earth hour wasn't much really...an exercise in making people feel they were actually doing something...alieviating some consumerist guilt...painless..did anyone turn everything off? the only landmark from the photos i saw that looked even remotely blacked-out was the pyramids...okay, so you don't want aircraft flying into the eiffel tower (they turned off the lights on the tower, but every streetlight in town was left on)...that's fair enough...but also part of my point...did aircraft stop flying for an hour? did power plants shut down? did opec stop pumping oil? did mittal stop making steel? did everyone on the interstate highway system pull over? like five sentence mission statements, symbolic acts are too simplisitic to really give scope to the problems we face as a species...those issues are too complex to be boiled down and sloganized...energy, environment, consumption are all parts of the dilemma, and they are closely interconnected...that renders them immune to politically expedient quick fixes...that complexity and the need for a shift in cultural values is what people need to be educated to...earth hour doesn't stand a chance of doing that...a clear definition of a problem such as industrial agriculture's dependence on petrochemicals for inputs such as fuel for farm machinery, herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizers and the resulting impact on the environment from the pollution of groundwater, streams, rivers, and estuaries from runoff as well as the environmental nightmares of confined animal feeding operations that run on the grain the pertochemicals produce, would illuminate both the shortsightedness of our energy policies and how a system of industrilaized, pre-packaged food and supermarket convenience shield us from the impact of our everyday actions...we expend nearly nine calories of energy to produce one calorie of food...turning out the light won't fix that...we need a new viewpoint.
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