EARTH HOUR: Christchurch turns it off

One whole hour. Good job, lets all pat ourself on our back and go to bed assured that demise is 1 hour further away.

Very well said Jo. WE need to work together towards a sustainable future in all types of energy consumption, fossil fuel, hydro, wind, as all have an effect on our environment. Earth Hour, for me and a lot of people I know, signified awareness of the issue on a global scale, and allowed people time to consider the energy use in their own homes. We are all in this together, we have no other home than planet earth, and we all need to work together to take care of it. Its about support and participation, to encourage the community to think about these issues on a daily basis. Is it that hard to go without lights for an hour to show that you care about your future? your childrens, and children's children's future? the earth's future?

What a pity people have taken this wonderful, positive awareness-raising exercise as an opportunity to be so negative towards each other. The key here is that Earth Hour is just that: an awareness-raising exercise. If it encourages people to think about what power they're using and switch off anything unnecessary, then it has done a good job. It saddens me that some people seems to spend so much "energy" running down the efforts, large or small, or those around them. "Holier than Thou" or "Let's just give up because it's all a waste of time" attitudes will not get us anywhere.

Also, turning the steet lighting off would be a health and safely nightmare - be sensible!

We flicked off the mains switch and had a candlelit party. At the end of the hour we switched the mains back on for the sake of the freezer, but nobody wanted to put the lights back on! A lovely evening all in all. :-)

The world is fine, stop your worrying and go back to sleep.

Tasha and Shannon drove around creating greenhouses gases with their car, and criticising those who left their lights on using renewable hydro electricity. That pretty much sums up Earth Hour.

I have no idea if my lights were on or off. I have got more urgent worries than watching out if it is between 8 and 9pm. As far as I support anything saving energy, I do not thing this event had any positive impact (people using batteries and candles for he hour do not appreciate energy that had to be wasted to make those!).

I say good on you if you left your lights on. Better than going along with what the eco-nazis tell you to do anyway. The implicit instruction is turn your lights out for an hour or you're socially irresponsible - I mean please, give me a break! If you want to do your bit for the environment, grow your own veges, compost your own green waste, and don't take out your woodburner. That's going to be exponentially more important than turning out your lights for an hour. It's like a diet - doing anything for a short period of time changes nothing. Life style change is required.

We put the kids down at 8pm using Earth Hour as a way to teach them about "resting our energy". We put a candle in our rooms and welcomed the silence of the house. We talked about making this a regular ritual every night; it was such a nice change and made us reflect on our consumptive behavior. We were also stunned to discover that our immediate neighbors on every side of us did not participate in Earth Hour. Looking down the hill (we live in Cashmere) we hoped to see a real difference in lights out, but we didn't. It made us wonder if we were a minority of people who really do care about our earth. I hope the rest of the world did better.

Why did the council not participate in earth hour by turning off he street lights - what a difference that would have made.