8.30pm
"off the light!"
-pause-
"mommy, off the light!"
"huh. why."
"earth hour leh. must put candle!"
"oh. okay."
"okay ah?"
i overheard the sound of a little girl persuading her mother to switch their lights off while i sat/am still sitting on the floor outside my house, with the door open so the light of the lift lobby can be let in. the parents are out, thankfully - i doubt they would appreciate an hour in complete (or not so complete, really) darkness. earth hour is really something that takes so little, yet when i went downstairs just a while ago to gauge the response, less then half of the apartments were completely dark. and who knows how many of those were just because the family went out for the night?
i cannot decide if i think that movements such as earth hour actually is worth the effort. sure, im sitting out here with the lights (and all the "vampire appliances", with the insistence of my increasingly environmentally friendly sister) off, but really - ah, the parents are back, and the first thing my mom did was to switch on the light in the kitchen to get a can of beer- how impactful can an hour of darkness be? even if the hour of darkness is global.
i do remember a time when i believed that the world could be saved on my individual effort, when every plastic bag i save somehow means lesser environmental damage. but along the way, it seems, ive got disillusioned, just as the rest of my family (and society) got more enlightened. (and... with the threat of my sisters wrath hanging over them i have convinced my parents to go outside, at least until 930. yes, even while shes downstairs "enjoying the lights offing" my sister can be very intimidating. speaking of which, shes just come back to collect all the empty boxes for the bags of cereal my dad imports to china everytime he returns for recycling. did i mention that shes very environmentally friendly?) how can recycling paper, taking the public transport, rejecting plastic bags be of
any impact at all when the major industrial countries spew tons of greenhouse gases into the environment
every single second and political will so easily bends in favour of economic gains? dont even mention the complete failure of the Kyoto protocol, or perhaps more recently, Sarkozy giving up on his carbon taxation bill. our world is still too much a consumer to be effectively ecofriendly. we all like to point to the "bring your own bag" wednesdays and other more enlightened practices we have developed as consumers in recent years, but when it comes between saving the earth and our own materialism, i still think materialism wins. and unless every single person on this planet decides to sincerely begin to save the earth and start making consumption decisions based environmental impacts, environmentally friendly practices will be nothing more than a marketing trick.
while i do believe that only political policies are capable of achieving any significant success against environmental damage, i cannot ignore the importance of individual action. the usual "if everyone thought like you we'll all be worst off!" is a convincing enough for me to play my part (although perhaps less enthusiastically then my sister would like me too). but while i continue to try and lessen my own carbon footprint, i still believe that every step we take leads to our own inevitable destruction.
9.30pm
"mommmmyyyy. off the light!"
