw some research on green light, and you know, sitting on sitting under a tree is an analgesic, you know, the green light of a of a hot summer's day.
• 20:43
  Dave Wallace: And who doesn't love to sit under a tree on a hot summer's day and feel the coolness of the but it turns out that that that feeling is a real thing.
• 20:51
  Dave Wallace: I mean, it's like I went to Nice on holiday and was sort of found myself eventually a little spot on the beach.
• 21:00
  Dave Wallace: You know, there was thousands of people on the and I was like, why do humans feel so this need to get in the sun and down by the sea?
• 21:10
  Dave Wallace: And it's like if you really think about it, why do we because it's very crowded, I mean, but there we all were enjoying ourselves, and it's because of the sun and the sea.
• 21:20
  Dave Wallace: And it's like if we listen to ourselves, I think we'd know what we've got to kind of do.
• 21:26
  Dave Wallace: And what what I love about what you did is you you listened to yourself and then went, oh, there is something wrong, and then you kind of went on this voyage of investigation and and then wrote about it.
• 21:38
  Dave Wallace: And I think it's a it's a fantastic thing that you kind of gave yourself permission to go, well, this is really odd, you know.
• 21:45
  Dave Wallace: Whereas I think a lot of us we just sort of spend our lives going, I feel crack, I feel, you know, under par, and not really kind of delving into the hows and whys, you know.
• 21:57
  Dave Wallace: And I think if you give yourself permission around, Light bulbs, then you, as you say, you start thinking about darkness.
• 22:04
  Dave Wallace: So I crave darkness as well.
• 22:06
  Dave Wallace: And I was like, that's kind of a weird thing, isn't it?
• 22:09
  Dave Wallace: Because surely we live in a society where we all want more light, don't we?
• 22:15
  Anna Levin: I think, yeah, I think we're as a society, we're bizarrely tolerant of shite lights.
• 22:22
  Anna Levin: You know, I think if you went, if you went into a cafe that had a bad smell, you probably wouldn't stay, you know, or if there was a really, really annoying annoying noise, or that you'd think of my staying for a meal here, you you might leave.
• 22:36
  Anna Levin: But very few people would leave because the light's awful, even if they don't like it.
• 22:40
  Anna Levin: And I think, you know, in workplaces, so many people say, Oh, I get a headache at work.
• 22:44
  Anna Levin: And they think that's just something they have to tolerate.
• 22:47
  Anna Levin: Um, and you shouldn't have to tolerate it.
• 22:50
  Anna Levin: You know, you shouldn't be affected by the environment that it causes you pain or causes you irritation or just makes you feel icky, you know, just that really uncomfortable feeling.
• 23:00
  Anna Levin: And I think, you know, people say, Oh, wouldn't it be great if you know we had something on our phones that you know some people can't, you know, do use their phones to measure aspects of light, or some gadget that you could say, what you know, what's going on here, what's the flicker, what's the glare.
• 23:13
  Anna Levin: But I always think, well, we we do have this amazing um gadget that's you know been in nature's research and development for millions of years.
• 23:24
  Anna Levin: You know, that's our own body and mind.
• 23:26
  Anna Levin: And if we actually listen to it, you know, you know when the light isn't right.
• 23:29
  Anna Levin: And you also know when it is.
• 23:31
  Anna Levin: You know, when you go into a restaurant or and there's little lights and there's candles on the table, and you just get that, oh, this is nice.
• 23:37
  Anna Levin: You know, if you go into someone's house, sometimes you walk in, you say, oh, this is this feels good.
• 23:42
  Anna Levin: And I think we need to listen to those more.
• 23:45
  Anna Levin: You know, there's issues for people that are, you know, so light sensitive that we call, you know, we use the phrase light disabled and actually not able to participate in society and not able to, you know, use public transport, get to the doctor, go to a dentist, do all you know, have education, all these things are becoming um inaccessible to people that are struggling with, especially with the bright LED lighting.
• 24:09
  Anna Levin: Um, but the so there's you know there's profound human rights issues for people for people who can't tolerate LED lighting, but there's also profound um everyone issues for just not feeling great in a in a work environment, in a school environment, in a in a in even in your own home, because a lot of people aren't light literate enough to have a clue what all the numbers on the light bulb boxes mean, or what it's you know, what it's all about, because there's so many changes and measures.
