Earth Hour at 8.30 p.m. on March 29:

Switch off lights to save planet earth

By Carol Aloysius

Come Saturday and the world will plunge into darkness for 60 minutes. This unusual phenomenon let me hasten to add, is not related to some alien or extra terrestrial force. Rather, it is distinctly earth based - a voluntary action triggered off by millions of earth loving men, women and children to save the further denigration of our planet in a symbolic gesture to honour the planet on which they live.

This is not the first time that so many people spanning over 7,000 cities in 152 countries with a digital reach of 200 million, have made this global gesture to preserve their planet.

This March will be the seventh year that the world’s largest body of humanity has come together to protect and save our rapidly shrinking environmental footprints. If truly committed to the cause, they will hopefully continue to push towards their goal of preventing the further eroding and denigration of our planet at least for the sake of our future generations, using the same Lights Out gesture to motivate humans everywhere.

Using this Lights Out concept to promote the importance of preserving our planet, is not something that was conceived haphazardly. It took a lot of research with the collaboration of scientists who were experts in this field.

It all started when the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) Australia became concerned about the increasing levels of toxicity in the earth’s atmosphere resulting from raised carbon dioxide. The chief culprit they found was over consumption of electricity both by domestic users and business organisations as well as by the industrial sector.

History

In 2004, armed with an impressive heap of scientific findings after their intensive research, WWF Australia met with a leading advertising agency to discuss ideas as to how they could engage the attention of Australians on the issue of climate change by showing them the adverse impacts that global warming had on every living thing that existed on this planet, which meant of course, people, animals, birds, insects, plants, seas, rivers, forests and oceans.

The idea of a large scale ‘switch off’ titled ‘The Big Flick’ was coined in 2006. The idea was ‘sold to the Australian officials, and received the blessings of Sydney’s Mayor Cover Moore. It was then that the first Earth Hour was officially launched on March 31, 2007. In October the same year, another leading city in a different country, San Francisco in USA, ran its own Lights Out program. Inspired by the success the events had in the two countries, other cities, towns and countries followed suit and soon the idea snowballed into something the world had never seen or expected.

In 2008, it was decided to make it an international event every March 29.

Int’l Day of Forests

To reinforce the significance of saving Mother Earth, another program with a similar goal was launched last year echoing similar goals and sentiments. Established by a resolution of the United Nations General Assembly on November 28 2012, International Day of Forests was launched and observed for the first time on March 21, 2013.

Both these special Days represented the desperate bid to save our planet as environmentalists became increasingly alarmed at its rapidly depleting forests. They revealed evidence of this fact when they showed how some of the biggest rain forests in the world as in the Amazon had shrunk by an unbelievable degree leaving indigenous populations who had made it their habitat, animals that freely roamed within them, flowering trees that thrived in the erstwhile luscious forests, thousands of birds, reptiles, insects, and other living species, endangered, fighting for survival.

The same tragedy is also taking place in our tiny island where due to unmitigated felling of trees, much of our forest cover has been lost, dwindling down to less than 20 percent and to shrink even more in the next 10 years, if the rape of our forests does not cease.

Singharaja, our biggest rainforest is already disappearing along with millions of the unique wildlife inhabiting it.

Earth Hour celebrations

Earth Hour meanwhile, continues to grab world attention as celebrities as well as royalty have begun joining in the observances. The Danish royal palaces Amalienborg Palace and Grasten palace for example, went dark during a recently held Earth Hour at the Queen’s command. To promote the earth friendly concept, participating countries have also carefully chosen sites and locations which are both unusual and crowd pulling.

In Kuala Lampur, Malaysia, one of the sites chosen was the world’s tallest twin towers, the Petronas Towers. In Egypt too lights went out on the Sphinx and the Great Pyramids of Giza for an hour during Earth Hour.

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Spiderman, Earth Hour 2014 Ambassador

Other sites to signal the switching off of non essential lights, shifted from temples, landmark sites, deserts, to temples and palaces. To give a few examples, they included: The Sydney Opera House, in Australia, Empire State Building, New York, USA, Sears Tower (now Willis Tower), Chicago, Table Mountain, Cape Town, South Africa, the Colosseum, Rome, Italy, Royal Castle, Stockholm, Sweden, London City Hall, and Wat Arun Temple, Bangkok.

This year, in a much looked forward to event, Earth Hour will be promoted by an unusual guest. He is none other than the motion picture superhero, Spiderman who has been persuaded to serve as an ambassador for the cause.

Images of the crimson clad superhero climbing walls, standing on high roofs and clinging perilously on thin wire as he jumps across high rise buildings rising several storeys to the skies, are already on the Earth Hour website for all to see.

Earth Hour in Sri Lanka?

So how has Sri Lanka marked this event, one may ask. In Sri Lanka Earth Hour celebrations began on a modest scale in 2010 with lights being switched off in just one building, that of the past Environment Minister. Today, events to mark this Hour, have expanded with several volunteers joining hands to switch off non essential lights, including hotels, businesses communities and environmentalists.

According to WWF Thailand, in Bangkok there was a decrease in electricity usage by 73.34 megawatts, which over one hour was equivalent to 41.6 tons of carbon dioxide.

The Philippine Electricity market Corp. noted that power consumption dropped by about 78.63 megawatts in Metro Manilla. Ontario, Canada, used approximately 900 megawatts less of electricity during Earth Hour.

In Dubai external lighting on several major city landmarks was switched off and street lighting in selected areas was dimmed. The electricity and Water authority reported savings of 100 megawatt hours of electricity. The best results were said to have been from Christchurch, New Zealand, with the city reporting a drop of 13 percent in electricity demand. Such positive response is not only inspiring, it is a powerful motivating factor. Reducing the carbon footprint on our planet requires concerted and sustained action. Everyone including students, academics, home makers, must get involved. Switching off lights that are not in use, or not using an electrical home aid when the same work can be done by manually must become a way of life, a habit.