Five years ago, a partnership project between the World Wildlife Fund and Australia’s largest newspaper, the Sydney Morning Herald, culminated in “Earth Hour,” in which over two million Australians turned off their lights and electricity for one hour.
Today, “Earth Hour” is a worldwide campaign, as businesses and residents turn off their non-essential electricity for one hour – 8:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. local time – to raise awareness of climate change and the need for our generation to do something about it. The CN Tower in Toronto, the Colisseum in Rome, the Golden Gate Bridge – these and other major icons will go dark for one hour. Last year, the New York State Capitol Building dimmed its lights in commemoration of Earth Hour; other businesses and organizations will do the same this year.
What does it all mean? Yeah, you turn your lights off for an hour, big deal. Get a flashlight, get a candle, yada yada.
But it’s not just that act of flicking a switch. Our world relies on so many non-renewable energy sources – coal and oil and the like – and, as the website for Earth Hour says, this action is all about giving people a voice and working together to create a better future for our planet.
Think about it – for one night, our planet will use less energy. Less energy expended can equal less greenhouse gases. Even if it’s a microscopic dent in our gluttonous consumption, it’s still a dent. It’s still a step.
And maybe it is a symbolic gesture.
Still, there’s nothing wrong with a symbolic gesture now and again.
Chuck The Writer 
I like this. In addition to turning out lights to save energy, how about going outside and looking at the night sky? Unless we live in a very rural area, we don’t experience truly dark nights anymore. I believe that we would be more rested and relaxed, maybe even saner, if we did.
http://www.darksky.org/
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Don’t do it Chuck, It is a mass scam, If everyone did this than goes to turn everything back on at 9:30 they would create a massive surge that would leave us in the dark for much longer than a hour, I hope this never happens. Scary
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Glad to see a safe turn out the lights this year, I really do like this event but I just wanted to point out catch-22 of everything going back on at the same time.
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