The Next Eco-Warriors (25 page)

To be honest, back then I could relate to those who were questioning what climate change was all about. I was pretty much your average guy, and issues like this had only recently come to the forefront of my concerns since I had joined WWF Australia in 2002. My journey in conservation to date had been amazing and inspiring but was often also fueled by frustration. I'd met some heroic characters who had shown what could be done, but I'd also struggled against a bureaucratic element within the conservation movement that, at least in my view, saw conservation as endless policy discussions and committee meetings. I had come very close on a number of occasions to finding myself being “managed out” of the organization.

Yet for me, conservation was more than committee meetings—it had been my life. One of my dreams growing up as a kid in rural England was to dive on the Great Barrier Reef. Within a week of first arriving in Australia when I was thirty-two, I got the opportunity to do just that. I quickly found myself on the back of a dive boat at Port Douglas, a few meters underwater, not looking at pristine reefs, but instead at a wasteland. I had imagined that I would see a flourishing rainbow of corals and fish, but the part of the reef that I was diving on looked almost as if a bulldozer had driven right over the top of it. This part of the Great Barrier Reef had been reduced to mere rubble. I couldn't believe it. I was expecting to find a wonderland streaming with life and color, not a lone cuttlefish in a ghost land. Was this really the famous Great Barrier Reef I had always dreamed of?

Once out of the water, I quickly learned some of the causes for the reef's demise, including climate change. When I hit the shore, my interest had been piqued, and what was happening to our atmosphere was no longer an abstract concept but a harsh reality reshaping life on land.

It was the beginning of a journey for me. I had heard about climate change, but like most people at the time, my understanding was mixed up in confused, semi-factual conversations about ozone and CFCs and other scientific terms. It was big, but I didn't know how big, and I hadn't had anything but a passing interest until now.

All that seemed long ago as I took Phil's advice and took some deep breaths, soaking it all in. That night, millions of people from all walks of life in Sydney were sharing a moment of hope and action. Yet, perhaps ironically, Earth Hour was born out of frustration. A growing frustration with the mainstream public's lack of engagement in the fight against climate change.

Among my colleagues there was a realization that fear, anger, and protest— the traditional approach of climate campaigners—wasn't motivating people any longer but alienating the great majority. And yet we were dealing with an issue that, if you really wanted to be serious about solutions, would have to involve everybody—citizens, business, schoolchildren—the whole lot. This may seem obvious now, but at the time it was a radical discussion. It was almost as if we had forgotten the 60 percent in the middle and were only talking to the 20 percent that agreed with us. Bang in the middle was the vast majority, a slumbering giant of public opinion that environmental campaigns were ignoring.

We realized we had to think more street party than street protest. We had to bring communities together, not against each other. We had to find leaders in business, sports, music, and community groups across the world, and they needed to be from all walks of life. And I knew that we needed to reach far beyond the green movement if we were to effect any real change.

The conversation had started less than a year ago in May 2006 at a breakfast at the Hilton Hotel. I had gathered together a small group of creative minds from WWF and advertising company Leo Burnett to discuss the dilemma that faced us. We were all throwing ideas around, but it wasn't until my WWF colleague Liz Potter spoke that the vision of Earth Hour began. It had been the buzz in our circles for weeks; somebody just needed to say it.

During an oil fuel crisis in Thailand, the government had asked people to turn off their lights to save energy. It was a simple idea, but powerful. And we
began to wonder, would something like that work in Sydney? The reaction at the table was mixed. Some said yes. Others were doubtful, saying it would never work. One said outright that we should prepare for failure. But the guys from Leo Burnett loved the idea, and I could see their creative minds going into overdrive.

I believed, personally, that we could do it, but the challenge would be to find the right partners and convince them to help us. The idea of a lights-out event may not have been new, but making it actually work on such a grand scale was. No one had done this before. I mean, where do you start? How do you make the lights go off in a city? Who do you need to help you? Who are the heroes? Would people do it at all? Were we delusional?

For the time being we labeled the project “The Big Flick” and then set out to try and make it happen. Before I knew it, a meeting had been arranged for me with Fairfax Media. And that's how I met Phil. Phil was the group editor at Fairfax, one of Australia's largest media organizations, and was keen to help. Before I knew it, we were at Coast restaurant in Darling Harbour, discussing climate change, the Big Flick, and a partnership with Fairfax. Tall, bald, and straight to the point, Phil was a newspaper man through and through. Later, I'd learn that he was a true believer in the power and responsibility of a newspaper in the community that it served, something that would make him a prime mover behind the campaign.

A few rounds of Crown Lager later and the conversation was flowing. Armed with a draft of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, I showed a graph that displayed the consequences of a small rise in temperature on the Great Barrier Reef. I wanted to make a very clear link between the need for action and the size of the issue. But it turned out that Phil was better informed on climate change than I had expected. He had already registered that this had the potential to be a major political issue for the incumbent government and, more important, for the society that Fairfax served. I took confidence from the fact that almost immediately he was talking “how to,” not “whether or not to.” Having Fairfax on board was a real success because it meant that we had two of Sydney's major newspapers involved, the
Sydney Morning Herald
and the
Sun Herald
, giving us a level of influence that would
open many more doors and reach a mass audience. We now had what we believed would be the key to open this door.

The Leo Burnett team soon did away with the Big Flick title and converted it from sounding like a crappy commercial radio station competition to something far more inspiring. Todd Sampson, our leading person at Leo Burnett and one of the best creative minds I had come across, presented the new name and logo. It was a simple and beautiful piece of art —the planet as a sixty, representing sixty minutes. He said we would call it Earth Hour. Capturing the desire of people in Sydney—and perhaps, one day, beyond Sydney—to spend an hour reflecting on the state of the planet. I loved it immediately. It captured the energy, scope, and focus of what we were trying to do.

