Earth Hour 2008
For our family Earth Hour was a beautiful reminder of life before electricity and also the inevitable modern-day tie binding us to electricty.
My boys and I went around the house and turned off all the lights and unplugged whatever we could. They loved that. A kind of hide-and-seek. Then we lit candles and read the book du jour: Robin Hood and they drifted peacefully off to sleep.
But when all was said and done, I couldn’t help but notice that we still had half a dozen green lights on in the house that we could not (one was a “would not”) turn off.
Our home alarm system (thanks to a recent rash of car burglaries and attempted b & e), our fridge (man’s gotta eat), the phone (we still have a land line), the oven clock, the microwave clock (no off buttons there), and the tv recording March madness (last time Betty turned that off in a conservation frenzy my husband lost the taped game of his alma mater – talk about Betty backlash)were still drawing electricity.
I felt a bit deflated – not being able to “really” turn off the lights for Earth Hour.
But then I remembered a wise person saying “perfection is the enemy of good.” At when it comes to us humans, we’re not perfect. Living and breathing and working and playing, we can’t always do in the dark. (bite your tongue there, witty ones)
But for one night we joined the collective and symbolic green plea to address the problem of global climate change and demonstrate a desire to do better.
World Wildlife Fund’s vice president for climate change, Richard Moss, said, “It’s not about sitting in the dark[;]it’s about making a serious commitment over the next year and beyond over how we contribute to climate change.”
Well said,
BWB
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