At 8:30pm on March 23rd it will be Earth Hour, when people across the world will be turning out the lights. Earth Hour is a symbolic gesture to highlight the environmental challenges facing the world with actions springing from the international campaign.
The first Earth hour took place in 2007 in just one city: this year it will be marked in 135 countries. In recent years Earth Hour seems to be a mainly southern hemisphere event, with the central organisers in Australia. Last year 2.8 million people in Hong Kong turned the lights off, and the Fijian president addressed his nation challenging them to turn off the lights. However the northern hemisphere is catching on. Sweden launched the Earth City Challenge as part of the Earth Hour campaign, designed to celebrate greener and cleaner cities. And hotels and casinos worldwide have pledged to turn out the (non-essential) lights for an hour, offering candlelit dinners to guests in the mean time.
Earth Hour in the UK has celebrity ambassadors. This year in January the singer KT Tunstal switched OFF the Chrismas lights at the London Westfield shopping centre last year to mark the countdown to the event.
Another campaign which would like us to reduce our light is the Campaign for Dark Skies. The night sky is beautiful but it is so polluted with excess lighting we rarely get to enjoy it as previous generations have. Moreover, excess lighting has health implications (disturbed sleep patterns), environmental costs (in wasted energy) and increases crime (burglars see better with more lighting). As it says on the web-site,
“The light from the rest of the Universe takes hundreds, thousands or millions of years to reach our eyes. What a pity to lose it on the last millisecond of its journey!”
Image courtesy of xedos4 at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