With Fairfax and Leo Burnett behind us, we soon secured the political support of the mayor of Sydney, Clover Moore, and the then premier of New South Wales, Morris Iemma. This was important step because the government controlled all of the emergency services and owned lots of the buildings in the city, so without their support, any attempt to get the lights out would be nothing but a pipe dream.

By February, we had formed a hodgepodge team of volunteers, and everyone was pulling favors all over the city, asking for advice and assistance wherever we could get it. Within a week of us announcing the campaign, one hundred corporations had signed up. But what was much more amazing than that was the groundswell of public support. We were meeting extraordinary people from all walks of life—male strippers and clergymen, top chefs and fish-and–chips diner owners. Everybody seemed to want to be part of Earth Hour. Each week, our team gathered around the boardroom table and discussed problems. And each week, we saw our progress, as we ticked off another iconic building in the city that had agreed to participate. For an idea that some had said would never work, the momentum felt impossible at times. But there we were, beating all odds.

However, I knew it was one thing to agree to participate, but the real question was a logistic one: how do you actually get the lights to go off in the enormous buildings where the lights were left on all night? We discovered a world
of unknown heroes—facilities managers. A facilities manager at the Intercontinental Hotel mobilized his friends across the hotel industry to get the hotels in Sydney to come on board. We were soon humbled by the knowledge that many people had been trying to get the message through on energy conservation for years, and Earth Hour was simply giving them the platform from which to work.

We started to get a sense that everyone did actually care. The response that we were getting from CEOs, sports clubs, and schools was that most people were concerned about climate change but the issue was so big that they felt powerless and therefore unable to do anything about it. The message we kept hearing was, “I'm just one person. What can I do?” In some ways, I felt powerless myself. Crossing my fingers and hoping that on the night of Earth Hour people would mobilize and act as one. But I knew only time would tell.

After months of busy organizing, suddenly the day was here. On the morning of Earth Hour, I decided I'd go for a head clean by taking a dip in the ocean at Bronte Beach. I dived in, trying to dispel the growing sense of anxiety gnawing away at my stomach. I knew that we had done everything we could, but now that it was supposed to be happening, I wasn't all that confident that it was going to work. I got out of the water, feeling not much less anxious than before, only to realize that my car keys were in my pocket and were now thoroughly drenched. This was just what I needed, I thought, as I left my car there and dialed a cab, hoping that this wasn't a sign of disasters to come.

That afternoon, after doing a television interview for which I needed a lot more takes than usual, I got into a taxi and headed for the office. Making small talk on the ride there, the cab driver asked me what I was doing over the weekend. When I told him I was coordinating Earth Hour, he launched into an
expletive-rich, aggressive rant about how totally stupid it was, how climate change was a joke, and how we were wasting our time. Ordinarily, comments like these would have been water off a duck's back, but today nerves were getting the better of me. When I got to the office, I found that the lights were still on. And I thought to myself, if we couldn't get the lights off at WWF, how on earth was the whole city going to do it? For the first time, I really started to feel the pressure.

With two hours to go, I got a call. “Hi there, it's Phil here. Just been getting a coffee ... there's Earth Hour logos everywhere, and I'm hearing people at the tables talking about doing Earth Hour. How's everything going at your end?” Phil's timing had been perfect, giving me a greatly needed boost in confidence. If people were talking about doing Earth Hour in the coffee shops, then perhaps this was going to work after all.

The final few hours were a blur of television interviews and meeting and greeting guests at our small event at Circular Quay on Sydney Harbour. And then it was time, 7:30 PM I took a deep breath in those final few moments as time seemed to stand still.

And then I watched the city skyline as, building by building, logo by logo, one by one, the lights went out. The bridge went dark. The Sydney Opera House flickered off. Within what seemed to me like a particularly long minute, all of the major buildings in Sydney had switched off ... except one. I swore under my breath. What had happened at the Stamford? Were they doing this on purpose to make their own logo stand out in the darkness as a bit of free advertising? Several people in the crowd pulled out their phones and started searching for the phone number of the hotel. Then a second later, to my profound relief and the collective cheers of the crowd, its lights went off too. I felt a friendly hand on my shoulder, and there was Phil.

That night, March 31, 2007, 2.2 million people, more than half the population of Sydney, took part in Earth Hour. The story went around the globe. This was an action that had happened with virtually no money, enormous amounts of free advertising, and volunteers. It had succeeded in Sydney because of the determination, efforts, and time of many, many people, previously unrelated but now united in one powerful symbolic act for an issue that affects us all.

The next day, the world's media was calling us. They wanted to know if we were going global, if Sydney was just the beginning. Buoyed by the success of Earth Hour in its first year, I truly believed the campaign would take off around the world.

Three weeks later, the first to sign up after Sydney wasn't another Australian city but Toronto, Canada—on the other side of the planet. Within months, we had cities in thirty-three countries lining up to take part in Earth Hour 2008. And the debate had changed.
An Inconvenient Truth
and the
Stern Review
had elevated climate change from a “green” issue to an economic and social concern. Whereas before climate change had been, to many, an issue of little concern, now it was becoming mainstream.

The world was moving on, and Earth Hour had to move with it. The growth of the campaign in such a short time had been incredible. Yet we were still running Earth Hour on a miniscule budget, with a very small team in Australia of only six people and a dog, and we didn't have the funding to change that. This was rapidly becoming a global event, not just an Australian one, and we needed to find a way to grow without needing more resources.