We’ve been electronically lobbied by Whitney, a 5th grader we’ve never met. Her e-mail was detailed and passionate: Ask Tribune readers to turn out the lights this Saturday night, March 29, she pleaded. Just leave them off for an hour, between 8 and 9 o’clock, she said. There are plenty of fun things you could do to fill that time, she reasoned. Play a game in the dark, she proposed. Or, she suggested, go to bed early — excellent advice for our sleep-deprived nation.
Why such passion for a lightless Saturday evening? Global warming. Whitney and her classmates are publicizing Earth Hour 2008, a World Wildlife Fund effort to get citizens around the world to turn off their lights for one hour, at 8 p.m. local time. Think of it as a rolling blackout on a global scale. The point: to illustrate the individual part each of us can play in the collective effort that will be necessary to curb global warming.
It’s an idea that would be perfectly obvious to our grandparents and great-grandparents: the shared sacrifice that helped them through the Great Depression and World War II. For Americans born after that era, collective sacrifice has been seldom demanded and even less frequently offered. We’ve lived, for the most part, in a land of abundance and a time of plenty. But combating climate change has the potential to knit the world community together. The shared goals: clean air, potable water and arable land crucial to our future prosperity.
This is the more interdependent world in which we should live. It is Whitney’s world.
