Protecting the Night, Empowering Our Communities: Announcing “Building the Darkway, Part I”
The Blue Ridge Parkway is globally celebrated for its breathtaking daytime vistas, drawing millions of visitors to our winding mountain roads every year. But half of the Parkway’s story happens after sunset.
As part of our ongoing engagement with the Blue Ridge Parkway Foundation’s Blue Ridge Rising program, we are thrilled to announce the official release of our new position paper: Building the Darkway, Part I: Dark Skies & Tourism Along the Blue Ridge Parkway.
Access the Full Position Paper (PDF) Here
Why Building The Darkway Matters for Our Gateway Communities
This isn’t just a technical manual for stargazers or a rigid set of environmental demands. Building the Darkway is a visionary, high-level blueprint designed specifically for the municipalities, local businesses, and residents who form the backbone of the Parkway corridor.
As tourism evolves, “astrotourism” (travel driven by the desire to see natural, light-pollution-free night skies) is booming. Our region sits on a perceived “goldmine” of natural darkness, but as urban sprawl expands, this valuable economic and ecological asset is slipping away.
This paper draws a line in the sand—or rather, a stake in the mountain soil. It explores how we can balance economic growth with common-sense nocturnal conservation. By implementing smart, targeted, and warm-colored outdoor lighting, our communities can:
- Boost local economies by attracting high-value, low-impact overnight tourists.
- Protect native Appalachian wildlife, from our famous “Blue Ghost” fireflies to migratory birds and salamanders.
- Save money and energy by eliminating wasted, poorly aimed light that shines directly into the sky.
A Call to Action for Virginia and North Carolina Leaders
If you live, work, or serve in government within the Parkway’s gateway counties, this paper was written for you. True paradigm shifts happen from the ground up, and we need municipal leaders, county commissioners, chambers of commerce, and local advocates to help guide this practical transition.
We are explicitly looking to spark civil discourse, collaborative policy changes, and progressive stewardship frameworks in the following counties:
- In Virginia: Augusta, Nelson, Rockbridge, Amherst, Botetourt, Bedford, Roanoke, Franklin, Floyd, Patrick, Carroll, and Grayson Counties.
- In North Carolina: Surry, Alleghany, Ashe, Watauga, Wilkes, Caldwell, Avery, Burke, McDowell, Mitchell, Yancey, Buncombe, Henderson, Transylvania, Haywood, Jackson, and Swain Counties.
Whether you want to protect the rural heritage of Floyd County, manage high-recreation headwaters in Watauga County, or balance urban-adjacent growth in the Roanoke Region, this paper provides regional models pressure-tested for your specific community’s needs.
Access the PDF Version of Building the Darkway, Part I
Mapping The Darkway
As a complement to this position paper, we’ve built an interactive map: Building The Darkway. It is important to be able to explore the area and highlight elements of the proceeding argument in a way that can be visualized for understanding.
In addition to mapping the adjacent counties as gateway communities, we have contextualized the counties (and the Blue Ridge Parkway) within all connected bioregions (USGS sub-basins) and Level III North American ecoregions. Another element of this project that is of importance to us is that a substantial portion of the Blue Ridge Parkway serves as a “boundary” of the Upper New River bioregion, along the Blue Ridge Escarpment and Eastern Continental Divide. As such, we find anything associated with the Blue Ridge Parkway to be of keen interest.
Open Access: Understanding Our Creative Commons License
We want this document to be used as a tool for public education, community town halls, and local policy debates. To ensure it is shared widely while maintaining the integrity of the work, we are releasing the paper under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs (CC BY-NC-ND) License.
Here is what that means in plain English for you, your organization, or your local government:
- Attribution (BY): You are free to download, share, and distribute this paper, but you must give appropriate credit to the authors and link back to our original work.
- NonCommercial (NC): You cannot use this paper, or any part of it, for commercial marketing purposes or sell it for profit.
- NoDerivatives (ND): If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you may not distribute the modified material publicly. We want the integrity of this collective regional framework to remain intact.
We encourage you to download the PDF, email it to your local representatives, share it with your neighborhood associations, and bring its concepts to your next planning board meeting.
Let’s work together to ensure the Blue Ridge region thrives by day—and stays beautifully, economically, and ecologically dark by night.
The Executive Summary of the position paper is included below for a detailed overview of each section’s findings and recommendations.
Executive Summary
Dark Skies and Responsible Outdoor Lighting
This position document introduces DarkSky International as the primary global authority combating light pollution and outlines its International Dark Sky Places (IDSP) certification programs. For the Blue Ridge Parkway and its adjacent regions, the most applicable tracks are International Dark Sky Parks (for public conservation lands) and International Dark Sky Communities (for adjacent towns enacting protective local lighting ordinances). To guide these local transitions, the document highlights the Five Principles for Responsible Outdoor Lighting, which require all outdoor light to be useful, targeted downwards, low-level, controlled with timers or motion sensors, and warm-colored to minimize atmospheric scattering and blue-light disruption.
The Blue Ridge Rising Project and Action Plan
The Blue Ridge Rising initiative is a regional project hosted by the Blue Ridge Parkway Foundation to unite 29 gateway communities and counties across Virginia and North Carolina. Backed by a $5.1 million Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) grant and over $4.2 million in matching funds, the project implements a shared Action Plan built upon six elements: Marketing, Visitor Experience, Advocacy, Resource Protection, Education, and Capacity. Within this regional framework, Blue Ridge Rising aims to protect dark skies by measuring sky quality, replacing non-compliant lighting fixtures on public lands, and supporting gateway communities in achieving official Dark Sky certification.
