The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.
Isaiah, Chapter 11, Verse 6 (King James Version)
Just before her school turned out for a week of Spring vacation, our daughter Elizabeth brought us the news that sometime soon, everyone was encouraged to turn out their lights on the same evening for one hour to give the Earth a chance to recover. She didn’t know much more about it than that, but as she was very excited about the idea I looked it up and discovered that what she was talking about was Earth Hour.
As an observance, Earth Hour began in Sydney in 2007, when over two million homes and businesses switched off their lights for one hour. It continued to grow in 2008, reaching world-wide participation. For 2009, the goal was set at 1 billion participants. Thus it was planned that on March 28, 2009 at 8:30PM in each respective time zone, people around the globe would turn out all lights in their homes or places of business in honor of the Earth and its increasingly limited resources.
Our own Earth Hour here in Scappoose, Oregon saw us lighting a few candles, taking out a board game, turning off the lights, the television set, and the computers, and settling in for what turned out to be an enlightening experience. At first, I was a bit dubious of the value of this activity. I was engaged in reading a book and was not exactly pleased at the prospect of being prevented from continuing for an hour (my sight being a bit weak in low light). However within a mere matter of minutes I was amazed at the change in our household environment – it was quiet. Not the sort of quiet that occurs when we all turn in for the night to sleep; rather a curious sort of quiet with everyone all still awake and active. I hadn’t realized that all the lights and other light-producing appliances commonly running throughout the evening generate a noise, sometimes noticeable, sometimes not, that the absence of is profoundly soothing to both the mind and spirit.
This quiet caused me to reflect on the lives of so many of my heroes who lived long ago. Looking at the volume of Darwin’s writings I have been reading sitting on the table, lit by the flickering light from a nearby candle, I was suddenly struck by the understanding that it was in this very amount of light and quietude that he likely penned all his works. And even if he didn’t and instead wrote by gaslight, then surely other such intellectual luminaries as Thomas Jefferson, Jonathan Edwards, and Jonathan Swift did. The point being that many if not most of the most profound ideas ever recorded on paper, ideas that have formed the manner in which we all live today, came into being in a world, as William Manchester so wonderfully put it, lit only by fire.
Not to turn Luddite, but I believe that, thanks to the urging of a child to honor a newly forming tradition of stopping if only for an hour out of respect for the Earth, I have discovered something about the manner in which many of us in the industrialized world live today that directly influences the processes of our minds. By occasionally dimming the lights and eliminating the electronic hum that has become to us almost inaudible through its ubiquity, perhaps we might be better able to think more clearly and with greater focus about matters both large and small. We may also come to realize that in the grand portrait of human history, how ephemeral the technological shell in which we live our lives truly is.
