AN INITIATIVE TO PRESERVE OUR PRECIOUS SKIES
-A Public Health Initiative -
Who We Are
This webpage is representative of anyone willing to advocate for the first model DarkSky community in Appalachia!
The Ashe Dark Sky Coalition is a collaborative effort among local DarkSky International members and community advocates with public health guidance from the University of Lynchburg's School of Medicine and Health Sciences.
Our only mission is to help create the very first International DarkSky Community (IDSC) in all of Appalachia while educating the public about proper outdoor lighting design. Our motivation is to improve all five determinants of public health in Ashe County by helping people recognize what this dark corner of the state has to offer and to provide an internationally worthy sense of purpose through mitigating the inappropriate use of artificial light at night (ALAN) aka light pollution (LP). We began as a small group of volunteer advocates in 2025 and have set out to reach our objective by the year 2030. We hope you will join us in this pursuit to achieve a better outcome for our community!
"Light Pollution is defined as every form of artificial light in the wrong place at the wrong time which creates sky glow, glare, nuisance, and other relevant causes of environmental degradation including some properties of artificial light that emit non-environmentally friendly or inappropriate light (Falchi & Bará, 2023; Lyytimäki, 2015)."
Rodrigues, Á., & Loureiro, S. M. C. (2024). Exploring Community Self-efficacy to Light Pollution Mitigation in A Tourism Destination. Tourism Planning & Development, 21(6), 818-840. https://doi.org/10.1080/21568316.2024.2332243
Support The Coalition
We are not accepting donations at this time. Once we get past the feasibility study, we will begin collecting donations for our effort. For now you may send us a letter of support to ashedarksky@gmail.com.
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