IAU Office for Astronomy Outreach’s Post

Transcript

This word, aboriginal, it's not, you know, it's not a traditional word. This is a once again like a colonial construct. It's a homogenizing word that sort of combines a group of 250 different aboriginal countries. So these are very diverse, distinct countries with distinct languages, which within 250 different languages has their own dialects and subgroups. So that's around 700 different dialects. So we are a very varied people and quite often when we're discussed, we're sort of combined into one group. But you should think about Aboriginal Australia much in the way that you would think about any other continent. For example, I give the example of countries like Italy and Germany. These are countries in Europe which are neighbouring countries, and yet we're quite familiar with the fact that they're foods, their culture, their language, their history, their people, their land. Is quite distinct from one another. And yet when we talk about Aboriginal Australia, we tend to use this term Aboriginal Australia and sort of smoosh us all together. But we're not. We are very, very diverse people and we should be approaching Indigenous knowledges with that understanding and respect for I guess country specific knowledge, knowledge that we deal with is related to place. When it comes to Aboriginal astronomy, especially for a culture that is the world's longest continuing cultures, so over 60,080 thousand, 100,000 plus years of continuous culture. All of our information and understanding has been transmitted in an oral format. And so when it comes to science, a way in which we can encode and transmit scientific knowledge for thousands of years but many generations and keep that knowledge intact is to use a number of different memory and information storing techniques. The one that's relevant to me to talk about today is how we can use story to encode science, and quite often this is taking a piece of scientific phenomena that we can observe. The skies and assigning A narrative to it, whether it be talking about a moon man and a sun woman, and the way those true characters interact in the story to describe the way those objects are moving or interacting in the night sky. And so this is a technique that we're very familiar with, even though, you know, often I feel sometimes some people have some apprehension to accepting this form of knowledge transmission. But it's just like any sort of Greek constellation story you may have heard. This is seeing an object or phenomenon in the sky. Deducing an understanding from what we're observing and the way that it connects with our environment, and then assigning A narrative story to it to help us remember it easier to help us be able to encode it in simpler or more complex formats so that we can convey that information to the appropriate person in our community, whether that be a knowledgeable person or simply just a child. We can adjust the complicatedness, or at least the depth of knowledge that we are giving across in this story. Also, we have to address this idea of interconnectedness. So when it comes to our knowledge systems, they are so intrinsically interrelated to one another. Whenever I'm talking about sky knowledge, people ask me to speak about astronomy. It can never just be about astronomy because our skies are constantly telling us about things that we need to understand in our environment. And so our sky is essentially start to become like our our library. Each star that we can see in the sky will be related to an area of say plant or animal knowledge, helping us predict or understand seasonality or weather predictions on a shorter time scale. It helps us encode our histories and our laws and our social values just by making this connection with this star in our observations and what it's telling us and assigning a story which can convey those moral values. So our skies then become our libraries. Because each of these stars are like our books and so as we hide these skies, we lose access to an very important resource for us which we have had access to for 10s of thousands of years. And this loss of access is happening quite rapidly and it's something that continues to increase with the fact that we are ever expanding. You know, cities are getting larger, more populated. We are lighting further out into the country. I know my regional town in Victoria, the skies that we see in the middle of my town now are very different from what I grew up with. And it's something that is getting worse every time I go back, go back home. And so it's important for us to talk about this issue because it's not just a cultural heritage issue in light pollution increasing and losing our access to the skies, which is. Super important for us, but also it is having a very significant harmful impact on the ecological health of our environment. So a lot of our native species are suffering very catastrophic consequences of light pollution, of artificial light being present in their environment. To give some context with the way that the skies can help inform our understanding of the environment, I'll just briefly touch on the the example of the e-mail in the sky. So the Emu on the Sky is a dark sky constellation that you actually find in the dark spaces of the Milky Way across the sky. And it's an very important shape and it is recognized by many Aboriginal countries as well as being recognized by other indigenous communities around the world. For my mob, Gomory, when we look for the e-mail on the sky, we recognize it as Govora guy and it's telling us a lot about what is happening to the e-mail on the ground. Throughout the year, which we know is the dinner one, and in particular, the one thing that it focuses on the most is this emu egg harvesting cycle. Because emu eggs are a very important food resource for us, and the position of the emu in the sky at sunset throughout the year is going to change. And the way that it changed acts as a calendar for us to understand the e-news behavior on the land and when we can be safe safely harvesting or collecting emu eggs and making sure that there is enough for that population to prosper. This is a, it's an oral tradition, a story that has so many layers of information encoded within it. So not going into full detail in this moment here, but it's something that informs us about