Lewes nightscape colors starting to change

At dusk the other evening, I walked out Savannah Road toward the cemetery and School Lane. The street lights had been on only a few minutes and I was thinking about how little traffic there was on the road. Then I noticed the color of the street lights overhead. What I really noticed was that one of the streetlights now had a bulb showing a cool, bluish light.  That light contrasted remarkably with the pinkish-orange light of the other sulfur lights lining Savannah Road.  My guess is that the sulfur lights are being replaced with more economical fluorescent style bulbs much as the bulbs in our homes and businesses are going that way.

The change in bulbs is going to change the night color of our towns.

In 2000, we made a trip to Cuba and I was immediately struck by the fact that all the bulbs in that cash-strapped nation were of the longer-lasting CFC (I think) variety and that it gave a ghostly quality to the misty night air.  The first night we were in the island nation a cool breeze was blowing out of the north carrying salty mist off the gulf into the streets of Varadero where we landed.

We can learn something from so-called Third-World nations. They have had no choice but to switch to the most efficient forms of energy and transportation.  There is no slack in their economies to allow them to stay with older, less-efficient options.

Necessity is truly the mother of invention. Until our government makes the cuts and reasonable tax increases necessary to get us back on a sustainable footing, and instead continues to dip into further debt to maintain old modalities, we won't truly feel the necessity that spawns new ways of doing things for successful life.

In the meantime though, we can watch the gradual change in colors of our nightscape and monitor the effect that has on our lives.  In Lewes, it can't help but mean lower electricity usage for lighting the streets at night.