(Not) Seeing the Light
October 11th, 2007 : posted by Kevin HamiltonNate Tyler wants to invite you to “the dark side.”
Tyler, an SCA alum and one-time Google spokesperson, is taking on global warming with Lights Out San Francisco, a grassroots campaign to get locals to turn off their lights between 8:00 and 9:00 p.m. on Saturday, October 20. Landmarks including the Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz and the TransAmerica Tower have all agreed to pull the plug.
Will Lights Out suddenly halt melting glaciers and put Al Gore out of business? Of course not. But the energy savings and reduced emissions, however minor, will be real and the message sent by those darkened SF icons should be heard loud and clear.
In fact, Los Angeles is already listening. The city plans to turn the lights off the fabled Hollywood sign, and the response from around the US has already prompted Tyler to schedule Lights Out America for March 29, 2008.
It’s always good to see SCA alums still fighting the good fight. Nate, a Connecticut native, says his mid-80s SCA hitch at Lassen Volcanic National Park in California opened his eyes to just how large the country is. If his Lights Out campaign catches on and helps thwart rising oceans that would otherwise consume at-risk coastal regions, our nation might just remain as big as he remembers it.
October 13th, 2007 at 11:22 am
Green Nights, from Louise Baum in Santa Fe, NM -
First posted in the SCA Forum 2006/08/14 18:56
Al Gore’s excellent movie “An Inconvenient Truth”, clearly and factually delineates the Global Climate Change Crisis facing us. At first, after seeing it, I felt despair and hopelessness. Then I came up with an idea. What if ONE NIGHT A WEEK we all turned out our lights at 8:00 pm? We would stop using all electricity, gas, etc., at that time (maybe leaving on the refrigerator, and also a little heat when it’s cold). The 8:00 pm time would give us time to make supper, and wash the dishes beforehand. To make it easy and workable, each household would choose the most convenient night of the week each week for them.
At eight we could go to bed early and get a good night’s rest, or sit around a candle or a solar lantern and talk, tell stories, play music together, or listen to a wind-up radio. Another enjoyable activity would be to go outside and look at the stars, or take a moonlight walk.
If thousands of people did this in thousands of communities around the country we would significantly lower our fossil fuel use. This would lower greenhouse gases, and with this and other solutions we can prevent the disasters to our planet from happening.
After six months, maybe we could do this two nights a week.
We could call these nights “Greening Nightsâ€, “Green Nights”, “Starry Nights”, as in “Tonight is our house’s Green Night. We’re going to go to bed early, and get up at dawn and see the Sun rise.” It would be good to keep track, household by household of our electricity and gas free nights, perhaps in booklets that we would turn in to a central record-keeper, and see how many of us are taking part, and measure the reduction in pollution and greenhouse gases.
Think of the polar bears living happily in the refrozen Artic, of the price of gas falling due to less demand, and of balance returning to the earth’s climate.
The point is we need to shift our way of living, and we can.
I imagine people all over the world are coming up with innovative ideas, small and large ways to live sustainably. We can do it. It isn’t that difficult, doesn’t need to be rigid or punitive. It could actually feel good to live more in tune with the natural cycles.
We can do it. We just need to start, and then keep going.
Louise Baum, Santa Fe.