On Saturday at 8.30pm we celebrated Earth Hour. In our case it meant the great switch off happened (great feeling that and easy when what’s on TV is rubbish) and the candles came out.
Earth Hour began in 2007 as a small grassroots movement in Sydney, Australia. Organised here by the World Wildlife Fund Earth it is now observed each year by hundreds of millions of people around the world. For 60 minutes people in more than 7,000 cities in over 190 countries switch off their lights as a symbolic gesture of solidarity to show they care about our planet and its future.
Placed on the table with reverence is Greta Thunberg’s The Climate Book. I kid you not – it’s sobering reading. Cleverly she has got a massive number of people who know what they are talking about to explain their bit of it in two pages. So, you can read two pages a day and gradually give yourself all the wisdom. It’s a bit scary. I’m sure most of us prefer not to think about what is happening to our planet but of course that’s part of the problem. Getting people to think about it might just mean that they start to care about it and then do something and make changes in their life.
We’ve just bought an electric car so I can go all self-righteous about it but it needs a lot more than that.
I suppose the central question is how can a world that always seems at war somehow come together and be in the same team on behalf of the planet. How do we persuade the powers that be to take zero emissions and climate change seriously?
This is what we are exploring later in the year in our show We’re Gonna Change the World. It’s tricky. Too many vested interests.
I’d like to think that the young people of today will be the generation that did more than talk about the problems. It won’t be easy for them but to me a lot of the younger generation today know more about the problems and they realise that selfishness and greed has to be called out. The world is evolving. Look at how we produce our energy now. But it’s not enough. We know the clock is ticking, and we can’t pretend it’s not happening anymore.
Maybe it’s the little things each of us can do. We’ve decided to plant a tree for every new person who joins Theatretrain. Now what’s next?