Mapping The Darkway and Wildlife Migration
The document introduces an interactive map (“Building The Darkway”) that integrates adjacent gateway counties within their broader connected ecoregions and bioregions, such as the Upper New River sub-basin. This geographical framework directly connects to The Nature Conservancy’s “Migrations in Motion” project, which models how species must travel northward and upward to survive changing global climates. The continuous, public land of the Appalachian Corridor serves as a continent-scale “climate superhighway” and a core refuge within the broader Eastern Wildway. Keeping this corridor wild and dark is essential to prevent urban sprawl from blocking the natural migrations of mammals, birds, and amphibians.
Perceiving and Navigating Roads: Relevant Ecologies
To understand animal movement, the document bridges road ecology (the environmental impacts of transportation networks) with sensory ecology (how animals perceive their surroundings). Every species occupies a unique biological sensory bubble known as an Umwelt and navigates its environment by interpreting natural communication signals—a field of study known as biosemiotics. When migratory species encounter the Blue Ridge Parkway, their sensory worlds face severe disruption from “sensory pollution”. This includes acoustic shuttering from engine noise, flat asphalt surfaces that trick insects into laying eggs on roads, and blinding high-beam headlights that temporarily wipe out nocturnal vision.
Ecological Consequences of Artificial Night Lighting (ALAN)
The document establishes critical distinctions between Artificial Light at Night (ALAN) and superfluous, wasted light. Light pollution acts as a pervasive ecological stressor that combines with habitat loss and climate change to create a destructive “combinatorial crucible” for wildlife. Applying the economic theory of the Jevons Paradox, the document demonstrates how increasing lighting efficiency historically rebounds into an exponential increase in total light pollution rather than energy savings. Using a “panarchy” systems framework, the document maps these compounding threats across terrestrial food webs (insect population declines), marine-land interfaces, and aerial migration corridors.
Regional Biospherical Impacts and Specific Appalachian Threats
On a regional scale, ALAN causes widespread biospherical damage, resulting in plant lifecycle disruptions (phenological shifts), pollination failures, wildlife disorientation, and altered predator-prey dynamics. The document identifies severe ecological threats to species unique to the Southern Appalachian and Upper New River bioregions. Species highly dependent on absolute natural darkness—such as the rare “Blue Ghost” firefly, native Appalachian salamanders, and aquatic hellbenders—face population instability due to encroaching human light domes.
Darkness: Ecological Crisis and Human Impact
The document frames the loss of natural darkness as a “Tragedy of the Commons,” where a shared public resource is degraded by unmanaged human intrusion. This crisis is driven by anthropocentrism—the culturally biased belief that human convenience exempts society from ecological limits. The paper chronicles how human nocturnal activities colonize the night, causing intrusive disruptions across twelve distinct sensory channels and fundamentally reorganizing vulnerable ecosystems.
Systems Literacy, Leverage Points, and Ecosemiotics
To reverse these trends, the document applies systems theory and Donella Meadows’ framework of “leverage points” to design effective conservation interventions. These range from shallow adjustments (modifying local lighting parameters and codes) to mid-level changes (improving informational flows) and deep paradigm shifts (reorganizing how human societies value darkness). By utilizing ecosemiotics—the tracking of ecosystem transitions through biological indicators—and integrating Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), communities can shift their mental models from viewing darkness as a commercial resource to viewing it as a shared kinship.
Commodification vs. Community Stewardship
The document offers an ecocentric critique of commercializing darkness strictly as a tourist commodity. Promoting unregulated “dark sky tourism” risks introducing destructive consumer behaviors into fragile mountain habitats. Instead, the document advocates for decommodifying the night sky through grassroots, sector-by-sector community stewardship. This includes instituting a strict “visitor contract” to govern tourist behavior, weaving nocturnal conservation into public education, and shifting local tourism economies from consumption to active biosphere protection.
Bioregional Stewardship Framework and Policy Models
A multi-scalar Bioregional Stewardship Framework is proposed for the Blue Ridge corridor, utilizing a “tri-lens implementation strategy” to establish a protective regional “stewardship overlay”. This model is pressure-tested across distinct pilot zones categorized by human impact tiers: Tier 1 Urban-Adjacent Hubs (Roanoke Region, VA), Tier 2 High-Recreation Headwaters (Watauga County, NC; Augusta County, VA; Swain County, NC), and Tier 3 Rural Agrarian Buffers (Floyd County, VA; Alleghany County, NC). To fund this transition, the document outlines concrete policy mechanisms, including green taxes, visitor user fees, redirected marketing budgets via “Chambers of Stewardship,” and a structured degrowth tracking system to actively engineer the reduction of regional light footprints.
Practical Synthesis: Getting to Darkness
The final section provides an operational case study focused on managing dark skies tourism within the Elkin-to-Doughton section of the Parkway. It outlines the logistical and financial realities of dark-sky event planning, covering environmental impact calculations, ambient traffic management protocols, and using urban light domes as educational tools. The paper presents a comprehensive rollout budget for a zero-emission Blue Ridge Parkway Electric Shuttle Experience Tour, addressing technical infrastructure hurdles like mobile vs. stationary EV charging, ticket pricing equity, and the expansion of regenerative camping educational programs. Ultimately, the paper provides prioritized recommendations for the Blue Ridge Rising action plan.