Re: legislation regarding the light pollution

[Jan Hollan <jhollan@amper....muni.cz>]

Dear Herman,

there is nothing more in English yet than what's at
http://www.astro.cz/darksky -- the Ministry of Environment awaits the
official translation of the whole law (it has ordered it a month ago
already, so it should be hopefully finished soon).

I would prefer having more rules inside the law, but as we have started
very late with its LP amendment, we are happy to have at least the few
paragraphs there. If the collaboration with the Ministry would start one
year sooner, the main rules (as using just FS fixtures in future) could be
probably inside the law instead of being left to the implementing
regulations. 

Our effort brought nothing new yet compared to the Lombardian legislation,
apart from the very important fact, that light pollution is declared to be
among different kinds of pollution of the atmosphere in a fundamental
environmental law. This is the right way to go: we helped to start
protection of environment in this very serious respect. And
environmentalists, who have acquainted themselves with the issue already,
welcome this new and quite easy topic (I am an environmetalist as well,
after all). The dispute is not between astronomers and the general public
represented by the lighting industry, but between the public (with some
astronomers in forefront, because of historic reasons) and people
representing the current non-quality lighting practice.

For getting more stuff for advocating the anti-LP regulations, we actually
need more technical info from Lombardy. The problem is, I don't read
Italian, so studying such texts is not easy for me. I guess that some
Slovenian anti-LP activists might be fluent in Italian and perhaps chose
the texts which should be translated into Slovenian. They could help you
very much in preparing the Slovenian legislation -- and enable me to read
them much more easily. I am still quite fluent in Croatian (sigurno ne
pišem dobrom jekavčinom, ali razumem sve, kad ljudi negovore suviše brzo)
and I plan to learn Slovenian a bit a long time already, just I should
have a suitable motivation to stop postponing it.

cheers,
 jenik



On Thu, 21 Mar 2002, Herman Mikuz wrote:

> Dear Jan,
> News arrived that you succeed with national legislation regarding the
> light pollution. Congratulations to all of you!
> 
> I wonder if you can provide me a copy of law that passed the
> Czech parliament. Namely, our Ministry of Environment is also
> preparing similar act for Slovenia and it would be very helpful
> to check your law as a guideline.
> 
> Thank you in advance,
> 
> Best wishes,
>               Herman Mikuz
> 
> 
> ---------------------------------------------------------------
> UNIVERSITY OF LJUBLJANA
> Department of Physics,
> Astronomical Observatory
> Pot na Golovec 25,
> 1000 Ljubljana
> SLOVENIA
> http://www.fiz.uni-lj.si/astro/
> http://www.fiz.uni-lj.si/astro/comets/DSSi/index.html