Calming the wind

It is Saturday, March 29, 2008 – four minutes past eight o’clock in the evening. Fifty six minutes to go. I’m sitting in my candle lit living room enjoying a silence of which I’ve never experienced in this house. There is no hum from the refrigerator, no noise from the tv. Nothing. My electric meter outside is not turning at all; I checked it just to be sure.

I’m participating in Earth Hour – a global climate change awareness campaign launched by the World Wildlife Fund in Australia in an effort to get people to do something about climate change.

Forty nine minutes left now. This isn’t so bad really. It’s not like I use much electricity on a daily basis anyway. I’m pretty good about not leaving unnecessary lights on. All the light bulbs in my house are the squiggly, energy saving, compact fluorescents and all of the electronics in my entertainment center are routed through a surge bar which I shut off whenever I go out of town. So I know that my shutting the power down for this hour isn’t going to save the planet.

But it’s the principal of it that matters to me. I am only one of roughly six billion people on this earth but the fact remains that I am one of those six billion people - meaning that my actions have just as much potential to affect this earth as any one else’s. If I can completely shut the power off to my home for an hour and not really be bothered by it, why couldn’t other people act on the same principal and take small measures such as shutting off a few lights they don’t need or unplugging the electronics they’re not using? In Sydney, Australia for example, the simple act of shutting off some lights will result in something like a 10% reduction in the city’s carbon emissions for this hour. Granted, that may not be a lot in the grand scheme of things but the principal is there: If one city can reduce their carbon emissions by that much for one hour, how much could be saved if everyone put a little extra effort into making a difference throughout the year? Then take that one city and multiply that across thousands and thousands of other cities and the difference we make becomes pretty impressive.

Thirty four minutes to go. In the silence, I’m noticing things I’ve never noticed before. I can hear the wind much clearer now. I always noticed it when it would rattle my exhaust vents or slap leaves against my window but I never heard it like I hear it now. It seems to have multiple voices. I hear one voice moaning through the bare branches of the ash trees in the front yard and then bending around the upwind corner of the house. Another voice seems to hum across the pasture that in recent days has started to green up seemingly in defiance of the winter-like conditions that won’t seem to let go of the region. I take solace in the greening of the pasture because I know that despite its lack of a meterological degree, the pasture is a better predictor of spring’s arrival than the weatherman who tells me lies every night from within my now silent television set.

When I listen closer I hear yet another windy voice; this one more distant, more melancholy, and much broader and far-reaching. It’s a voice that growls over the distant landscape of ridges and valleys; barren crop fields and wooded draws. I resist the urge to dub the sound as ‘haunting’ as that has become too cliché in reference to the wind. Nevertheless, there is an unsettling aura about the sound of this subtle, yet noticeable wind. It almost seems as if nature is angry. It seems as if it is restraining itself almost to the boiling point and the distant wind I hear is just the pinhole leak foretelling us that the top is about to blow off violently. And it’s not that I can blame poor Mother Nature for being so dismayed. Every wind gust whips up precious topsoil from crop fields left barren throughout the winter. Every drop of rain carries with it sediment and human-applied chemicals which gravity ensures that each eventually finds its way to the lowest possible point where it builds up to toxic levels affecting practically all life it encounters. Not to mention that every ray of sunlight – the lifeblood of the planet – is filtered through tons and tons of chemicals and human-contributed emissions before ever reaching the ground and nourishing that which allows us to eek out the feeble existence we use to pour more emissions into the air. When our blood is toxified, we call it poison; when the earth’s blood is toxified, we call it progress.

Only two minutes to go now. In the same hour that would have otherwise been spent brainlessly watching two sitcoms on television, millions of tons of carbon emissions have been kept from reaching the atmosphere across the globe (okay, maybe not millions). It feels good to be part of something so far reaching and potentially so inspiring. The wind still sounds angry but at least I’m doing my part to calm it down.

The hour is up now. I could turn my power back on and go back to watching tv or surfing the net or doing whatever this electronic society allows me. But there will be more shows to watch tomorrow. Right now, I’m content to listen to the wind.