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.

Thankyou, thankyou – I’ll be here all week. Please do not try the veal.

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.

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.