How not to waste an hour

Posted by Conor O'Neill on Sunday, March 29, 2009

We’ve just had the third annual waste of time known as Earth Hour where millions of people worldwide pretend to do something useful about global warming and turn off lights for an hour. For 99.999999% of those people, that’ll be it for another 365 days. End result for the Earth, big fat zero. Perhaps if we take all the energy expended by the media covering this story, we may even have a net negative?

chamberlain2
chamberlain2

Imagine if, instead, those millions of people went outside, dug up a square metre or two of their perfect lawns and planted some vegetable seeds? Or if they lived in an apartment in Ireland, they contacted Irish Allotments about organising patches in their locality?

digforvicspade
digforvicspade

Then instead of some silly hour-long nonsense they could:

  • Reduce CO2 throught the action of the plants
  • Reduce petrol consumption through less shopping
  • Reduce fuel miles by not buying foreign vegetables
  • Save money
  • Get their kids outside
  • Take part in Seed Saver schemes
  • Eat healthier
  • Get fit We could call it Gardener’s World :-)

Of course taking care of this veg patch takes a wee bit longer than one hour a year and isn’t news-worthy so maybe we should just turn off the lights and keep playing mushroom instead.


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