• 24:37
  Anna Levin: Um and just being more um alert to if your body or mind tells you this this light isn't good, that is what that is what you need to know.
• 24:48
  Anna Levin: And I think you know what's coming out now with some of the really interesting science from people that have been on your podcast before, is that things that we know experientially, you know, sitting under a tree feels good.
• 24:59
  Anna Levin: You know, there's science coming out that's actually explaining why.
• 25:02
  Anna Levin: Um which backs you up, but we kind of know it knew it already.
• 25:07
  Anna Levin: You know, we just have to listen to that.
• 25:11
  Dave Wallace: I I I I I absolutely I absolutely I mean I think it is a real lesson, and we probably all know what, or many of us know what's going on.
• 25:20
  Dave Wallace: We just have to kind of shut out some of the modern voices around us.
• 25:24
  Dave Wallace: So but I I I'm I'm one of the things in your book, sort of touching on the light spiracy stuff, which is fascinating, is just how quickly incandescents were kind of vilified.
• 25:37
  Dave Wallace: You know, uh how you know, this wasn't just in you know, sort of certain countries.
• 25:43
  Dave Wallace: I mean, it's a global phenomenon that we've moved to this sort of low energy thing.
• 25:48
  Dave Wallace: I think in some countries you can be arrested if you have incandescent bulbs and things.
• 25:53
  Dave Wallace: I mean, it it's not quite that bad here, but I think you know, in the US they're going to be fully outlawed very soon.
• 25:59
  Dave Wallace: In the UK, you I mean nobody can make them anymore, can they?
• 26:03
  Dave Wallace: So the manufacture of incandescence has gone out the wind.
• 26:07
  Dave Wallace: I and you you know, I mean, I deal a lot with the water industry, and that's in the UK is in a terrible state, and basically it's in a terrible state because you start following the money and you see that you, you know, lots of people have made a lot of money out of uh the situation with it.
• 26:24
  Dave Wallace: I couldn't quite see the money training the the light side of things in quite the same way.
• 26:30
  Dave Wallace: So how did this whole thing, the how did it happen?
• 26:35
  Dave Wallace: I mean, it it's sort of it it's it's a quite an odd thing, isn't it?
• 26:40
  Anna Levin: It it is a bizarre story, and sometimes I still think, you know, how has this happened in my lifetime?
• 26:46
  Anna Levin: Um it's it went round the world very, very fast, the ban on incandescent lighting.
• 26:53
  Anna Levin: And I think people you're partly with good intentions, it was driven a lot by Green Movement, you know, desperate to do something about the reality of climate change and to get our emissions down by getting our electricity use down, they looked at one measure.
• 27:09
  Anna Levin: Um, and when the whole concept of you know energy efficient lighting or low energy lighting looks at you know the amount of light that comes out of a light bulb at the point where you switch it on and the amount of energy that it takes to run that.
• 27:27
  Anna Levin: It doesn't look at the materials, it doesn't look at the manufacturing, it doesn't look at the transportation, it doesn't look at the recycling or you know, the processing after the use of that bulb.
• 27:38
  Anna Levin: And it doesn't look at the quality of the light, it doesn't look at any, there was no um, you know, environmental risk assessment, there was no human health risk assessment, um, and there was no understanding of you know the effect of that quality of light on human life or the environment.
• 27:57
  Anna Levin: So we took one tiny measure and made global regulation about that, um, which seems incredible.
• 28:06
  Anna Levin: And even at the time, you know, there was leading dermatologists and ophthalmologists warning against this and talking about incandescent as biologically harmonious lighting.
• 28:17
  Anna Levin: Um, and this was, you know, even before LEDs, this was you know, banning them so that everyone had to change to CFLs, which contained mercury, which you know had another environmental impact.
• 28:28
  Anna Levin: That wasn't taken into consideration.
• 28:31
  Anna Levin: But what happened was was a um a power tool of language that was really used.
• 28:39
  Anna Levin: You know, if every time you say the word incandescent, you say inefficient, you get this inefficient, incandescent, inefficient, incandescent.
• 28:45
  Anna Levin: And when you hear the words incandescent, you think, oh, they're inefficient.
