Several parts of the city plunged into darkness on Saturday night between 8.30pm and 9.30pm after hundreds of Mumbaikars joined the global Earth Hour celebration by switching off their lights.
The Earth hour, which was conceptualized by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) in 2007 for Australia, has now spread to more than 7,000 cities all over the world.
The event is considered symbolic toward collectively devoting an hour towards environmental consciousness among people, rather than actually saving on electricity through it. People from over the world come together to raise pertinent environmental issues of global warming, pollution, deforestation and the much required environmental sustainability that people need to incorporate in their lives.
This year WWF is campaigning for use of renewables as opposed to naturally depleting resources. They have initiated a crowd funding campaign to equip villages in the Sunderban, West Bengal with solar lighting to reduce tiger- human conflicts and are also encouraging people to use household appliances that run on renewables.
The Young Environmentalist's Programme Trust (YEPT) which is a Powai based environmental NGO raised their voices against the exclusion of the subject of Environmental Studies (EVS) from the school syllabus and the banning of plastic bags. "The younger generation is the future of the country, if we don't let them learn about the significance of conserving the world they live in, who else will. We have also distributed cloth bags to people to encourage reuse of bags. When all the states have banned plastic bags, why can Mumbai not effectively implement a similar ban?" , asks Elsie Gabriel the founder of YEPT.
Landmarks all over the world like the Empire state building, Mount Rushmore, Niagara falls, Sydney Opera House and many more have participated in the Earth hour by shutting off their lights for an hour. Even TV channels such as Cartoon network and National Geographic channel have suspended their broadcast in the past during earth hour.
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