The Planet Is Saved!

Saturday night the whole world came together in a huge show of support for what's becoming their favorite planet. For an hour, all of us shut down all the points in our house that drew power from the grid. We burned candles. We talked about the environment. Some even fondue-d!

For one whole hour.

Sixty minutes.

I really enjoyed it. The house was so quiet. The neighborhood was filled with people out walking as families, taking in that suddenly-brighter starlit sky. My family got into it too. My son commented that he liked the silence, and he grudgingly passed on watching the Habs/Leafs game (which, as it turned out, wasn't the result we'd wanted anyway). My wife said it made her much more aware of the "phantom power" draws around our house.

In the midst of Earth Hour, my sister called from Arizona. I asked her what they'd be doing when their turn came in an hour and she said: "what is it?" She said there hadn't been a word spoken in their rural corner of the state. I had to tell her the concept, to which she commented that it was "a great idea." Yet she was unsure as to why Earth Hour wasn't being promoted on any of their local media.

And that's where my cynical brain starts to get fired up. In Sydney Australia, Paris, Toronto, Kingston, Seattle or any other modern, post-industrial centre, we already get it! The people in charge (the Dick Cheneys, and the Stephen Harpers) privately have to admit that we need to change some things before all is lost, but they won't in public for fear that we'll suffer dire economic consequences, and worse...they'll fall from power. The public though, is showing that more and more, we really do get it.

But in the other world... In the parts of our planet where people have for too long suffered in poverty and oppression, and where in just the past decade they've begun to taste the possibility of a better, modern, more convenient way of life...in India, China, Brazil, wherever. In those places, all the awareness in the world about climate change, won't keep the population or their leaders from the status quo. In places where the media is used for little more than just a pr service of the government, the public will know only what the government wants them to know. Perhaps rural Arizona could be lumped in there, along with rural Alberta and a lot more places that are closer to home than we'd ever imagine.

Earth Hour is a great way to get the message out to ourselves. It's a really important exercise we should partake in on a regular basis to keep us on-task, to fix what we can with global warming.

But we've got to get the other world to buy in too.

Al Gore is making trips to India now to preach environmentalism. He's teaching small classes of local folks to get the message out to the masses, in hopes that the billion citizens of that country will be there with us. He thinks he can do the same in China (if he can turn that regime around in their thinking, he deserves a second Nobel). Perhaps he could take some shorter trips to Yuma, Cold Lake, and Tamworth to make sure we're all on the same page.

I laughed on Saturday night when I saw it. We'd already overloaded the grid for the few hours before "lights-out" by charging up our cell phones, Psps, laptops...whatever. Now here in the middle of our our of self-congratulatory hour of darkness, I saw who the true benefactors of this Earth Hour were. It was written in clear, easy-to-read font right on the package of tea light candles we were all burning: "Product of China."