For sixyears Earth Hour  has taken place every year. It is a global event to raise awareness about the need to take action on climate change by turning off the lights for one hour. Every year more and more cities, buisnesses and people participate in Earth Hour. This year over 6700 cities and communities in over 150 countries took part in the biggest Earth Hour event ever! And I was one of them!

Since I heard about Earth Hour I wanted to be part of it. So I started planning a little event with a couple of people who I knew from the WWF Youth Community in a little town named Plön  for Earth Hour 2012. After having painted jam glasses beautifully in green and blue colours like the Earth and organising a lot of stuff the day of Earth Hour was finally there.

We met up at 6:30pm at the market square of Plön to arrange everything. It was a freezing cold and very windy day, not the best condition for an outdoor event with candles. First, we distributed Earth Hour flyers to people walking by to inform them about the upcoming event. Then we began setting up our information desk, putting information about Earth Hour, Climate Change etc on a table. With our hands freezing we drew the Earth with chalk on the ground. The most difficult thing of all was to inflame the tea lights but we finally managed to create a big 60 out of tea lights as symbol for the 60 minutes of Earth Hour. We also put up a guessing game including facts about meat consumption to create awarness about the consequences of meat consumption for our environment. Did you know that every German eats in average 62kg meat per year?

Then it was nearly 8:30 pm. The light which illuminated the little town hall was supposed to be turned off for the Earth Hour but only minutes before it wasn’t even turned on. “Well, doesn’t matter,“ I thought “like this even more energy is saved.“ At exactly 8:30 pm the spotlight of the Plön castle was turned of. What a moment for me and the others after all the time we spend organisating the event!

On Facebook over 100 people registered to join our event, but in fact it were only more or less 20 people who joined us. That could have been because of cold weather. We spent the hour with giving interviews for the local press, informing people about environmental issues, listening to guitar music and keeping ourselves warm at the fire place.

Of course not everything worked well at our event. For example the church in front of which we stood was illuminated during the Earth Hour as well as the store windows around us. That was a pitty because like this it wasn’t totally dark. Nevertheless we had a nice little Earth Hour event and it felt great being part of such a big global event.

It was the first time I have ever been part of an organizational team and we all learned out of the things that went wrong. Next year we want to start organising earlier to make our next Earth Hour event even bigger and better! Next Earth Hour takes part on March 30th 2013! You can also part of it! Don’t hesitate organisating something, it doesn’t has to be perfect! Just try it and you’ll see it makes you feel great when everything works out well 😉

Greetings from Germany to all of you!

Sarah 🙂

• Date: 30th March 2012
  
• Location: Plön, Germany