Earth Hour means nothing, unless you start consuming less

We live in times when paying lip-service is a preferred pastime and indulging in gimmickry is a manic obsession. It’s little wonder, then, that Earth Hour was celebrated with much fanfare and uproar across the world on Saturday last.

The event has become an annual ritual wherein you can unabashedly wash all environmental sins you might have committed in the preceding 364 days. It’s become a glitzy happening that every event manager wants to encash, a tool that every unsustainable industry wants to greenwash with, an episode so contagious that it’s possibly the most ostentatious way to exhibit one’s professed political correctness. It’s become a pretentious, theatrical and insensitive display of all that is wrong in the fight to arrest global warming.

For whatever a sham it is today, the roots of Earth Hour were definitely genuine, sincere and well-intentioned. Sometime around 2004, World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) Australia, seriously concerned about climate change, took up the issue with leading advertising agency Leo Burnett. The point was to “discuss ideas for engaging Australians on the issue of climate change.” The discussions developed into the concept of a large scale switch-off. The original working title of the event was ‘The Big Flick’. The idea was then put forward to Australian media giant Fairfax Media. The Lord Mayor of Sydney, Clover Moore, threw his weight behind the event, and Earth Hour 2007 was held on March 31 that year in Sydney at 7:30 pm, local time. Since then, the event has been held worldwide every year urging individuals, communities, households and businesses to turn off their non-essential lights for one hour from 8:30 to 9:30 p.m. on the last Saturday of March.

Earth Hour is now a big event, possibly the biggest extravaganza held every year. The WWF is a monolith with presence in over 100 countries, and claiming to have the backing of over five million people worldwide. When such an organisation teams up with advertising and marketing agencies, the result is likely to be colossal. But eight years down the line, serious and pointed questions need to be asked: has the symbolism helped matters? Has the token ceremony of switching off lights for an hour made people change their lifestyles at all? Has the message indeed got across that the clue to fighting climate change is about lifestyles, about (over-) consumption? It is such a travesty that people of cities should be talking of climate change when they themselves are the drivers of over-consumption of resources.

Climate change is real, and global warming needs to be arrested too. But certainly not in the way the Earth Hour event has been communicating the idea. Critics of Earth Hour abound, and unfortunately a good many of them are rabid climate change deniers. They are usually right in asserting that only symbolism does not change matters; and they are undeniably wrong in the pseudo-scientific arguments that they bandy around in trying to bolster their claims. Only one line of reasoning of these deniers is strong: that any drop in energy demand for that one hour is virtually negated by the upsurge in emissions from re-firing coal or gas stations that would have been lying dormant. The candle-light rigmaroles are just as ill-conceived. Candles are made of paraffin, a petroleum byproduct, and when you light up candles to ‘observe’ this event, your argument about cutting down on consumption of fossil fuel goes for that proverbial toss. Moreover, candles burn at relatively low temperatures, and release significant amounts of particulate matter, benzene, acetaldehyde, formaldehyde, and acrolein, into the air. Candles that contain lead wicks release significant amounts of lead into the air when burned.

In short, the Earth Hour event miserably fails to be a compelling statement. That, possibly, is a shortcoming of all actions and policies that are rooted in metaphor. Organisers of Earth Hour need to understand that if it was just a question of getting a message across, they have long succeeded in doing that. Just consider the highlights of Earth Hour 2015: 172 participating countries and territories; 1400+ iconic landmarks switched off; 66 countries that went beyond the lights out event; 378 million Twitter reach in the week leading to Earth Hour; 36.5 million video views related to the event. If they have still not been able to get the message across, one wonders how they ever can. The campaign needs to go far beyond Earth Hour.

As environmental writers Derrick Jensen and Aric McBay point out, “For an action to be sustainable, you must be able to perform it indefinitely.” Switching off lights for one hour on a particular day has a feel good factor about it; everyone wants to do it and brag about the act to all and sundry. But just ask anyone if they would be willing to switch off lights every single day of the year. The reaction should not be very difficult to guess. This illustration should drive home the argument that we are essentially slaves to a consumption-driven lifestyle that is at the core of climate change. And, in turn, the lust for goods and services drives production. This production is all about the devouring of natural resources. The organisers of Earth Hour don’t exhort participants to massively curtain their profligate lifestyle choices, do they?

It is, of course, not easy to run a campaign urging people to drastically cut their consumption habits – from meat to cars, and from clothes to fast food. This is especially true in a milieu where hedonism is all about consumerism. In such a setting, a symbolic event remains just that – a symbolic event: it fails to strike roots.