This March 29 is the second Earth Hour , a global call to turn off our lights for one hour, at 8 p.m. local time. Started last year in Sydney, Australia, the Earth Hour event took off quickly, with several cities around the world participating at different times. This year, the goal is to coordinate a global Earth Hour. Already, a large number of cities (including Montreal, Toronto , and most major Canadian cities) have agreed to participate.

The World Wildlife Fund has taken the lead in sponsoring the event. This multinational organization can sometimes be a bit soft on important issues, but I like everything about the Earth Hour initiative, the global scale, the concrete individual action, and the information about electricity use and climate change that is made available through participating organizations. While much of this information can be classified as "entry level" for not getting too in-depth on conservation and climate change issues, the simplicity of the Earth Hour also creates a path towards concrete social change: in order to dislodge old ways of thinking and long held myths, a new truth must be introduced, reinforced, and repeated until people get tired of hearing it. Then it passes into conventional wisdom, then into social and political orientation.

Perhaps my favorite aspect of Earth Hour is the simple fact that people are turning off their lights. We live in a part of the world where real darkness simply does not exist. I was shocked to see a satellite view of the world on a "normal" night, and how much light is visible from space. As a child, I was taught that the lights of the east coast of North America were visible from space. Back then we saw satellite images of a band of light running from Halifax to Florida with a few dark spots where the rural areas were located. Now the entire northern hemisphere is plainly visible from space, and light speckles the entire globe. It's bad enough that one has to travel to the far north just to be in the dark, but it is a shame to see that the ambient light of cities and towns is so bright that our rural areas no longer get dark at night.

On Saturday, March 29 between 8 and 9 p.m., I will be turning off my lights, and I might just leave them off until the next morning. Join me and we can put Montreal on the map-or perhaps more appropriately take us off it!

—Roger