Earth Hour 2011

I’ve heard many naysayers scoff at this whole, in their words, “exercise in futility”, that it’s actually useless and a waste of time and money, and that our energies could be channeled into something more useful and concrete. Maybe. I don’t discount the opinion that it may be so. But in my opinion, it’s better than doing NOTHING. One can sit there, in the comfort of his own spectator seat, and mock the efforts that others do, but my question is: “What are YOU doing?” If you’ve got a better idea, then let’s hear it; let’s do THAT instead of THIS. I don’t have a better idea, so I’ll support this instead. Will it save the world as we know it?  Maybe it will, maybe it won’t. But I won’t stand in the way of people trying their best to effect a change for the better. In fact, they have my full support. Turning off the lights for an hour won’t necessarily stop climate change or whatever it is that ails our planet, but it gives us all a chance to reflect on a pressing fact: our planet needs help. Whether it’s man-inflicted or a natural course of our planet’s evolution is a difficult question to answer. But it wouldn’t hurt for us as a global community to set aside an hour in a year to think about it as one. We may not come up with the right solutions to our problems, but I applaud any attempt to give it a try. Even if our efforts prove futile, if we could change the habits of ANY number of people and effect a change in their consumption habits, it would’ve been worth it already. It doesn’t hurt to remind ourselves not to consume too much, that we’re not alone on this planet, that in order to co-exist we need to share EVERYTHING, and therefore we need to be frugal in devouring whatever it is we already consume. Whether we humans are the cause of the problem or the solution, we have to give it a try. The peanut gallery has never been the source of either the solutions or the inspirations for. Like they say, if we can’t be part of the solution, at least don’t stand in the way of those trying.

So tomorrow, Saturday, March 26, 2011, from 8:30-9:30pm, switch off all your lights and send a strong message of hope.