This Saturday, March 29 is Earth Hour Observance. This is a worldwide call for lights off for one hour, 8:30 pm – 9:30 pm during participants local time, on the last Saturday of March each year.
This is an opportunity for individuals, businesses and governments around the world to take accountability for their ecological footprint, and call attention to climate change. It’s easy to take part in this movement, you simply need to turn off all your lights and forgo using electricity for one hour.
You can use this time with family to talk about what you each appreciate in nature and what you can do to help preserve or conserve it, or you could break out the good old fashioned board games and play them by candlelight or flashlight. If its warm outside, you could sit outside under the stars and admire the beauty of the night sky and the night sounds all around you. There’s much you can do and enjoy during this one short hour, but whatever you do, try to think of ways that you and your family can make a change to positively impact our environment and then make the commitment to do it.
If you’d like an extra incentive to hold you to your commitment, you can take an online pledge at Earth Hour.org, which started the lights out movement. The organization designed a platform for you to get involved and engage in the movement by making your actions reach beyond an hour of lights out. Earth Hour founders developed a campaign entitled “I Will If You Will” to accompany the lights off movement. This campaign is an online public platform from which you can issue a challenge to others to make change. If your challenge is met, then you have to hold true to what you pledged to do as well. Any good you pledge to do for yourself, your community or others is multiplied by the good you challenge others to do. You can make an “I Will If You Will” challenge at the EarthHour link below.
For more information about EarthHour, visit on any of these links:
Earth Hour 2014 Superhero Ambassador
Earth Hour Reimagining Sustainability: Andy Ridley's TED Talk
Contributed by NVC's Sabrina Carey