• 28:48
  Anna Levin: And they talked about um, you know, incandescent light bulbs going extinct as if this was some natural process, but actually it was a political decision.
• 28:57
  Anna Levin: Um and the weird thing happened with consensus, really.
• 29:02
  Anna Levin: I think it was, you know, it was about psychology as much as about business and money that um this was accepted and this became the consensus.
• 29:11
  Anna Levin: And it was sort of one thing you could do.
• 29:13
  Anna Levin: It was you could change your light bulbs.
• 29:15
  Anna Levin: You know, everyone's you know, rightly desperate to do something about the really dire predicament that the world is in.
• 29:21
  Anna Levin: And that felt like, oh good, I can change my light bulbs, I'm doing something good.
• 29:24
  Anna Levin: Um, so that became good.
• 29:26
  Anna Levin: Incandescent light bulbs became bad.
• 29:29
  Anna Levin: And, you know, at the time Greenpeace in in Germany actually sort of drove a um, you know, smashed like 10,000 light incandescent light bulbs, saying they're so dangerously inefficient that it's better to smash them than use them.
• 29:43
  Anna Levin: It's like it became as if um you know the CO2 was coming directly from these light bulbs.
• 29:49
  Anna Levin: Like that was a dangerous product in itself.
• 29:51
  Anna Levin: And actually it was quite an innocuous product compared to what we've replaced it with in terms of the materials and the processes.
• 29:58
  Anna Levin: Um and a lighting designer at the time, Howard Branston in in the States, he did a big study and he felt found that you know the same amount of energy could have been saved by dimmer switches, and of course putting the lights off, you know, because a lot of the energy use around lighting depends on how you use it.
• 30:17
  Anna Levin: Um so actually using less could use less energy, and we've gone the opposite way.
• 30:21
  Anna Levin: We've we've got you know we've gone to LED light bulbs, which we are told are good and cheap, so we've put them everywhere.
• 30:28
  Anna Levin: You know, we've we've got a lot more light than we had.
• 30:30
  Anna Levin: So consensus became I I had this weird sense when I was working on the book, and when I was talking to people, um, you know, and I work in environmental journalism, and most of my friends are pretty green, and everyone, you know, I got a really weird reaction from people when I started challenging this consensus on light bulbs, because my previous book had been about otters, and I felt like when I talked about otters or dolphins and whales, I'm very interested in marine mammals and the the health of the watery environment, you know, like yourself, people would, you know, lean forward and you could see the sparkle in the eyes and they'd be all engaged.
• 31:07
  Anna Levin: And when I talked about light bulbs, you'd get this repulsion.
• 31:11
  Anna Levin: Um and people really didn't want to know.
• 31:14
  Anna Levin: And I realized it was quite affronting because they'd change their light bulbs and they'd been good and green.
• 31:19
  Anna Levin: And if you if you unpick that, you're really threatening someone's sense of of what they're doing.
• 31:25
  Anna Levin: Um, but I think I realized it was something much deeper than that, um, which is that light bulbs had got tangled in ideology, and there was this sort of ideological veil, a bit like light pollution sort of separates us from the stars.
• 31:39
  Anna Levin: There was this ideology that had just blurred the conversation so people couldn't really see what you were talking about.
• 31:47
  Anna Levin: It was just that, you know, Donald Trump doesn't want incandescent light bulbs banned.
• 31:51
  Anna Levin: I don't want incandescent light bulbs banned.
• 31:54
  Anna Levin: Therefore, I'm uh in the same camp.
• 31:57
  Anna Levin: And and you didn't.
• 31:58
  Anna Levin: Yes, which you know, I'm not and and you know, a lot of the American right was against um banning light bulbs for the same reason they're against banning guns.
• 32:10
  Anna Levin: You know, it's not up for government to tell us what to do.
• 32:13
  Anna Levin: Um and it it became distorted.
• 32:16
  Anna Levin: And in in Britain, um, it was the Brexit um movement that was against the banks.
• 32:22
  Anna Levin: They didn't want Europe telling us what to do.
• 32:24
  Anna Levin: Brussels can't say what light bulbs they use.
• 32:26
  Anna Levin: And you know, a lot of people didn't like the CFL light bulbs because they were shite lights, you know, they um they cast a really ugly pallor and they took a while to light up and they made things look gloomy and deathly, and people didn't like them.
