Earth Hour 28/03/09 20:30hrs

I think that by now many would have heard about “Earth Hour”, “Switch off your light” or “Vote earth”. What’s Earth hour?

I googled this and found that earth hour is actual an annual international event that asks households and businesses to turn off their non-essential lights and electrical appliances for one hour. And this takes place on the last Saturday of March. The intention is to create awareness on global climate change and the need for actions on the climate changes. This year Earth Hour is on 28 March 2009 20:30 hrs (local time).

I would like to share a bit of the history of the Earth Hour. It started on 2007 in Sydney. And 2.2million households and businesses supported the event by turning off the lights for an hour. And last year, it turned into a bigger event. 50 million people and global landmarks such as the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, Rome’s Colosseum, the Sydney Opera House and the Coca Cola billboard in Times Square switched off their lights during the Earth Hour. This year, they planned to take it global, with the goal of getting 1 billion people to join this event. They called this lights switching off action as the global vote.

I’m not environmentalist, but I do support this event. And I think that this is a good platform to remind us to conserver energy, take care of the environment and being responsible as a global citizen of planet earth.

Yes, I urged you to join in as well. But, I do not hope that you only switch off your non-essential lights and electrical appliances during the earth hour. Instead, why not turn it into a habit to always switch off non-essential lights? Plus, we can switch some of the lights to energy saving bulbs. With this you can have saving on energy and saving on money. Climate change is due to human’s habitual activities that deteriorate the balance of the Mother Nature. And by switching off the light once a year is definitely no good enough.

Being a global citizen of planet earth, we can start to vote earth by switch off your non essential lights and electronic appliances daily for a brighter future.

Fun note:
Last year one of the participating countries celebrated the end of the year’s earth hour with fireworks show. I just wonder why fireworks show is chosen to be the celebration method. The reason by to switch off the lights is to conserve the energy, as energy productions contributed to an enormous amount of carbon emission. And as soon as the earth hour ended, people put on a fireworks show that also creates a lot of carbon. Well, I do hope that this year, nations that supported this event will have a better, greener way to celebrate the success of the earth hour.