The biggest threat to the environmental movement might just be fire damage. "Turn off your lights and make love," is singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright's suggestion for saving the planet. The flaming
heart uttered the words as he kicked off his "Blackout Sabbath" campaign with a March concert in a synagogue on Manhattan's Lower East Side, using no electricity at all. The all-wood, 150-year-old
structure was illuminated by more than 1,000 candles - no small concern for the concert's organizers, who had nearly as many fire extinguishers on hand as candles.
No power was sucked
for anything (neither lights, air, nor amplification), so the 400 or so concertgoers had to strain in the dim space to hear the lovemaking advice. The experience was positively medieval - an era
during which most people had very small carbon footprints - but it was also an interesting look at the lights-out meme that's the latest vogue in the save-the-planet movement.
Inspired by
the east coast blackout of 2003, Wainwright decided that the environmental movement had gotten "too glitzy" - and glitz is a subject Wainwright knows well - so he's urging the world to turn out their
lights and unplug everything on June 21, the summer solstice. "I loved the New York power outage. I found it incredibly invigorating, spiritual and practical at the same time. We all had to pay
attention to each other. Not to mention that Manhattan in total darkness was oddly enough a beautiful sight to behold." On his site for event, blackoutsabbath.org, in addition to promoting the
darkened day, he posts other eco-suggestions like "go vegan."
And Wainwright isn't the only one urging people to turn out their lights. March 28 was the second annual Earth Hour, when
organizers urged people to turn off their lights from 8 to 9 p.m. Started in 2007 in Sydney, Australia, this year's Earth Hour went global. The "Earth Hour" video narrated by
Entourage star Jeremy Piven - yes, we're scratching our heads, too - was viewed nearly a million times in the week before the event and the
Pivert's piece was the viral
clip du jour heading into the big day. A quick look around Midtown Manhattan on that Saturday evening,
however, suggested that perhaps not too many Manhattanites had seen the video or heeded the call to action.
Even Google got in on the action by "darkening" their Web site - they changed the
usual white background on their home page to black, thus s
aving huge amounts of energy. Which was already silly enough, and then
techcrunch.com noted, "It turns out, black Web pages actually may use more power than white ones (based on a study that Google itself cited last year)." Google later clarified by paraphrasing Michael
Jackson: Black or white, whatever, it makes no difference in terms of the amount of energy used. If you prefer the dark background there's always blackle.com, which offers you the standard Google home
page in black. It may not actually make a difference, but it's a lot easier than going vegan.
