Saturday, March 29th, from 8pm – 9pm, was Earth Hour. What’s Earth Hour? Watch this…

Even Google got into the act by turning off the lights.

(An all white web page uses about 74 watts to display, while an all black page uses only 59 watts. With +200 million queries on Google, switching from white to black would save a decent amount of energy, depending on your monitor type. You can read more here on EcoIron. Want to start lowering your electricity bill now? You can use Blackle.com for your searches.)

So at 8pm I turned off all the lights. For an hour, I sat at the dining room table, reading The New Yorker by the light of a flickering candle. The main thing I noticed, besides being totally unprepared with a good reading candle, was how quiet it was. No TV in the background or foreground. No typing on the keyboard. No headphones.

Quiet.

I quite enjoyed it. Will need to do this on a regular basis. And maybe have it in the middle of the day as well… get away from, Twitter, YouTube, instant messages, email, Adobe CS3… a book, a magazine, an in-person conversation, a pen and paper. It’s not just saving electricity. It’s rethinking how things can be done.