On March 28, at 8:30 p.m., up to a billion people may switch off their lights and appliances for one hour as a symbolic vote against global warming.
This week's Green Quick Fixes is simple: Jump on the pop-culture greenie bandwagon!
The goal of the experiment, a WWF (formerly World Wildlife Fund) project, is to show world leaders that the public desires real change and is looking to them to develop a sustainable energy future for all. Results of this third-annual social experiment will be presented at December's United Nations Global Climate Change Conference, which is supposed to generate a new global treaty on carbon emission reductions.
WWF is working with 1,000 cities (like Boston) to capture widespread public participation in Earth Hour. Individuals, schools, companies, and organizations can be counted by going to www.earthhour.org and clicking on the orange "Sign Up Now" button.
For last year's effort, organizers and supporters convinced municipalities and corporations that oversee famous landmarks like the Golden Gate Bridge and the Coca-Cola billboard in New York's Times Square to power down for an hour.
I am optimistic that here in the North Shore, we can show some impressive statistics of our own. While the gesture is partially symbolic, real wattage and money can be saved. Better still, we can slow fossil fuel combustion rates down a bit.
According to the WWF Web site, in 2008 more than 2.7 million Chicagoans participated with a 7 percent electricity savings, the emissions of which equal taking 1 million cars off the road for one hour. Also that day Australia's participants conserved enough energy to take 48,000 cars off the road for one year.
Turning your lights off for Earth Hour 2009 is something to celebrate.
Recently I have been reflecting on the fact that though one hour's energy savings is somewhat negligible in terms of reliance on numerous fossil fuel sources. But shutting of our lights is, if nothing else, a nod of respect to the American communities that suffer the very real environmental devastation of coal extraction.
Coal is where America gets a full half of its energy, with each person in the U.S. consuming five tons per year, and copious quantities are extracted from just a few regions.
Picture this: Maria Gunnoe, the heroine of David Novack's "Burning the Future," a poignant documentary about coal-rich southern West Virginia and mountain-top removal screened last week at the Salem Film Festival, is shown in New York City to try and address the United Nations about coal's effects. After a disappointing afternoon, she cries out in frustration at the light spectacle of Times Square. To her, seeing the overwhelming display must have felt something like what Native Americans experienced when encountering the bullet-ridden buffalo carcasses that littered the Old West.
Deep within the neon, Gunnoe saw deeply-scarred mountains, more than 1,000 miles of streams choked by lethal acid mine drainage and buried by 300 feet of rock. Her fellow West Virginians are still coping with the kind of black water leaching from unlined underground retention basins that killed 124 people at Buffalo Creek, W.Va., in 1972.
During Earth Hour, I will turn my lights off in celebration for Santa Maria Gunnoe and others like her, because despite death threats, she has recently won a battle in her fight to protect Appalachia's land and people. According to Novack, Gunnoe now controls enough privately-funded stock in Bank of America, a fact which recently propelled a vote against the bank financing new mountain-top coal removal projects.
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Andrea Fox, a Beverly resident, has been writing about environmental sustainability and eco-topics for eight years. She is a member of the Society of Environmental Journalists and a watershed protection advocate in Salem Sound Watershed.
