One by one, time zone by time zone, lights dimmed again Saturday night as has been customary for many years now.
For one full hour, households and establishments went dark as they participated in what is now known as Earth Hour.
It’s a symbolic act, designed to magnify the call to conserve energy, not only to bring down demand and use up available supply more slowly, thereby decreasing electricity bills.
It’s more than keeping costs down. It’s using up less energy and relying less on energy-producing methods that give off greenhouse gases that harm the atmosphere and warm the globe.
Climate change has been a buzzword for years now, but the connection between reversing its effects on the planet—melting polar ice caps, increasing ocean temperature, breeding more violent weather patterns more frequently—and mankind’s own hand has been weak.
Even now, and even after seeing such weather patterns bring loss and destruction to entire communities, people may appreciate Earth Hour only in terms of keeping up with the trend or mouthing the motherhood statement “saving the Earth.”
But who are we saving, really? Who will stand to lose the most? Who will be exposed to the greatest risks? Not Earth, per se, but we who live on it. It is us who need to be saved from the life-altering effects of damage and displacement. Our children and our children’s children who need to know they can inhabit a world where there is enough for everybody.
Saturday’s Earth Hour was our hour, because we stand to lose or gain with the only planet we have. Let us stop thinking this is but an annual event. By our own little acts, documented or not, we can have succeeding Earth hours that would achieve the same purpose and deliver the same message.
This is not about being fashionable. This is about knowing the risks we face and acknowledging that something can still be done.