Results tagged “earthhour”

       

Above, a selection of photos—from Torontoist and from our Flickr Pool—of Toronto during Earth Hour.

Earth took its revenge upon Toronto late last night for not doing an adequate enough job of participating in Earth Hour: power was out (according to 680 News) from "Victoria Park To Don Mills, 401 to Lawrence, Islington to Martingrove, Dixon to Rathburn," and the outage apparently lasted—you guessed it—a bit more than an hour.

Some, like the Star, were a tad overzealous about Earth Hour's success earlier tonight. "No," wrote Daniel Dale, "you are not witnessing a city-wide power failure. Toronto's Earth Hour has begun." From where we were, sandwiched between a few dozen high-rises downtown, there was still plenty of light to be seen—and from our site statistics for the hour, it's not looking like all that many (of our Saturday night readers, at least) switched off their computers, either. But, now that another Earth Hour has come and gone, this one bigger and even more contradictory and token-y than ever, it's still worth asking the same question we did last year: did you participate in Earth Hour?

DESIGN: Designers from all walks of the trade compete in the Toronto version of the Cut&Paste Digital Design Tournament. This travelling competition has already visited a host of other cities (Boston, Los Angeles, and San Francisco among them), picking and choosing winners along the way until the final showdown in New York City. Tonight's contest goes down in real time with the work of the participants broadcast over the crowd. Sound Academy (11 Polson Street), 7 p.m., $15 in advance, $20 at door.

We are, just to be clear, very fond of Planet Earth. Big fans. Huge. We are, likewise, fond of initiatives which safeguard our environment, and also in favour of consciousness-raising efforts that promote such initiatives. Therefore, when we say that many of the events being held to celebrate Earth Hour tomorrow are vacuous publicity exercises that insult our intelligence and with which we want no truck, we are not doing it because we think this whole environmental crisis we've been hearing so much about has been overblown. We are doing it because they are so vacuous and so insulting that we have been rendered awestruck by their inanity, and find our consciousness to be depressed, angry, and frustrated rather than uplifted.

MUSIC: Torontonian indie favourites Born Ruffians are back in town with a show this evening at Sneaky Dee's. Also performing are the similarly awesome rock band Akron/Family, who hail from Pennsylvania and New York. If you can't make it out tonight, don't worry; there is a second show tomorrow at the same location and time. Sneaky Dee's (431 College Street), 9 p.m., $13.

If you had any doubt that Earth Hour—a little less than two weeks away now—is an all-but-empty symbolic gesture, click on over to its website. As Brett Lamb writes on his blog: "There is actually NO CONTENT about useful things you can do for the environment on the Earth Hour website. Not a single thing ... unless you count turning out the lights for an hour at the end of March. The website does offer product placements. Corporations receive mention for token gestures. Did you know that Coke is shutting off its billboard in Times Square for an hour? Wow, that must be a real sacrifice." As Lamb puts it, Earth Hour is less about awareness of environmental issues—many of the problems, after all, are perpetuated by the very companies sponsoring the whole thing—and more about "awareness of awareness."

Look for packs of perplexed wheelie-encumbered tourists roaming Front Street this week in a fruitless search for shelter, as the Fairmont Royal York darkens its iconic rooftoop sign for seven days.

TTC strike: not today, but probably Monday. If it happens, Torontoist will let you know.

Sam Javanrouh—the man behind the venerable Daily Dose of Imagery, this city's most widely-read photoblog—has always had something of a knack for creating amazing stop-motion timelapse videos. Whether it's cars filling up an Edward and Bay parking lot or the downtown skyline (go to his archives under the heading "timelapse photography" to see more), his videos are hypnotic, beautiful, and fascinating—a chance to see the motions of the city in a new way.

Photos by Miles Storey

Like it or not, Earth Hour has come (and gone)! And we're curious as to whether you participated. Officially, all you had to do was turn off all your lights, though you were welcome to have gone all-out and turned off everything that consumed electricity, like your computer (though at least according to our stats, not too many people went that far). And if you're kicking yourself for missing it, hey, there's always 8 p.m. on March 29, 2009. Or basically any other time you want.

As Toronto joins countries around the world in turning out the lights tonight, we thought it was worthwhile to take a critical look at Earth Hour. And we're not the only ones. Even in its home country of Australia, a blogger on a newspaper website writes (via Metro) that instead of switching off the lights, "people should switch on their brains and realize that they are being played for suckers. And they should see that this sort of feelgood propaganda just lets governments off the hook." When we power down our lights at 8 p.m., are we powering up our ability to tackle the climate crisis? Or is it possible that Earth Hour—due to its messaging and unclear purpose—could actually do more harm than good?

You've got less than three weeks to prepare yourself for Earth Hour on Saturday, March 29. That's when people around the world are being encouraged to turn off their lights for one hour to raise awareness about global warming. Toronto was the first Canadian city to sign up for the international event late last year, and has since been joined by most other GTA municipalities, Montreal, Vancouver, Ottawa, and many more—close to 50 cities across the country at last count.

Do you think you can turn your lights off for an hour? The WWF is challenging people around the world to do just that at 8 p.m. local time on March 29. The global event is called Earth Hour, and the goal is to raise awareness of global warming. Last year's inaugural event took place in Sydney, Australia, where more than 2 million people and 2100 businesses turned off their lights. The result was a 10% reduction in the demand for electricity during the hour-long action.