• 32:41
  Anna Levin: So people who didn't who wanted to not like them were, you know, didn't want to be told what to do to be said that they had to.
• 32:49
  Anna Levin: So it became a a a right wing, left wing sort of divide, and it became um, there's also people that were like climate change deniers that were saying, oh, you know, this isn't this isn't true.
• 33:01
  Anna Levin: So it it became tangled up with all these different ways of thinking and all these different ways of, you know, political um ideologies.
• 33:10
  Anna Levin: So when you started talking about it, you found people were taking sides, and suddenly I I seemed to have shifted to some other side, which I hadn't, because I was talking about light, I was talking about neurology, I was talking about physics, which doesn't care about any of these ideologies, but it got so tangled in it.
• 33:28
  Anna Levin: And I don't think that's gone away.
• 33:30
  Anna Levin: You know, I think incandescent lighting, there's a kind of taboo about it.
• 33:35
  Anna Levin: You know, there's a lot of talking about light, you know, there's a lot of conversations, and even the people that are really seeing some of the problems that we've brought in and some of the problems inherent in um fluorescent lighting and in LED lighting, there's still the consensus and the accepted thing to say is that oh, we need to make LEDs better and we keep needing to make LEDs better.
• 33:55
  Anna Levin: There isn't a conversation about actually, did we have pretty decent lights to start with?
• 34:00
  Anna Levin: And you know, could we change our behaviour so that we use less um electricity, use less energy for them?
• 34:06
  Anna Levin: And can we look at how we make the energy, not how we use it, because that's actually the climate change causer.
• 34:14
  Anna Levin: Um so there was a lot of protests, I can't actually remember if it was um Iceland, I think it was, but where you know most of the energy was was made from renewable sources, excuse me.
• 34:29
  Anna Levin: And and they were saying, well, the the calculations of you know however million tons of CO2 used by light bulbs, it it's not the light bulbs that are making the CO2, it's actually the source of energy.
• 34:42
  Anna Levin: So the conversation had got so why do we have to?
• 34:45
  Anna Levin: So I think we need to we need to start again.
• 34:48
  Anna Levin: We need to look at light in the context of what we now know about the environment, about you know, like pollution and the incredible impact that's having, and every, you know, every aspect of human psychology and physiology, and then we need to say what light is best for what circumstances, and how can we best make that when we look at the total environmental impact, when we look at you know the manufacturing and the recycling and everything involved.
• 35:18
  Anna Levin: And then, you know, we may well find if we actually put those questions and look at those metrics that we're better off with what we had.
• 35:28
  Anna Levin: And but nobody's saying that because it's like it's a taboo word.
• 35:33
  Dave Wallace: But I mean you're but I I I think it's I I think your analysis is totally spot on.
• 35:39
  Dave Wallace: I mean, one just picking up on one thing you said is you know, we've moved to low energy, but then we've got vastly more lights now than we ever had before.
• 35:48
  Dave Wallace: I mean, yeah, I was just as you were talking, I was thinking about that dome thing in Las Vegas.
• 35:53
  Dave Wallace: I mean, that that must have so many LEDs that you know that the the the light from that, you know, I mean, it it's beyond kind of imagination in terms of of that.
• 36:08
  Dave Wallace: But I mean, that's what we've done is we've kind of built these things.
• 36:10
  Dave Wallace: We've got screens, we've got all of this stuff everywhere which didn't exist before.
• 36:15
  Anna Levin: And the and the ban was all about using energy.
• 36:18
  Anna Levin: So it's like I remember just even walking down the street in Edinburgh that Christmas thinking, hang on, we've banned incandescent light bulbs, which you know I might want to use in a little bedside light to read a bit before I go to bed.
• 36:30
  Anna Levin: But there's no restrictions on energy using to light half the city with like, you know, 20,000 LED, or isn't it pretty Christmas lights?
• 36:38
  Anna Levin: And it's like that it doesn't actually make sense.
• 36:40
  Anna Levin: Um, you know, and also you know, we banned incandescent light bulbs for the crime of making heat, but there's no there's no legal restrictions on how we can wildly overheat, you know, our houses or our schools or our hospitals.
• 36:52
  Anna Levin: So we're using energy for all of that.
