Photo by: aussiegall
So, on March 29, 2008 the world held the second annual Earth Hour. Designed to encourage people to take action in terms of climate change, all we had to do was turn our lights off from 8 pm until 9 pm that evening.
So why was so much of downtown Montreal lit up!? People were even debating whether to watch the hockey game or not! (okay I confess I watched the game by candlelight!)
Considering I didn’t see my city go into too much darkness, I would be interested to find out if yours did! Much of the press has marked Earth Hour as a success, but I would like to know if this is just them taking an extremely positive spin on things or if the event was actually of any productive success.
Although I didn’t obviously see a great difference in the Montreal city skyline, apparently Canada as a country came out pretty high on the list of great particpants for the evening.
However, after all the fun and games of sitting in the dark for an hour has settled, how many of us are going to remember the reason we turned off the lights to begin with? Part of me wants to be very optimistic about Earth Hour (its an Aussie effort and I am an Aussie myself!), but I wonder whether or not those in charge of the event really put an image out there that will stick.
I do not know if it was entirely clear to everyone what Earth Hour really is about. The name and logo itself (see above), demonstrate that it is something global and associated with the number “60″, but not much else. Moreover, how did these images, and turning off the lights for an hour, persuade those who don’t believe that climate change is an issue, change their minds?
I have to give them credit though, raising awareness is the first step to changing habits and I think Earth Hour was a huge success from that standpoint. It got ridiculous media coverage and considering last year it was a Sydney only affair, the fact that it streched across the globe and stopped only at Vancouver is a pretty impressive feat.
Some also argue that Earth Hour was a symbolic protest, and in that sense too it was entirely successful. As long as it kept thinking about the Earth for days, weeks and months afterwards, I don’t really see how this is a protest that had much significance.
I did find, however, that personally, after my hour of candle-lit darkness I didn’t necessarily want to turn my light back on. And perhaps it is here that the success lies. It did make me stop and think and it did make me consider the fact that a life less of less consuming isn’t that hard to achieve, or that inconvenient.
So, did you turn the lights off?
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