On our kitchen bulletin board we used to have a dog-eared Mercator-style photograph of the world taken in, I think, 2001.
The image was shot from space at night, and at a glance it showed where on earth people could use artificial light when the sun goes down.
You could see the shape of the oceans by the glimmering of electric light along their edges. Large parts of Europe and the United States were lit up like, well, Los Angeles.
The entire length of Japan blazed in the darkness. Africa, partly because of poverty and partly because it’s just so big, had only pinpoints showing areas of concentrated population.
And it was obvious where the border lay between North Korea and South Korea, because north of the 38th parallel everything was pitch black.
As I enjoyed pointing out to the children, this wasn’t a map that showed electricity: It was a picture of progress, prosperity, and freedom. For by their darkness, shall ye recognize poverty and tyranny!
But now, this coming Saturday, we’re all supposed to embrace the darkness. A new campaign to make us all behave a little more like North Koreans is hoping to persuade people to turn off their lights from 8:30-9:30 pm local time for something called Earth Hour.
The campaign started in Australia two years ago with a lot of homes and businesses going dark. Last year, the lights went off for 60 minutes at the Sydney Opera House and the Colosseum in Rome.
This year, the Great Pyramids at Giza, the Alhambra in Spain, and New York’s Chrysler Building are all switching off for an hour.
Activists are trying to get a billion people around the world to sit in darkness in what’s being billed as the first global election. The results will be used to pressure policy makers at an upcoming UN climate change conference in Copenhagen.
“We must change our ways,” says Earth Hour supporter UN Secretary Ban Ki-moon, who had the good fortune to grow up in the brightly lit portion of the Korean peninsula. “This is the path of the future. We must walk it together.”
On a website set up to promote the thing, we’re given a stark choice: “You can VOTE EARTH by switching off your lights for one hour. Or you can vote global warming by leaving your lights on.”
That’s the choice?
Actually, there are plenty of other options. For instance, you might choose instead to sit quietly in a well-lit living room reading Bjorn Lomborg’s “The Skeptical Environmentalist.” You might choose to go salsa dancing in a gaily-lit club, so as to enjoy a weekend night out.
Or if you have the misfortune to live in one of the world’s more blighted and corrupt corners, you might have to sit in the usual darkness caused by the usual blackouts wishing for some other engine of carbon dioxide than your own nostrils.
The witty disbelievers at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) in Washington have their own idea – a Human Achievement Hour to coincide with Saturday night’s global orgy of dark earthiness.
In a press release, CEI cheerfully applauded organizations such as the Kennedy Center, Wal-Mart, Target, and the United States Marine Corps for keeping the lights on (and, in the case of the Marines, for continuing “combat and humanitarian operations around the world”) throughout Saturday night.
“We salute the people who keep the lights on and produce the energy that helps make human achievement possible,” said Myron Ebell, CEI’s director of energy and global warming policy.
Quite right. This Saturday night, I hope you’ll join me in causing a beautiful blaze of light to shine out your windows. Let’s turn on some appliances, too, what do you say?
We can send our own powerful message to Copenhagen: Americans are people of light and progress and innovation, not peasants willing to scrabble about in darkness.
Examiner columnist Meghan Cox Gurdon is a former foreign correspondent and a regular contributor to the books pages of The Wall Street Journal. Her Examiner column appears on Thursdays.
