Community perspectives

For residents of “the rock” — the affectionate name Niueans call the 261-square-kilometer (101-square-mile) coral slab they live on — marine and terrestrial sanctuaries are a familiar concept. Forty percent of the country’s 390,000-km2 (150,580-mi2) exclusive economic zone and 23% of its land are designated as protected areas.

But a sky sanctuary? “When we first started talking about it, everyone thought we were a little bit odd,” Bollen said. “They couldn’t quite come to terms with why we were so excited about this, because they just take this sky for granted, because it’s never been anything else.”

However, when the team shared images of less-starry skyscapes in cities like Auckland, “people began to appreciate that what they had was something special,” Richard Somerville-Ryan said.

The team trained a number of locals as “dark-sky ambassadors,” who can now operate telescopes for tourists and share knowledge about astronomy from both indigenous and western perspectives.

“The way-finders of Polynesia were famous for using the stars to navigate their routes between the islands,” Bollen said, “and the moon was used very specifically for planting.” Those practices have “fallen into the depths of history a little bit,” she said, “so it’s really nice that people are being reminded of how their forefathers used nature to get the best out of the country.”

It will be up to Niueans to decide how much of those stories and traditions they choose to share with curious tourists, Richard Somerville-Ryan said.

It will also be important to ensure that the need to keep light pollution at low levels doesn’t impinge on economic development, Bollen said. That’s been a key critique of other dark-sky conservation projects in the past. In her 2017 essay “The Trouble with Darkness: NASA’s Suomi Satellite Images of Earth at Night,” environmental historian Sara Pritchard warned against “neo-colonial approaches to the conservation of natural night-sky brightness” that, like many 20th-century approaches to biodiversity conservation, don’t make space for communities in more pristine areas to modernize as they see fit.

So far, the dark-sky nation status has entailed a relatively simple shift for Niue’s residents, which has been enabled through education, awareness, and access to softer-toned LED lights.

“Everyone is so proud of the fact that they’ve been able to achieve this,” Bollen said. “Just by changing the lightbulbs out under their veranda, they have contributed to making their country something very special.”