It started last year in Sydney, Australia, with a seemingly radical proposal: Turn off all lights and unnecessary electronics (which I think would include all of them) for one hour.
The event, called Earth Hour, took place last Saturday from 8 to 9 p.m. around the world. People switched their lights off when their local time zone hit 8 p.m. and spent the next hour in complete darkness. Or, if they missed their nightlight too much, they lit candles.
Like similar environmental advocacy events that have taken place in the past few years, such as Live Earth, Earth Hour drew its fair share of criticism. Like its predecessors, critics questioned whether this event could do anything to save a planet that has to choke down 27 billion tons of carbon dioxide every year.
“There’s very little that any of us can do on an individual level to stop climate change,” writer Bryan Walsh said in his column titled “Earth Hour ’08: Did It Matter?”, which was posted on www.time.com. “Live like a monk, take away your 20 tons—stop breathing if you’d like—and you’ll barely scratch the surface.”
But Walsh completely misses the point of the event and has fallen into the carbon dioxide-induced dumps. The main point of Earth Hour was not necessarily to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Instead, organizers wanted to bring climate change back into the public eye.
The biggest producers of carbon in Americans’ daily lives are transportation and the energy used to heat and cool our homes. How can these not be changed at an individual level? These are the carbon-intense areas of our life that we have the most control over.
We can decide to turn the thermostat down a few notches in the winter and up a few in the summer. We can decide to walk to Mass. Street instead of driving. We can decide that we would rather have our electricity come from Bowersock hydroelectric plant near downtown instead of Westar’s coal plant north of town.
Individuals comprise the collective, so the efforts that we make on a grassroots level resonate higher up the chain.
Walsh may be right on one point, though: The statistics are monstrous, and it is hard for people to visualize what their 20 tons of carbon dioxide emissions are doing to the planet. But this oh-well-it’s-not-my-problem attitude has plagued efforts to electrify any sort of global environmental concern in the American people.
Historically, international failures like the Kyoto Protocol—a decade-old treaty that was supposed to reduce worldwide carbon dioxide emissions 5 percent below 1990s levels—give even more clout to the importance of individual actions.
Although then-Vice President Al Gore symbolically signed the treaty, the Clinton administration never submitted it to the Senate for ratification. President George W. Bush says he has no intention to submit the treaty for ratification, making the United States the only developed country in the world that hasn’t signed Kyoto.
Walsh’s pessimism is not shocking, considering the message our country has sent by failing to sign Kyoto and its refusal to take the action needed to solve global warming. It’s no wonder Americans think we can’t make a difference when this cynical attitude dominates politics and the media.
Walsh directly contradicts himself by questioning whether we can even do anything about the problem, but in the next sentence he writes, “This is the moment when we need to keep pushing in every way we can.”
By ignoring the significance of the individual, Walsh defeats any hope that America can make a difference. As a world leader, this country has an obligation to take on global challenges and be a role model to other nations. The United States has the highest amount of carbon dioxide emissions per person, so it’s up to us to change first.
It’s easy to fall into the trap of green fatigue by constantly being reminded of the tough changes we must make to the typical American lifestyle. But what we forget is the new American lifestyle that we can create—a smarter lifestyle that holds us accountable for our actions and our only home.
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