Cometh The Hour, Cometh The Caring People Of Chicago
The Age
Monday March 31, 2008
IT IS an awe-inspiring sight, Chicago.
By day it is urban canyons and boomtime skyscrapers. At night it is a jewelled city, the crisp winter air alights from the towers built in a time of enduring optimism.The inland sea Lake Michigan laps its feet before disappearing into the horizon to meet some unseen shore.But a different mood from the one that created the soaring metropolis, more reflective and less confident, overtook it in Saturday's Earth Hour when the city dimmed and its panoramic skyline was a shadow of itself.It was no less awe-inspiring for that, as thousands of its citizens contemplated terms unimagined in those ebullient moods when the city was taking shape: global warming, carbon footprint."Global warming is now mainstream," said Richard Moss, the vice-president of climate change for Earth Hour organiser WWF. He was at Navy Pier to see lights out first hand. "I think what's changed is people are beginning to notice the signs of climate change, to see that things are not just the same way that they used to be. It's different for everybody. For some it's about record low sea ice in the Arctic or you see (Antarctica's) Wilkins ice shelf breaking apart. For other people it's thinking about (hurricane) Katrina on the Gulf Coast a couple of years ago that's a harbinger of things to come."People begin to connect these dots, they see a pattern and they understand it's something that's going to affect them."Elsewhere in the city, different people in different ways acknowledged the moment.Chicago bars bowed to Earth Hour with green-themed cocktails and offered organic beers and vodkas, while the Allerton Hotel restaurant offered a special menu prepared, without electricity or heat, of seafood and avocado, followed by a salad of cured salmon and baby spinach. The theatre district dipped its marquee displays, as did the baseballers at Wrigley Field. Sixteen thousand bulbs on the 45-metre ferris wheel at Navy Pier went out.Families turned off their televisions and rediscovered, by candlelight, board games and conversation. University Centre hosted an acoustic music concert. In the city renowned for electrifying the blues, they were taking it back to the way it was when the blues was born in the Deep South.But this was not a moment of total conformity. From the waterfront it was apparent that this was a movement confronted with recalcitrants. Something like four floors of the Aon building remained fully lit through Earth Hour.In West Town, Kindy Kruller, a sustainability activist with Chicago's Local Economic and Employment Development Council, was hosting a rooftop party."I am always looking for ways to integrate my work with my life and we have a shared roof among six flats. Like Sydney, Chicago has lot of landmarks. To see them going dark, there's a real novelty to it," Ms Kruller said.Northern Illinois power company ComEd estimated savings from the dim-down to be 5% of normal Saturday night consumption."The reduction in electricity usage in the City of Chicago and northern Illinois during Earth Hour is estimated to be 537 megawatt hours, the equivalent of reducing nearly 840,000 pounds (381 tonnes) of carbon dioxide emissions," the company said.theage.com.auWatch video reports and view photographs of Earth Hour being marked around the globe.
© 2008 The Age