Earth Hour 2009

March 28 2009, 10:23am

Earth Hour is about using our light switch in voting for Earth, or Global Warming. From 8:30 PM until 9:30 PM local time (any place) on Saturday, 28th of March 2009, switching off your lights is a vote for Earth, while leaving them on is a vote for global warming. My family and I got ready for Earth Hour by having our dinner outside, in our front yard. That way, we were able to enjoy the ambiance of the lightless hour “outdoors”, and also created a sort of festive “party” mood (as described by our kiddo) for the event. At exactly 8:30 PM, our time (GMT +8), we switched off all our lights. Fumbling in the dark can be a safety risk, especially when you have a toddler, so we had a pair of candles on the makeshift dinner table. (Dinner by candlelight, while making a vote for Earth, wasn’t bad at all.) I noticed a lot of different reactions and opinions on Earth Hour. Here are a few that stand out:

“I vote Earth! I’d like future generations to have the same, if not better, world to live in.” “I’ll do it (switch off lights) if everyone will do it…” “This is just a gimmick to save electricity…” “What? Electricity will be cut-off for an hour?” “This is B.S.! I need to have light during this hour…”

For me, the whole point of the exercise is to raise awareness that what we do or don’t do, no matter how small, can definitely have an effect on our environment, and the future of our future generations. The people of the Earth can be united for something good, or bad; the choice is ours to make. IceRocket: voteearth, earthhour, philippines, manila