I'll admit that I laughed when I first saw this, but according to the author, light pollution represents a real and deadly threat to nocturnal moth populations everywhere.

Environmentalists aren't the only ones irked by Earth's increasingly luminaphobic tendancies. Astronomers, too, are worried that the darker regions of the sky will no longer be visible to the naked eye, while conservationists reflect upon the amount of fossil fuels used to power urban lighting.

Being a life-long city-dweller, a constant post-dusk glow is a fact of life. While I'd prefer utter blackness (compare this to this), I can't say metropolitan lighting bothers me that much. Of more concern (not so much for any environmental reason as for the sake of efficiency) are the increasingly glitzy inner-city advertising billboards - from giant LCD displays to random bursts of flame - which threaten to overtake the skyline in a Vegas-comes-to-Melbourne kind of way. This doesn't seem to bother the bats, though, which continue to swoop and screech ever-louder over my rooftop. Everyone has to complain about something though, don't they?