Lights Out Los Angeles

Saturday, October 20, 2007 is the date of the Lights Out Los Angeles. This is a city and county wide effort to reduce our carbon footprint for just one hour. This effort is supported by a myriad of organizations ranging from Southern California Edison to big name retailers like Gap Inc. to Rainforest Action Network.
Sydney, Australia home to 2.2 million residents turned off the lights for 1 hour and reduced 25 tons of carbondioxide which is equivalent to taking 49,000 cars off the road for 60 minutes. Los Angeles is joining San Francisco's effort and it is estimated that the combined effort will remove ten times more carbon emissions as Sydney's. KPCC's Pat Morrison interviewed Lights Out America director of operations Brian Scott (listen to interview) who provided insight into the purposes behind this effort. I believe this is a worthy undertaking for many reasons. My primary reason is that we as a society consume too many non-renewable resources. Oil, natural gas, water etc... I believe that we should, step by step, become less wasteful and look for ways to improve our world. I would say "improve our environment" but that word has become poisoned by ultracons, i.e. ultraconservatives. I by no means am saying that we should live in trees, sing folk songs and stop shaving, I am saying that we need to be more fully aware of the positive and negative impacts of our decisions on our surroundings. One concern of mine is overfishing and pollution in our oceans. In a commentary by Mark Hertsgaard, The Nation's environmental correspondent, laid out some surprising information:

"Climate change was the big environmental story of 2006, but the alarming state of the oceans was not far behind. Topping the list was a study published in Science that projected that edible sea life will completely disappear by 2048 if current trends of overfishing and pollution continue. "Our children will see a world without seafood if we don't change things," commented Boris Worm, lead author of the study, which found three years ago that 29 percent of fish and shellfish populations had collapsed. A separate report by the United Nations Environmental Program announced there are at least 200 oxygen-starved "dead zones" in the world's seas, caused by excessive runoff of fertilizers, sewage and other land-based pollution. Further worrisome evidence came from the central Pacific Ocean, where Greenpeace researchers took samples from a swarm of floating plastic that stretched across an area the size of Texas. Suspended in a stagnant vortex of currents, the plastic came primarily from mainland consumers in Asia and North America. The Los Angeles River alone flushes enough trash each year to fill the Rose Bowl two stories high, according to a superb exposé in the Los Angeles Times.".....read FULL COMMENTARY

We really have limited knowledge about what lies beneath our oceans and blindly we pillage and poison it not knowing the real damage we are causing. In recent weeks an alarming number of dead blue whales washed ashore on California beaches. Blue whales are listed as a federally endangered species. We in Southern California could do things like landscaping our homes with drought tolerant plants. We could also let our grass grow a little longer so that it would require less water to stay healthy. We could try walking or riding a bike to travel short distances instead of driving. We could carpool more often. These are but a few ideas that are relatively painless. The Lights Out organization is also asking that as a part of our participation we install one CFL light bulb. Hopefully these efforts and those like it help us to permanently alter our habits and have a clean bright future.