Sat 29 Mar 2008
Yes, we turned our lights out.
Did you?
And we all went out and walked around the block. Maybe a third of the houses we passed had their lights out.
Maybe it was my imagination, but the stars seemed to shine a little brighter. The girls loved it… said it was like a campout.
We might do it next week too, just for fun.
March 30th, 2008 at 3:55 pm
Yep, the lights were out here too. And they actually stayed out for five hours; it’s a good thing I recently bought some new candles. M. was in Perth with his mom and they spent about 1.5 hrs playing Scrabble by candlelight.
March 30th, 2008 at 5:34 pm
Sadly I get the sense that a more than passing portion of the population will interpret this ‘gesture’ as their ‘contribution’ to our global concerns. The distinction between Earth Hour as a symbol of what needs to be done vs the reality that the vast lowing majority have no interest in changing their behaviour is mostly lost. I find it far more troubling to think that it is likely most people who participated will simply go back to being the avaricious jerks they’ve always been. What do you mean every hour has to be earth hour? Sigh.
March 30th, 2008 at 7:11 pm
Actually, the World Wildlife Fund already has a contingent plan to keep people interested. It’s called the Good Life, and it’s been set up to encourage Canadians to make conservation a lifestyle rather than a passing fad. You can check it out over at http://thegoodlife.wwf.ca/
Events like Earth Hour may occasionally be attended by fickle folks who won’t stick with it, but they’re organized by passionate people who will do their darndest to make sure that the world keeps paying attention.
March 31st, 2008 at 6:40 pm
I too think that we aught to do away with empty global gestures and attempts at enlightening the general public. Recycling, alternative energy, and better insulated home programmes will never work and should be discontinued immediately. They do not instantly solve all problems, so they should never be tried at all.
March 31st, 2008 at 10:47 pm
Way to distort the point of the comment maggie old boy. Attaching largely meaningless ‘feel good’ gestures that may or may not have any impact to ongoing and emminently sensible programs sure helps make your sarcastic rejoinder seem more valid. While all ten of us Eco-hippies give a hearty huzzah to the WWfs ‘Good Life’ (having been on top of this idea for a few decades at least) the other 5.99999 billion people will go on not giving a crap.
I was more concerned about the fact that the folks at the WWF didn’t include a sledgehammer with this message. It was all very much couched in warm fuzzy vagueness in the media allowing for the boneheaded reaction I suspect is very prevalent. If this was an attempt to ‘enlighten’ the public it was a pretty sad one.
Being naturally realistic I’m pretty convinced that the only ‘gesture’ that is going to have any useful effect is a near apocalypse. Our species reacts reasonably well to (which is to say, ‘in a concerted fashion’) imminent doom but very little else.
April 1st, 2008 at 9:31 am
That’s me, “Avoiding Repetition through Misunderstanding, since 1974”.
Thankyou, thankyou – I’ll be here all week. Please do not try the veal.
April 1st, 2008 at 2:26 pm
Grond, I think the term is “pessimistic”, not “realistic”. You’re esentially implying that nothing ever changes in human society without disaster sitting on our doorstep. You’re also implying that all of us who keep trying to encourage people through positive means are naiive and unrealistic. As a woman I’m pretty darn glad I was born into this generation, where I can vote and own a house and choose what I want to wear and what I want to do for a living. That was change that happened without a nuclear holocaust, and made things better for an awful lot of people around the world. I for one like to encourage that kind of positive change and hope for more, rather than look at all the horrible situations that still exist in the world and say, everything sucks and nothing will ever change, so why bother reaching out to anyone?
April 1st, 2008 at 3:36 pm
Oh, and just by the by, the bluebox program was considered by many to be a meaningless panacea when it was first introduced - so Magpie is not being totally facetious in including recycling in his list. It was widely thought that it would have no lasting beneficial effect on people’s daily habits. Instead, what it did was take recycling out of the fringes (i.e. Europeans, hippies, and the odd sensible rural dweller setting aside cans and newspapers on their trip to the dump), and make it a regular everyday habit for thousands (if not millions) of people throughout a large portion of North America. It also spawned green-waste programs, school trips to the recycling depot, and a whole host of things that otherwise might not have taken place.
April 1st, 2008 at 9:15 pm
Good for you!
April 2nd, 2008 at 3:59 pm
Oddly enough, nowhere in my criticism of how the ‘message portion’ of this Earth Hour was handled did I ever suggest that. ‘Everything sucks and will never change’. I did think that many of the people who participated were unfortunately more than likely to go back to normal behaviour actually thinking they’d contributed in a meaningful way by suffering the hardship of turning their lights out for an hour.
Back to the notion of recycling et al. None of these matters were conceived of as a feel good, play if your wanna, one day of the year bit of business. Governments were lobbied, studies were done and test centers were engaged. They were approached as serious and practical ways to reduce either landfill or energy use and then simply implemented in gradual steps. One of the reasons I really felt that this Earth Hour drive was conspicuously lacking was any sense of concrete achievement. Not one of the spokespersons I heard talked about how this type of behaviour could help in at least decent estimates (for example). I would have dearly liked to hear them lay it out plainly. X persons turning off X lights for X long would yield the equivalent of X cars off the road or a power plant shut down for X long. Instead it was all warm and fuzzy and ‘Kumbaya’ meaningless. Perhaps this is due to the fact that if they tried playing the numbers game the real ‘pessimists’ out there would happily hammer them on how much like spitting into the ocean this type of action is.
A nice gesture but now time to move on to achieveable goals. If we (reasonably)accept that Anthropogenic climate change is upon us then pretty well all the literature I’ve read (Tim Flannery, The Weather Makers; George Monbiot, Heat; Elizabeth Kolbert, Field Notes from a Catastrophe) talks about the need for *huge* changes that go well beyond these one shot actions that might help to assauge the latent guilt most westerners must share in how horribly we done at being stewards of our world. If that’s pessism than I humbly suggest realist and pessimist are concurrant terms in this situation.
April 3rd, 2008 at 10:44 am
On the recycling note: London ON was just told off by their local head of recycling guy because apparently most Londoner’s tend not to opt to use their recycle bins. The stat was something like a football stadium worth of recyclable products (I assume annually).