Earth Hour

Tonight we observed, or rather, tried to observe, Earth Hour. While the actual savings in energy are probably nil (certainly for us, probably in aggregate, too), I think it’s a meaningful exercise in reminding people how excruciatingly reliant we are on unsustainable energy.

First of all, we didn’t make it back to the apartment until after 8pm, so we opted to do an hour from 8:15 to 9:15. We didn’t unplug the fridge, and left a number of devices plugged in but off, including a TV with an annoying flashing light.

In the last week, we’ve starting using the air conditioning. (We can cope with an eighty-degree place, but the puppy doesn’t like it). I turned it off for the hour, so energy was used anyways to bring the temp back down afterwards. See, there’s some time shifting going on. For many individuals or locations that did turn off the power, use probably shifted to before or after the Earth Hour. For me, going off the grid means turning off my laptop and mobile, and disconnecting our modem and router. But my wife let her laptop on and just unplugged the power cable. Batteries don’t count, right? : - o

It was nice being in the dark for an hour, as I heard sounds I had never noticed emanating from the fridge, along the incessant clicking of my watch and the wall clock. A light was flipped on by accident for about a second; other than that we behaved best we could. We spent the majority of the hour playing a board game by candle light.

Maybe events like these, while only symbolic acts, have the potential to move us away from lip service to some sort of tangible action. How much more effort is needed to turn that symbolic action into serious activism and real transformative action?