Green Daily

As these things go, Saturday's Earth Hour was pretty successful. Some 300,000 people around the world signed up on the Earth Hour website, and about 380 cities and towns formally participated. Here in Toronto, electrical usage dropped to almost 9% below normal during the hour, and thousands of people braved the semi-darkness and unseasonable cold to catch an Earth Hour-branded concert in front of City Hall.

It was an impressive turnout for an event only in its sophomore year, and one driven entirely by the grass roots efforts of ordinary people looking to do something extraordinary.

Still, the real impact on the planet will be negligible - a tiny blip on control screens in power plants around the world, and one that won't dial down the global thermostat by a single degree. Glaciers will continue to melt, the oceans will continue to die, and deserts will continue their inexorable, climate-change fueled expansion.

We knew that, of course - Earth Hour was always about achieving that great intangible, awareness, not single-handedly turning back the tide of human self-destruction. We hope that the impressive, prophetic sight of iconic urban skylines in darkness will lead more people to turn off a light, refuse a plastic bag, talk to their leaders about the change they want to see in the world.

And maybe it will. But we need more.

In 2008, millions of people made a small sacrifice - an hour of electric light - to send a message that we're willing to change. What if, in 2009, we decided to go one step further and agreed not to drive? What if, instead of making fatuous comparisons ("turning off x number of lights is equivalent to taking y number of cars off the road!") we actually took those cars off the road?

Such an effort would require more planning on the part of individuals. People would have to think about staying home, or finding alternate ways to get where they needed to be.

It might not work. We love our CO2 machines, so maybe we'd just ignore that part of Earth Hour as too difficult, or better still, wait til it's over to hop in the car, adhering to the letter of the thing but not the spirit. And then at least we'd know - we care about the environment, but not enough to cause ourselves any pain or hardship (at that that point we might decide to abandon climate change control efforts as pointless due to our collective selfishness, and concentrate on individual survival in a sure-to-be-interesting future.)

But imagine if people embraced the idea. How much more impressive would Earth Hour become, if alongside the darkened officer towers and candlelit homes, the streets were silent? If even a few million of us inconvenienced themselves a little more, showed ourselves willing to do more to pull humanity back from the brink, by stepping out of our cars and into our neighbourhoods for one short hour?

Earth Hour remains a baby step, or less - rolling over in the crib might be a more apt metaphor. But it's a collective action that we can build on until a day when simple awareness is taken for granted, and when, instead of hesitant paces towards a healthy world, we take great strides. And one way to build on what we've started, to show that we truly mean business, would be to decide that driving is the next thing we give up for Earth Hour.

Honk if you're ready.