When a river gets polluted people do not think strongly enough to change. Now, why is that and why we still should strive to do better?

Do you think we’ve been ground down sufficiently by corrupt wholly self interested politicians, so just feel resigned to something like this? When we’ve fucked our biosphere with CO2, a much more dangerous issue we’ve failed to solve?

Collective action can help, but at an industrial scale, a functioning democracy is necessary to mitigate the tragedy of the commons. A functioning democracy requires an empowered and informed voting population. Corruption from industry seeks to minimise both. People need to fight for stronger democratic institutions if they believe the priorities of the majority should come first. And I’m betting the majority want to look up and see real stars

Keep in mind that in this case, even a perfectly functioning democracy may not give you the result you expect: there are many of us here who would vote strongly for continued development of space industry and expansion into the solar system, even if would completely block Earth-based observations, because we believe developing Earth orbit is much more important than astronomy in general, and it also happens to be a necessary stepping stone to enabling affordable space-based observations, so we believe it'll ultimately benefit astronomy mid-to-long term.

> Keep in mind that in this case, even a perfectly functioning democracy may not give you the result you expect

I don't expect to fully know the will of the majority. If the majority think that clearer skies are great, and let's say that took a significant amount of finances to happen (not sure that it would), people might think that lower taxes are even better. Democratic government is just a vehicle for enforcing the interests of the majority, and I present it here as the potential avenue for reducing artificial Night Sky Brightness (in answer to GGP), with the premise that this is actually in the majority interest.