Tomorrow night is the 3rd annual Earth Hour, where those of us who advocate lower energy use can put our money where our mouths are and turn the lights out for one hour starting at 8:30 pm.
Buy some candles, read a book, go for a walk, spend some quality face time with someone… there are so many ways to spend a mere one hour that don’t involve the use of electricity.
Vote to save the planet with your light switch!
For more information, check out EarthHour.org
You can’t be serious. I thought as a group of university students, we could perhaps debunk the pointlessness of PR exercises that bloat “non-profits” like this.
While we “carry the burden” of turning off a fucking lightbulb or two, we still leave the furnace running, factories run their machines to manufacture our candles, and the hospitals still leave their life-support machines running. Moral of the story: our existence is bad for the environment, so maybe we should all kill ourselves.
Great website nonetheless!
love,
bladek
Hi Bladek!
First of all, thanks for your comment. I must, however, disagree in some point with your argument. I do agree that the excercise of turning the lights off for an hour won’t solve anything, and constitutes a purely awareness/media campaign. It is true that most systems that run on electricity will keep running. However, I don’t believe it intends to be any more than that. I believe that if it helps to raise the awareness in the role of energy and our responsible consumption, it will be achieving quite a bit already. Moreover, high levels of compliance to the campaign (seen in other parts of the world… definitely not Calgary), would also constitute a clear sign of the interest of citizenship to see changes in the way that consumption and energy efficiency is currently being performed. It can be a quite powerful image to see a city completely off at night (as observed in Hong Kong or Sidney).
In what it respects to Calgary, I don’t believe this will have an impact at all. We live in an environment that is apathetic enough not to notice anything relevant happening in the city. We can have less hopes for something happening in the rest of the world. I personally just think that it doesn’t really cost anything to do it while might have an impact in society (may be not in Calgary, but hopefully somewhere).
Once again, thanks for the comment and we are happy that you like the website!
Guillermo Guglietti