CHICAGO — From the Sydney Opera House to Rome's Colosseum to the Sears Tower's famous antennas in Chicago, floodlit icons of civilization went dark Saturday for Earth Hour, a worldwide campaign to highlight the threat of climate change.
The environmental group WWF urged governments, businesses and households to turn back to candle power for at least 60 minutes starting at 8 p.m. wherever they were.
The campaign began last year in Australia, and traveled this year from the South Pacific to Europe to North America in cadence with the setting of the sun.
"What's amazing is that it's transcending political boundaries and happening in places like China, Vietnam, Papua New Guinea," said Andy Ridley, executive director of Earth Hour. "It really seems to have resonated with anybody and everybody."
In Chicago, lights on more than 200 downtown buildings were dimmed Saturday night, including the stripe of white light around the top of the John Hancock Center.
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"There's a widespread belief that somehow people in the United States don't understand that this is a problem, that we're lazy and wedded to our lifestyles. (Earth Hour) demonstrates that that is wrong," Richard Moss, a member of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said in Chicago.
Darkened restaurants glowed with candlelight in San Francisco while the Golden Gate Bridge, Coit Tower and other landmarks extinguished lights.
New Zealand and Fiji were first out of the starting blocks this year. And in Sydney, Australia — where an estimated 2.2 million observed the blackout last year — the city's two architectural icons, the Opera House and Harbour Bridge, faded to black against a dramatic backdrop of a lightning storm.
Lights also went out at the famed Wat Arun Buddhist temple in Bangkok; shopping and cultural centers in Manila; several castles in Sweden and Denmark; the parliament building in Budapest; a string of landmarks in Warsaw; and both London City Hall and Canterbury Cathedral.
Local angle
Government buildings in Downtown Tucson went dark during last night's "Earth Hour," except for some emergency lights.
Other local agencies such as Kitt Peak National Observatory and the University of Arizona also took part.
Tucson City Hall, the Pima County Administration Building, the Pima County Health and Welfare Building and the six Tucson City Council ward offices around the city planned to turn their lights off between 8 and 9 p.m., said an advance news release from the Pima County Department of Environmental Quality.
Kitt Peak National Observatory alerted its network of citizen scientists in Southern Arizona to make measurements of the night sky before, during, and after the Earth Hour event, the news release said. The UA asked students living in residential halls to turn off lights when they are not being used.
Phoenix, the nation's fifth-largest city, also planned to turn out the lights in all downtown city-owned buildings for the hour.
