By Chris Howe

Now I’m not normally the kind of person that listens to talkback radio, but last year I was moved to call Michael Laws. He wanted to know how something as ridiculously simple as flicking off a light switch was going to make a difference to global warming. He didn’t wait for the answer, shouted at me for 45 seconds and then put the phone down.

Of course the point of Earth Hour, which Michael missed completely, is that switching off your lights for an hour won’t save the planet by itself. Climate change is a huge challenge but it will only be solved if enough people around the world demand action. Mobilising millions of people is where Earth Hour comes in.

I’m not often complimentary about our friends on the other side of the Tasman, but we all have to give them credit for coming up with what most people – including me – thought was a pretty crazy idea. No doubt they were in a Sydney pub, in 2007, when they thought, why not get everyone to turn their lights off for an hour, all at the same time? How cool would that be?

The first time most of us heard about Earth Hour was just before it happened in March 2007, and none of us really thought it was anything more than a gimmick. How wrong we were. In just three years it’s grown to be the world’s biggest mass environmental movement ever.

There are still detractors of course. When I predicted that a million New Zealanders would take part I’m not sure many people really believed me. In fact polling showed it was one and a half million, and that was just the adults. This year even Tom Jones is supporting Earth Hour – he attended the launch on 17th February at the Langham Hotel in Auckland, and just before he disappeared under a barrage of flung knickers, he said.

Personally I think that the reason everyone’s excited about Earth Hour is that it puts people first. You decide what you want to do and where you want to do it. One couple I know who have just got married are re-creating their honeymoon in their back garden. They went camping on their honeymoon, so the tent is going up and the candles are coming out. They think it will be very romantic…in fact we’re looking very carefully at the stats to see if there’s a higher than expected number births 9 months after Earth Hour.

It’s obvious from the way online communities have grown that people like being part of something collective. Earth Hour reached 1 billion people around the world in 2009. There simply isn’t a bigger worldwide community that you can belong to.  And the creativity it has unleashed is mind-blowing – just look on YouTube or Flickr at some of the truly amazing videos and photos that people have taken of their Earth Hour experiences.

Of course I managed to meet only a fraction of the people who took part last year, but they were all just buzzing with the excitement of it all. One of the most memorable moments was racing back across Auckland – on foot, I hasten to add – from the Ecostore where Malcolm Rands and his family were playing cheesy covers on their ukuleles, looking up at the SkyTower with its lights off (except the important red one on the top), and getting back to the Langham where Rachel Broadmore and her team had put on a stunning candle-lit event, getting there just in time to meet a whole load of people who wanted to know what they could do next, and how they could get involved after the night.

The thing is, Earth Hour is a lot of fun. But if it was just about having fun, there’d be no point. Earth Hour is about climate change, plain and simple. The sceptics may spend millions trying to convince us otherwise, but we have to face it: climate change is real, and it will affect us and the generations to come. How badly it affects them is up to us. We are responsible for what will happen to the world they will inherit. I for one want my children to be living in a safe, cool world, not something out of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

One thing that I believe very strongly indeed, is that in the great global switch off, your voice is as important as anyone else’s. While many leaders are supporting the action, such as the secretary general of the UN, Ban Ki-Moon, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and our own Helen Clark so too are millions of people from all walks of life who understand the need to act has never been greater.

If you’re doubtful about taking part, let me ask you this: it will be fun, so what have you got to lose? Go on, get involved. It’s not often you get a chance to feel truly connected to millions of other people around the world. Perhaps it’s enough to persuade even the most ardent talkback host to switch off just one tiny little light on 27 March, 2010, 8.30-9.30pm.