A Skeptic's View of 'Earth Hour' and Crowdfunding Environmentalism

Earth Hour is a campaign, now eight years old, on behalf of the World Wildlife Fund encouraging people to turn out non-essential lights in their homes and businesses one day a year for an hour as a "symbol for their commitment to the planet." The Earth Hour mission also includes pushing a more traditional spate of green actions, like girl scouts installing LED lights, rigging Indian villages with solar power, and pushing legislation. As of 2014, it is also a "crowdsourcing platform for the planet," e.g. a future-branded vehicle for raising money for other assorted WWF activities.

The hour itself is tonight at 8:30 p.m. (local time), if you're interested in expressing your "commitment" to the Earth while not exerting any actual effort or demonstrating the slightest capacity for real-world sacrifice. I understand, of course, that anything that calls attention to our whole Earth situation is good, even if it's the smallest amount of good, but maybe we should be asking if campaigns like this that ask for so little are all that helpful in conveying the real-life 2014 gravity of our ecological/climate situation, which will not actually be solved by being more aware of household power usage.

I guess a more fair way of looking at it would be as a way to call attention to WWF's many various (and worthy) green campaigns, an advertisement of sorts. If in the event that your neighborhood or town is noticeably dark, and a large percentage of that neighborhood or town is privy to the Earth Hour campaign, then maybe just maybe it will have had some effect. That said, public action that will only be recognized by those participating in that public action (via awareness of it) is kind of a tautology, no?

Anyhow, while I'm being a dick, there's a quick point to be made about WWF's related crowdfunding campaigns. You can find them all here, and I'm not about to say that any one of them doesn't deserve lots of money, but this is pop environmentalism at its very most pop and there's a point to be made about that and how it merges with the larger question of crowdfunding in science. Should things like this be subject to the crowd at all? The crowd after all isn't made of scientists and doesn't make decisions based on greatest impact/most scientific merit. It tends to make decisions based on emotions, on cuteness and fads and to what they can most relate in their day to day lives.

That's not a body I'm very into trusting with science or big questions of Earth-fixing. The Earth Hour crowdfunding campaigns all deal with very significant amounts of money and range in mission from training puppies to saving the Amazon. Giving control over to the crowd seems to admit some amount of helplessness, I think, in the grand green scheme, that there is not an ordered and objective way to get at the larger, interconnected problems in the environment and instead we might as well let the people at home pick favorites.

So, that's your asshole take on Earth Hour. You should probably ignore it and just celebrate popular action of any kind because maybe that's just what we have to work with. Our scientifically determined mass-action will have to remain an illusory best case, subject to the whims of politics and other means of amassing deep feelings.