But honestly, how pragmatic (I've found myself using that word a lot lately. Thanks, philosophy class) is earth hour? Earth Hour is supposed to be about saving the planet - isn't it? If we all turn off our lights for an hour - we'll save a bunch of electricity, thereby lessening climate change - for that hour. It sounds stupid even now as I type it. There are 8760 hours in a typical year - excluding leap years. So, earth hour cuts down on 1/8760th of our expended electricity usage. .. .. hypothetically. That doesn't sound like a whole lot.
But then (just now) I went to earth hour's official website: earthhour.org. Turns out, earth hour isn't really about shutting off power at all. So, despite what one Facebook friend of mine thought who complained this morning in her status update about the fact that our city had left its public unnecessary lights on, it's really not about the electricity at all - it's about raising awareness of climate change.
But, as one fictional character on House M.D. put it: wouldn't building houses for habitat be a more useful activity and a better way of raising awareness/fighting breast cancer than walking with pink ribbons on? Why not kill two birds with one stone? If earth hour is about raising awareness of climate change, it's not doing a very good job - besides that 1/8760th of our year. Once that hour - or night - is up, we all go back to our same habits anyways. Also ironic: all of us probably heard of earth hour on some electronic device - or from someone who did, am I right?
Here's a better idea than earth-hour: why doesn't the government give us all who live in a big enough city/town to have a transit system an all-day, one-day pass for public transit? We could use it any day of the year, and it would get all of us out of the houses without our cars, it would support the local economy, and hell, we'd all get a little more exercise just walking to bus stops - not to mention it'd help a lot of lower-income people out too.
Just a thought.
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