Earth Hour

Look around, and watch your world getting destroyed. Or take a stand and make a difference.

Put simply, out planet is dying the death of a million cuts. If each person contributes even in the smallest proportion it can make a difference. It would take an ignorant person to not know by now what I’m referring to.

Global Warming. Despite being ignored for decades, the issue has found public interest in recent years. Amongst many efforts comes Earth Hour – a stand taken up first by the city of Sydney (Australia) in 2007. By switching off their lights for one hour in the evening, 2.2 million homes and businesses in Sydney collectively voiced their concern for our planet.

Moved by their actions, people around the world joined in the next year. In 2008, 50 million people switched off their lights. Global landmarks such as the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, Rome’s Colosseum, the Sydney Opera House and the Coca Cola billboard in Times Square all stood in darkness.

And on March 28, 2009 an estimated 1 billion people took part in Earth Hour. Sitting in my university in Singapore, I watch the lights go off and realised how collective people from different parts of the world were at that instant. Pictures posted at Boston.com reveal the effect in a series of before-and-after photographs – which (starting with the second one ) fade between “on” and “off” when clicked.

This is the official Earth Hour 2009 video:

To learn more about Global Warming, you can check the following websites:

• Global Warming.org – http://www.globalwarming.org/
• The New York Times – http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/news/science/topics/globalwarming/index.html
• U.S. Environmental Protection Agency – http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/
• Al Gore’s ‘The Inconvenient Truth’ documentary – http://www.climatecrisis.net/ (Watch here on Google Video)