In a press release, lighting artist Bentley Meeker, president of Bentley Meeker Lighting Staging, Inc., contends what we don’t understand about light is affecting our health.
He says: “LEDs and fluorescent are the same light from a spectral standpoint. Daylight and halogen (or incandescent) light are similar in spectral properties. And daylight and firelight are the kinds of light that we as a species have been exposed to for tens and even hundreds of thousands of years. We’re being forced to use light in which we have no evolutionary relationship. It’s the difference between sitting in your office and going outside.”
Meeker worries about the trend in modern lighting toward LED and fluorescent lights, arguing that policymakers are focusing too heavily on energy as the key lighting policy metric: “They’re looking at coal and fossil fuel consumption and reducing it through a watt per lumen efficiency ratio. But we’re not discussing the behavioral traits that happen in that light. If you lived in your office lighting, you’d be out more, consuming more, driving more, you’d probably be fatter and you’d have a resulting ‘phantom’ carbon footprint that would easily outweigh your watt per lumen savings on electricity.”
Meeker believes that people who advocate cheaper electricity do not realize what they are sacrificing: “The change is really the elimination of spectrum. White, high noon daylight has 2 billion colors, almost all of them latent to the eye but available to us as humans. Fluorescent and LED have very, very few, if any beyond what you see directly. We don’t connect to that light at all, which is why we hate those kinds of light so much. Show me one person who likes fluorescent. The narrative needs to be framed in terms of ‘good light’ (full spectrum) or ‘bad light’ (‘mono’ spectrum).”
He points out that light is ultimately a matter of the utmost importance to human beings. It can affect the way we think, live, and love. Meeker frames light in almost religious terms: “Our souls are light, so as such this is mostly affecting our souls. We connect to daylight because of all of the latent colors that are baked into the colors that you see. Hence full spectrum. Our soul would connect to that. With mono-spectrum light, we don’t connect to anything on a soulful level. This creates a void within us where our bodies can physiologically function in certain kinds of light but our souls can’t connect. I think, over the longer term, this represents a real healthcare issue for the general population. Just as I believe that fluorescent-lit offices have directly or indirectly caused a lot of our healthcare issues today, either as a direct result of the light itself, or as behavior changes (eating, drinking, sugar consumption, comfort food, etc.).”