• 36:54
  Anna Levin: So the the actual um you know thinking behind the ban doesn't actually make a lot of sense.
• 37:03
  Dave Wallace: But it's being corrupted.
• 37:05
  Dave Wallace: I I think you're right though, in terms of taking a much more holistic view at all of this.
• 37:10
  Dave Wallace: Because, you know, I was looking at GE, have done a nice little video on, you know, the difference between old bulbs and I was looking at, and it's like the say talks about the savings and how long term they are.
• 37:22
  Dave Wallace: You know, but then I was thinking about the conversation I had with Glenn Jeffrey about you know the the metabolic impact of kind of modern lighting and not getting outside in the sun a lot.
• 37:35
  Dave Wallace: You know, the cost of that, I mean, the human cost is massive, but if you wrap around the human cost, the environmental costs of people being long-term ill and the medication, and you know, so if you kind of start thinking about it in the biggest picture way, you go, well, actually, you know, for the sake of manufacturing a few of these, because he, you know, what he's saying is like you just need a couple of uh incandescent bulbs around to give you that a bit of a boost, and you you know, his advice is obviously get outside at least 20 to 30 minutes every day.
• 38:12
  Dave Wallace: Um but that needs to be part of the story, and I I I sort of I think light bulbs are a bit like recycling, you know.
• 38:21
  Dave Wallace: So if you dig into recycling, you discover that you know that's a bit bit of a that we're doing our bit for the environment.
• 38:29
  Dave Wallace: I kind of like feel like light bulbs have given us all a bit of control over something, but you know, that's been sold to us by I whatever, the politicians, the green movement, which you know, and I'm I I absolutely believe that we should be doing everything we can to kind of minimize our energy use.
• 38:57
  Dave Wallace: So I don't it's not said it, but there's lots of co-opting gone into all of this, and as you say, it's been turned into kind of like a massive marketing gimmick for you know saving the world.
• 39:11
  Dave Wallace: And I'm like, well, it's total BS actually.
• 39:13
  Anna Levin: If you kind of I think I got the sense that when people say to me, like, what's incandescent about, or um, you know, say, well, yeah, it's about like bulbs to some extent, but actually it's about consensus.
• 39:27
  Anna Levin: And that, you know, the story, most of all, um, is about I got this sense like consensus had a sort of texture, like a a sort of gloopy, sticky stuff, and you can't you punch a hole in it and it fills in, and it's and it's built.
• 39:44
  Anna Levin: You can actually have something that isn't true, but you build and build and build this consensus on it, so that actually if you take away the thing that it was built on, it doesn't move because the consensus is so um impenetrable.
• 39:57
  Anna Levin: And that's what I feel like the little boy in the Emperor's New Clothes sometimes saying, but um, but is it low energy?
• 40:04
  Anna Levin: But did it make sense?
• 40:05
  Anna Levin: Was a everyone seems to have accepted that.
• 40:09
  Anna Levin: And I think you know, because I am just a freelance writer, I'm not involved in any lighting industry, I'm not involved in any political party, I'm not, I I can say this this word incandescent.
• 40:21
  Anna Levin: Yeah, people people even that um you know a lot about light and talk a lot of sense, it seems to be it's not it's not socially acceptable to say, well, you know, might we actually re-examine that ban?
• 40:36
  Anna Levin: Um, and was that actually the right thing to do?
• 40:38
  Anna Levin: It's still how how can we get LED lighting as close as we can to the light that came out of those?
• 40:43
  Anna Levin: And how can we contor them?
• 40:44
  Anna Levin: How can we develop them?
• 40:46
  Anna Levin: Um, but that isn't part of the dialogue, and I think that is, you know, nothing to do with physics or manufacturing or human health.
• 40:57
  Anna Levin: That is because of this um, this weird taboo that we've put over something because it's too big a thing to say, you know, we really cocked up there.
• 41:06
  Anna Levin: That was a big mistake.
• 41:08
  Anna Levin: Um, and I don't think the ban on incandescent lighting has sol saved energy.
• 41:13
  Anna Levin: I don't think it's contributed to the fight against climate change, and I think it's caused an awful amount of damage.
• 41:20
  Anna Levin: I think it's caused damage hugely to people's lives who can't tolerate the alternative lighting.
