On Saturday the 28th of March we celebrated Earth Hour with a great bunch of friends and some wonderful food.  We had a delicious BBQ (including North Carolina pulled pork) and then took a roady up to the top of Balmoral Hill to watch the city go dark. Unfortunately there were many lights still on; especially disappointing were all the big wealthy houses immediately around us still glowing bright. On a positive note, there were several other people partying in the dark and our friends all got into the spirit of the event. We came home and continued to eat, drink and be merry by candle light until after 11pm.

To get ourselves motivated for the evening Mark and I went and watched Chris Jordan speak as part of the Ideas Festival at the State Library. It was an incredibly moving and inspiring talk.  You can see a shorter version on the TED Conference website, but Chris went into more thought-provoking detail in his talk at the State Library of Queensland.  Chris uses photography to present humanity’s excessive consumption. He is trying to use his images to bring about mass awareness of our excesses, which he believes is needed to motivate significant change. We came out of the presentation (as did Chris Jordan) with tears in our eyes and eager to take action to help spread the message. Our Earth Hour party was a small step in the right direction.