20:30 the hour for change

For children growing up in cantonments across India, whenever the lights would go out - always at dinner time - the family (plus dog) would have to cease TV-watching/homework-doing activities, and gravitate towards either the balcony, or if the mosquitoes were singing, then to a ‘common room’, and be forced to trade the day’s bulletin and let conversation take its course. Over the next hour spent around candlelight, talking to family, at home, a strange thing would happen.

From initial peevishness at lights having gone (yet again), whenever they would return, and amid joyful exclamations alongside candles being snuffed out, there would arise, along with the dispersed smoke from candles, a sense of brief melancholy with the reality that fun hour was now over, and life was back to a never-ending series of long-division sums. That was what it meant to have the lights come back on.

Now unless you are completely shut off from the world, for one hour this evening, even the most minimally perceptive of us will witness a certain darkness. One hour of the lights gone down.

But Earth Hour, as the phenomenon has come to be known in the last seven years, is not a blackout. New York, last autumn, brought to its knees by Hurricane Sandy - that was a blackout. As the CEO and co-founder of Earth Hour, Andy Ridley, says, Earth Hour, the world’s largest mass participation event on the planet, is more of a “fade out”.

Who cares? How does it matter? These refrains in the past couple of years, and in the context of ‘are you going dark?’ have become common currency, surrounded as some of us are by killjoys. “Cynical realism,” said writer Aldous Huxley, “is the intelligent man’s best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation.”

Earth Hour is not about turning off the lights. Sure, it’s a symbolic gesture. But that’s merely stage one - a mass of people dusting off the apathy to show symbolically that they care about the planet. It’s about understanding the truth in clichés that talk about leaving your children a world in which you no longer remain but they will be around to deal with the consequences of the collective negligence of generations.

The second stage was to take the movement forward. It’s a powerful message to see the Sydney Opera House, India Gate, Times Square and Burj Khalifa go without light. As Ridley said in his 2013 keynote Earth Hour speech in Singapore: “We could be the catalyst for an interconnected global community that shares the opportunity and challenges of sustainability.” He’s talking about a vision to try and change the world we live in.

“Having done Earth Hour for seven years, change takes a lot of persistence and perseverance and you need inspiring people,” he has said. Spending more energy on the environment and less on ourselves is, like art, a great way to rise above the quotidian struggle.

Ridley cited in his speech examples where climate change and pollution have detrimentally affected the world: bushfires in Australia, smog-affected Chinese workers going to work with masks on their faces, severe flooding in Jakarta which swept a Rolls Royce down the street.

Earth Hour is a reminder. About doing what you can - the little steps, individual initiatives, about segregating paper from plastic, about disposing of things conscientiously, about using less aluminum takeaway boxes, about having shorter showers, about teaching your child to compost, the value of soil and why earthworms are good. It’s messages that if you recycle one plastic bottle, it saves the amount of energy needed to power a 60-watt bulb for six hours or a 9 watt LED for 36 hours.

The ‘being in the darkness tonight’ bit is just a step towards habitually doing something. And really, how difficult it is for an hour when, metaphorically speaking, we go long stretches of our lives being in the dark.

What candles should I use?

If you plan on burning candles during Earth Hour, make sure you use 100 per cent beeswax candles or soy candles, which are gentler on our planet - smoke free, non-toxic and non-allergenic.

They are also made of natural products, not petroleum-based materials, so they are effectively carbon neutral (the CO2 they emit has already been taken from the atmosphere to produce the wax).

If you’re using candles, though, make sure you take care.

Around the world

What is Earth Hour?

“The greatest threat to our planet is the belief that someone else will save it,” says Robert Swan, explorer.
Earth Hour is an open-source, self-generational phenomenon. “The world’s largest mass participation event on the planet,” according to Andy Ridley, CEO and Co-Founder of Earth Hour at the keynote speech during the global launch of Earth Hour 2013.

All sorts are involved in Earth Hour. It is an incredibly diverse community across the world taken in by the idea that a school kid can change a classroom, a CEO can change a company and a president can change a country.

• UAE
• Dubai
• Abu Dhabi
• Sharjah
• Ajman