- A French parkour collective is using its talent to tackle light pollution.
- The group made a game out of trying to turn off shop lights in the middle of the night.
- Member Mathieu Brulard said the group wants to travel across Europe to turn off more street lights.
A Parkour collective in Rennes, France, is using its abilities to combat light pollution by making a game out of turning off street lights.
Wizzy Gang, a group of nine parkour athletes, was inspired by a video on YouTube of someone turning off a street light using a wooden stick, member Mathieu Brulard told Insider.
Brulard said the group joked about whether or not they would be able to shut off a street light without using anything. Lighted signs usually have small interrupter switches on the outside of stores that the group jumped to find and switch off.
After training in the summer of 2019, Brulard said they began turning off street lights in Rennes.
Months later they filmed what they were doing and in December 2020 decided to post a compilation of their efforts. The video accumulated close to 800,000 views on Instagram.
Light pollution is excessive artificial light – a form of waste energy that can disrupt or cause adverse effects on environmental quality. Rennes has a moderate level of light pollution, according to the crowd-sourced database Numbeo.
The Guardian reported that France introduced a law in 2013 that requires store owners to shut off their lights an hour after store employees leave, but said enforcement of the law is sporadic.
Before France instated lockdowns and curfews to curb the spread of COVID-19, Brulard said the group would turn off lights two to three times a week but were unable once curfews were set in place.
Brulard said he's been confronted by shop owners who want their lights kept on but said the group tries to explain why they do it to everyone they encounter.
Brulard said he hopes Wizzy Gang's work helps people understand the need to take care of the environment, adding that they explain to people they encounter that the lights disrupt both people's sleep and nocturnal animals. He said it doesn't make sense for the lights to stay on in the middle of the night, so turning them off saves energy and is " important for the next generation."
"When the Parkour training is done, the sun is down. So, it was at night in the city, we walk around and see different lights of lots of shops. And we say, 'oh, this one, this one', and we will turn off the light of this one and it was like a little game," Brulard said. "So it was pretty fun to make an, it was cool because the light pollution is a big problem here in the city and other cities. We want to show that making improvements to ecological things is pretty fun too."
Brulard said environmental and ecological issues are "real" and "can't be ignored," and he hopes to make people realize that.
"Now we want to make this project in different cities in Europe. So we can travel but with the pandemic, it's a little bit complicated," Brulard said.