City Participating In Earth Hour – What About You?
It is Earth Hour on Saturday March 27 from 8:30 to 9:30 p.m.
Earth Hour is about taking simple steps everyday that collectively reduce carbon emissions – from businesses turning off their lights when offices are empty to households turning off appliances rather than leaving them on standby.
The City will be participating in Earth Hour by turning off the lights at City Hall, The Esplanade and the Library.
“Earth Hour is an excellent opportunity for the City to engage the community in a discussion around responsible energy use,” says Russ Smith, energy sustainability manager.
What will you be doing? Here are a few different ways to spend Earth Hour and reduce your carbon footprint:
- Gather family and friends for a night picnic in your local park and gaze at the stars. Try to identify some of the constellations in the night sky.
- Enjoy a family dinner by candlelight
- Organize a treasure hunt in the dark using wind up flashlights
- Take the dog for a late evening walk
- Enjoy a candle-lit soak in the bathtub
- Sit in the dark and share stories
- Organize a family night playing board games
To find out more about Earth Hour, visit the official website www.earthhour.org. Sign up and join millions of people in more than 1,400 cities and towns in 80 countries by turning off your lights for one hour starting at 8:30 p.m. on Saturday, March 27.
March 25th, 2010 at 12:52 PM
Sean says:
I am going to go to the park and hide in the woods to share stories with any treasure hunters that might come by. If anyone calls the cops, walking a dog will be my scapegoat.
March 28th, 2010 at 1:13 AM
Larry says:
This may not seem like much but we shut down the computer network for the hour. This included the server & external drives, 3 desktops, 6 monitors, printer / fax, 1 fan, 2 air systems and the laptop. I also opted to turn off the cell phones in case I received any email that I wouldn’t be able to ignore from some client or other.
We then moved out to the patio for the hour and ate leftover cold Greek pizza without ham from Top’s Steakhouse from the previous evening. Laurie decided on a glass of “watchca ma call it”, a nice 2006 merlot/shiraz Californian blend. She opted for the red because obviously as it is served at room temperature there would have been no need of refrigeration. As the less than eco-friendly member of the household, I filled my thermal mug with hot coffee from the electricity guzzling Cuisinart coffee maker at 8:26 pm. In my own defence, I did shut off the coffee maker @ 8:28 pm.
Feeling remorse for the electrical consumption required to generate the hot coffee I did not reboot the network until after 10 pm.
The upshot of our contribution on a personal level was:
The network actually rebooted with no errors
Several Windows updates were installed
I found my pen sitting on the server keyboard
I realized just how dirty the fan in my office is
I realized just how much I need and love to sit on my patio talking to my wife about a whole bunch of nothing.
And finally
Our small contribution to a truly excellent idea may extend humankinds existence on the planet for some small percentage of a second
and you what
that might be all it takes to find the answer.