Let's Be Tolerant Towards Earth Hour Believers

AND so we solemnly approach tonight's Earth Hour. A mock-paschal festival of carbon penance, confessional expiation and green rebirth - this year with Martha Stewart-like tips for making yours aesthetically pleasing and charmingly rustic - it was inaugurated by the zealously metro-druidic for the great, impressionable unwashed. The darkness is meant to symbolise the looming catastrophe we've brought upon ourselves and remind us it can still be averted - provided we accept the warmening Logos. The ceremony and those most ardent about it resemble many of the televangelical and cult movements of recent times. Anti-modern millenarianism is the thing they have in common. There is even a resemblance to the margins of the Fatima movement, transfixed as those pious believers are with an always imminent Great Chastisement and the necessity of converting a sinful world.

But come on, say the sheepish followers and cheerful boosters of life, is there anything absolutely bad about it? Even if it's nonsense, does it actually hurt anyone? Well, there's nothing wrong with making a rational decision to cut your electricity bill.

“... it doesn't hurt to turn off the TV, get out the candles and have a flickering night of nineteenth century romance with someone special.”

There's nothing bad about deciding to spend less time looking at screens and more time talking to your family, housemates or goldfish. On a Saturday night, it certainly doesn't hurt to turn off the television, get out the candles and have a flickering night of nineteenth century romance with someone special. But Earth Hour is none of those reasonable, spontaneous, individualistic things. It is a packaged, collectivised, advertised product. And the product doesn't even do anything. Energy retailers chief executive Cameron O'Reilly says today that "despite widespread concern about the threat of climate change, household energy use was still principally driven by price." The whole liturgical exercise, then, is a faith-based initiative.

But note well: some refuse blood transfusions for spiritually symbolic reasons and - hey, judge not - WWF and SMH Earth Hour dogmatists believe that in turning down the lights they can give effect to a higher, intangible goal - sometimes called "awareness." Just as Pat Robertson believes AIDS was God's punishment for our sexual hedonism, they believe a global temperature gauge that hasn't shifted in several years is Mother Earth's punishment for our plasma screens and 4WDs. But we should be tolerant towards the darkenist belief system. I'm always pleasantly surprised by the under-appreciated religiosity in so many articulate darkenists. They'll mention solar panels at the Vatican, the pope's environmentalism, even biblical injunctions concerned with stewardship of Yahweh's splendid creation. They are searching for the Truth. I say it isn't for us to mock them for doing so in the dark.