Earth Hour.
Call me a little skeptical but isn’t this Earth Hour bizzo more or less a gimmicky feelgood fest with lots of symbolism but negligible benefit to the Earth? An opportunity for vague, mamby-pamby green posturing by corporate giants, keen to PR-up their (insubstantial) enviro-credentials, and equally fuzzy and temporary gestures by individuals? The name says it all to me: consign thinking about the Earth to an hour a year – then get on with consuming as much as you can in as little time as possible.
A quick gas-guzzling drive around to see the extent of participation was in order. The folks at Longrain and Grossi Florentino in the city seemed to have opted for candlelight, but 7-Eleven was as blindingly bright inside as it ever was. At McDonalds, a participant in Earth Hour, in their Church St, Richmond store, some of the street signs were off but it didn’t look like a single lumen was absent on the inside.
[Church St McDonalds, about 8.40pm. Main sign is extinguished but smaller signs are still powered up.]
[Roof sign is off but it's still blazing with light on the inside.]
Down the street at a lighting emporium, it seems no-one had told them about a power-down:
Heading back to the city, the big corporates had turned a fair share of their lights and nearly all of their neons off – if only to save “embarrassing” news footage with their logos blazing:
[This photo looking up from the Exhibition St bridge.]
And of course, the government has to be in on the act too… Parliament house was de-illumined for the occasion:
[you can kinda make it out in the background of this shot]
But by 9.15pm, guess what? All that terrible, Earth-polluting visible radiation was back in business. So much for the Earth!
