why earth hour is not stupid

People for whom activism is a way of life have a tendency to scoff at one-off efforts like Earth Hour. These sorts of events can seem so paltry, and short lived, and gimmicky. And perhaps they are all those things.

But when you know a lot of people who are not activists, and who never talk about the environment, and freely admit that they never think about energy conservation, and then you see how a one-time event make them do all those things - that is, how an event raises their awareness - it seems a lot less stupid.

And when you take into account how helpless and overwhelmed most people feel about any efforts to make change - the fatalistic "nothing can be done" refrain - and then you see how a one-time event gets them involved, it starts to seem pretty clever.

Plus this morning I saw Rex Murphy hates it. So I thought, they must be on to something.

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