And what do you do with five-hundred millions stars ? Assessment of darkness and the starry sky, values and integration in regional planning
Résumé
Environmental crises renew questions about the values associated with the “objects of nature”. Two specific emergent environmental goods illustrate these valuation difficulties: the night and the starry sky. The negative impacts of excess artificial light are now being studied by various disciplines, but the question of located values associated with the night sky and its stars remains current and overturns a paradigm: it is the darkness of certain territories that creates their value by a new consideration of the sociocultural (welfare, scientific heritage, landscape resource) and ecosystem (regulation and self-sustaining ecosystem, circadian cycle, etc.) services that they produce. Since the end of the first decade of the 2000s, initiatives of certification of dark-sky protected areas have been growing worldwide. They respond to an increasing concern about the problems of light pollution caused by the socioeconomic activities that place the night and the starry sky in the centre of new regional planning considerations. This chapter interrogates the valorisation process of the night and starry sky and the types of services they provide. We question how value is geographically produced, explore how this value relates to planning devices and examine how territories convert services into local resources and localised competitive advantages and thus create value from them.