• 41:27
  Anna Levin: And at the time of the ban, you know, politicians in Britain from every party promised people with loopers, people, autistic people, a whole different groups of people that were really struggling with some of the new forms of lighting, that there would always be incandescent lighting available.
• 41:41
  Anna Levin: That hasn't, those promises haven't been kept, and that came from every side of the political spectrum.
• 41:45
  Anna Levin: So it was acknowledged even then that some people would not be able to light their homes and live their lives without this lighting.
• 41:52
  Anna Levin: That's just a bit been forgotten.
• 41:55
  Anna Levin: You know, lighterware has ensured that it's been written into um European legislation that people need incandescent light bulbs, and that's now been brought into UK legislation, but there's still no mechanism for somebody to go to the doctor or go to the com chemist and say, I actually need this light.
• 42:14
  Anna Levin: So once, you know, once we can't get them online anymore, I don't know how people are going to light their homes, and I don't know how people are going to live their lives.
• 42:23
  Anna Levin: Um but yeah, nobody's saying, you know, what what did it achieve?
• 42:29
  Anna Levin: It's it's this sense that this is evolution and it's it's not, it's just technology racing ahead of research and understanding.
• 42:39
  Dave Wallace: Yeah, I mean it really is quite a metaphor for modern life, to be honest with you, I think.
• 42:43
  Dave Wallace: And it's more than a metaphor, obviously, but uh I mean you could apply that thinking to so much of what we're surrounded by in terms of you know, I I mean my favorite law is the law of unforeseen consequences, and you know, you really got to be careful about what you wish for.
• 43:01
  Dave Wallace: So, um well, listen, thank you so much.
• 43:03
  Dave Wallace: I mean, one thing I wanted to show you, just get your reaction, is I bought this as an incandescent bulb, and I think you'll see that that's clearly not an incandescent bulb.
• 43:14
  Anna Levin: It's not an incandescent ball.
• 43:14
  Anna Levin: No, it's pretending to be an incandescent bulb.
• 43:17
  Dave Wallace: It's pretending, which makes it I mean, I and to be clear, like incandescence, they are generating light from heat, and it that seems to be the kind of key thing.
• 43:32
  Dave Wallace: So it's broad spectrum light, whereas LEDs by definition is very narrow spectrum, and you know, even if LEDs they sort of start filling in all the gaps, they're not the way it produces light, you're still gonna have sort of bands missing, aren't you?
• 43:47
  Dave Wallace: And it could be the missing things which you know nobody knows could be the things which are really important.
• 43:54
  Anna Levin: So I think that's what's really coming out now, because there was a lot of concern about blue light and the effects of certain Wavelengths, but now we're we're look starting to understand the effects of what isn't there and the you know the emissions of of light.
• 44:08
  Anna Levin: So and it just comes back to this um you know this question of what what are we trying to achieve when when we're engineering and engineering and manufacturing and designing and trying still trying to reach towards this perfect light.
• 44:23
  Anna Levin: Um I think we possibly had it.
• 44:26
  Anna Levin: And actually an incandescent light used sparingly with a dimmer switch is not the um you know the environmental demon that it's been described as.
• 44:39
  Dave Wallace: No, no, no, I agree.
• 44:40
  Dave Wallace: I mean, and then there is also um you wrote this book as well, which is a great phone because that's the other thing is to, you know, make sure you get outside a lot.
• 44:55
  Dave Wallace: Um have a dog.
• 44:56
  Dave Wallace: Have a dog, that's the plan.
• 44:58
  Dave Wallace: Like dogs are very good.
• 45:00
  Dave Wallace: Absolutely.
• 45:00
  Dave Wallace: Um I think the the you know, I mean one thing I I've really, you know, going back to kind of noticing the difference about, you know, I've been like last year, as I was sort of getting my head around all of this stuff, I was getting up earlier and earlier with the dogs to get them out, and that just became the most fantastic time for me is that those few hours in the morning before everybody else is up, um out in the countryside.
• 45:30
  Dave Wallace: So, you know, getting outside I think is is kind of critical as well.
• 45:35
  Dave Wallace: So I love the fact that you've written about incandescence, about dark skies, but also about dogs as well, because I think if you kind of join all of those things together, you've kind of got a recipe for health.
• 45:49
  Anna Levin: Absolutely.