seasonal change throughout the year. So what conditions we can expect in our climate, our access to water and its availability across the year, as well as helping communicate our social values once again as well with a firm focus on sustainable harvesting. So we need to be able to see these constellations to be able to understand a lot about our animal and plant cycles. There are so many more examples which I could speak about for hours, but that is not the point of today's chat. And so when it comes to light pollution, we are seeing an incredible increase in light pollution right across the country, as I've said, extending into rural areas. Light pollution comes in many forms, but ultimately it all sort of comes together in this effect that we call sky glow. So this light that we have all in our environment which isn't lit with purpose, which is sort of you know, excessively over lighting business buildings or you know having neighbours bright light spill into our yards or having you know St. lights which are not properly fitted and are sort of just spilling up. All of this light is also going up into our skies and so it is impacting our ability to see stars. But it's also very severely and unfortunately super effectively impacting our ability to see faint constellations. Features like Darksol constellations, those regions of those dark regions that we find in very faint, delicate features like the Milky Way. 80% of the world's population lives in a place where you cannot access these features in the sky, let alone you only see a few hundred stars instead of several thousand. So light pollution is a big problem. But The thing is, it seems like a lot of people just get very used to it in their. Environment. It gets very much normalized, to the point where if you live in a city for long enough, especially if you never venture out to the country, often it feels normal to only see a hundred stars in the sky. The reason that it's so concerning for us is not just losing access to our library above, but also for the impact that it's having on a lot of our native species. And there are so many examples I could give about this issue. But I do want to highlight one in particular that has been incredibly shocking for me, which is that of the mountain pygmy possum and the bogon moth. So the mountain pygmy possum is a very cool, very special species in Australia. It is one of Australia's, if not only hibernating marsupial. It is this gorgeous tiny little palm sized possum which at its maximum. It's around usually 80 grams. The thing is, it hibernates for seven months of the year, and in that time it loses half of its body mass, approximately 35 grams, when it emerges from its hibernating period. And so the issue is that when the mountain pygmy possum comes out of hibernation, it needs to eat a lot of food to be able to accumulate the mass it needs to be able to go for the rest of its its year. And then eventually hopping back into hibernation. Its main food food source is the bogon moth. Now the mountain we possum, only there's only like 3 sites in Australia that have this species anymore, only three populations. And the bogon moth is very sensitive to light cues in its environment. And so it's a migratory species that we rely upon to reenter the possums environment at the right times of year for it to feed on. And over the course of, I think about 2018, the Brogdon most population went down from billions down to just a few 100. This is a dramatic drop in availability of food for the mountain pygmy possum and it led to an incredibly horrifying very high percentage of. The mountain pygmy possums young, not surviving infancy. And sorry, this very beautiful, cool, unique species in Australia is now pretty critically endangered and is unfortunately. Sort of running out of options for survivability, there were campaigns trying to highlight to the local people about the impact of light pollution on the mountain, sorry on the bogon moths migratory pathway. And the campaign was made to try and just stop people from, you know, just turn off your lights to try and see if they can fix this issue. And unfortunately that campaign was ineffective. At present point in time there hasn't been an increase in the broken moths population size, the mountain pygmy possum. I know that there have been attempts to try and either reintroduce or introduce a new food source to dramatically change the possum cycle by forcing it to not go into hibernation and getting it used to warmer temperatures. And so these are very drastic solutions to an issue that could be relatively easily sold. Particularly when we look at trans disciplinary methods of collaboration and attacking this issue because it's an issue that impacts cultural heritage. As I've said, it impacts astronomers with their ability to access skies and take our observations. And also having this very harmful ecological impact, but it's also an area in which you can also benefit Astro tourism and the lighting industry for all of us to come together and to tackle this problem. And so I think this is very, very worrying, not only for us losing a lot of our very important species, but because this is happening to a lot of animals in Australia. For another example is that of the Tamar Wallaby, which is another animal which is unfortunately getting misled by lighting cues in its environment and birthing its young into a time of year where there isn't the available food for it to be able to prosper. So a lot of these animals are being harmed and as I said at the start of this, we have a very interconnected knowledge system. The skies above tell us about animal and. Client cycles and so much more that we have been able to develop over the course of 10s of thousands of years this understanding. And so what's happening is we're losing a lot of species. We are losing our access to the skies and also our interconnected knowledge system, which is so unique and so deadly unfortunately is also becoming out of sync and harmed by light pollution present in the environment. And so this paper was a very important for us to write because everybody deserves access to the skies and for a lot of cultures around the world. Particularly indigenous cultures, the skies are the backbone of our knowledge systems and so if we can't see our stars, we can't see our books, we can't access our knowledge.