Earth Hour

My parents guilted me into observing Earth Hour through their gushing e-mail telling me how they had their lights off for an entire hour.

So, here I am, at work (as usual, ugh!), with the lights turned off. It's all symbolic though; my computer is still running as I need to finish up some reports. I am half tempted to turn the lights back on as I'm trying to look at my notes and finish updating my lab notebook through this white glow from my computer screen.

This futile annual one-hour practice reminds me of an article I read a while ago. Earth-concious people were hotly debating whether one-use disposable diapers were more eco-friendly after all than cloth diapers that constantly needed to be washed and scalded in hot water and detergent. Disposable diapers consume plastics and papers whilst reusable cloth diapers go through many washing machine runs (typically, unless one is willing to boil water on a gas stove and do them by hand). The writer astutely observed, however, that either choice outweighs the much smaller carbon-footprint left by the decision of not having a baby at all in the first place.