• 45:50
  Anna Levin: And actually, the first one of the first books I w worked on was a book about otters returning to UK waters with a fantastic wildlife photographer, Lori Campbell, who'd been documenting the otters coming back to his home river on the Tweed.
• 46:03
  Anna Levin: And they'd disappear.
• 46:04
  Anna Levin: He grew up there, had never seen otters because they'd disappeared.
• 46:07
  Anna Levin: Um, and people think, you know, they disappeared because they were hunted, but actually it was the pesticides that were um put on the crops that washed into the rivers and they built up in the food chain, and you know, we pretty much wiped out otters from most of Britain.
• 46:22
  Anna Levin: Um and then I went off and wrote this book about light bulbs, and I realized it's you know, to some extent it's the same story because it is those unforeseen consequences, and it's not looking at the big picture.
• 46:33
  Anna Levin: They put that stuff on the crops because they were looking at one yield of you know, one type of thing, and they weren't looking at the it's this you know, risk assessment, it's the it's the precautionary principle, it's it's looking at the total environmental impact of things.
• 46:49
  Anna Levin: Um, and and that had you know um incredible impacts on on every aspect of life in our rivers.
• 46:56
  Anna Levin: Um, but that wasn't what they no, but they weren't trying to um you know kill off the otters or all the other bits of the food chain before otters, but they didn't think it through.
• 47:07
  Anna Levin: And I think you know, we've done a similar thing with light.
• 47:10
  Anna Levin: We've you know, we've let the technology or the inventions of, oh yeah, we can fix this thing, but we actually cause an awful lot of trouble.
• 47:17
  Anna Levin: And I think, you know, in this era of energy efficient lighting, we've had a massive increase in light pollution.
• 47:24
  Anna Levin: And light pollution affects those rivers, you know, it affects the us as it affects every aspect of light on life on earth, because we think, oh well, light, these lights are good and they're cheap, therefore we can put them everywhere.
• 47:36
  Anna Levin: And it's a real headshift to think.
• 47:39
  Anna Levin: Light at night is pollution, you know, artificial light.
• 47:43
  Anna Levin: And if you have uh, you know, pretty lights by your pond, if you have outdoor lighting of your house, security, that you're actually polluting the environment.
• 47:52
  Anna Levin: And it's the kind of headshift that's made you know a single-use plastic bottle a lot more less socially acceptable, I think needs to come to light that you know, if you if you were at somebody's house and they left the tap on and walked through to another room, you'd be like, um, excuse me.
• 48:10
  Anna Levin: But if they leave a light on, that's totally normal.
• 48:13
  Anna Levin: But it's actually, you know, how how we use light and how we over light, that is the energy issue.
• 48:20
  Anna Levin: Um, and also, you know, light pollution is a vast amount of wasted light.
• 48:24
  Anna Levin: You know, we don't need to light our churches all night, we don't need to light our shops all night so people can, you know, look in.
• 48:31
  Anna Levin: We don't need to light the streets to the extent that we do.
• 48:33
  Anna Levin: And we certainly don't need to, you know, leave security light of that, you know, brightness on houses all night.
• 48:39
  Anna Levin: So when you walk around, um, I mean, I live in central Scotland, I look sort of across to Stirling, across the Central Plain, and you know, it is dazzlingly bright when I look from my house at night.
• 48:50
  Anna Levin: And you know, that that is the environmental crime.
• 48:54
  Anna Levin: You know, not a not an incandescent light bulb in my bedside lamp.
• 48:59
  Dave Wallace: Fantastic.
• 48:59
  Dave Wallace: Well, listen, thank you so much for joining me.
• 49:02
  Dave Wallace: It's been a really lovely conversation.
• 49:04
  Dave Wallace: Uh, and uh your book, I'll put some links to your books so people can buy them should they wish to read them, and I would highly, highly recommend that people do.
• 49:14
  Dave Wallace: Thank you.
• 49:15
  Dave Wallace: Thanks for listening to Sunlight Matters, brought to you by Shadow Man, where we explore how sunlight influences the way we build, design, and live each day.
• 49:25
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• 49:32
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• 49:45
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• 49:56
  Dave Wallace: We appreciate you being part of the conversation, and we'll see you next time, where you can keep exploring the world through the lens of light.