Tonight the lights on the Great Pyramids of Giza, the Acropolis in Athens, the Empire State Building in New York and in millions of houses around the world will go dark. Why? Because all around the world at 8:30 p.m. local time, it’s Earth Hour, a World Wildlife Fund organized event urging communities and citizens across the globe to vote for the Earth and against climate change by turning off their lights for one hour. So far nearly four thousand cities spanning the globe as well as millions of individual participants are planning to participate. The results will be presented to world leaders at the Global Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen later this year.
Earth hour began in Sydney, Australia in 2007, and grew to an event with over 50 million participants in 2008. This year’s goal is for 1 billion global citizens to participate. If you’d like to join in, visit the Earth Hour website. Make sure you sign-up so you can be counted. You’ll find tools for spreading the word, including a blogger tool kit, as well as ideas for what to do once you turn the lights out (!) on the Take Action page. And here’s the very inspirational Earth Hour 2009 video to help get you motivated.
Updates:
Here’s a nice piece from the Huffington Post highlighting Earth Hour events as they roll around the world, beginning in Australia and New Zealand and including Beijing’s plans to darken the famous Bird’s Nest stadium and Las Vegas’s plans to darken it’s famous strip.
3/29/09 Here’s the AP wrap of the event with some nice before and after photos as the lights were dimmed at some of the world’s most famous landmarks.
3/31/09 Update.
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I liked the idea of the event and hope that the leaders work on the issue of global warming in the upcoming Copenhagen’s conference which means that the message understood, hopefuly!
Thanks for stopping by ChangeAction, Hicham.
I agree. I hope the message is understood as well.
Earth Hour got lots of press, including thousands (millions?) of stories on the web. It was on both local and national television news in my area. I am very impressed by the level of participation. If nothing else it created an opportunity for people to begin talking about Copenhagen, and to raise awareness about climate change in general, and it can’t hurt in Copenhagen for leaders to see that people all around the world really are paying attention to this issue.
I’m impressed too by the level of participation and it’s important to raise the awarness of people regarding this issue, and hopefuly again, the leaders will listen!