Calgary Earth Hour event Saturday features Indigenous Youth Showcase

The Calgary Earth Hour Unplugged event on Saturday featured dozens of interactive environmental activities.

Earth Hour is a global annual campaign of energy awareness for one hour in each time zone around the world where individuals, communities, and businesses are encouraged to turn off their non-essential lights for one hour. 

In Calgary, an event at the Central Library included Indigenous drummers, singers and dancers, hip hop artists and dance music.

The free family-oriented event also showcased ways to save money and energy presented by Calgary environmental groups and the City of Calgary.

"We have a bunch of human-powered activities, bicycle-powered, low-energy, lighting, and those sorts of things to sort of show the alternatives and ways of saving power," said Arusha Centre climate coordinator Michael Byerly. "We also want to show people that, although the climate crisis doesn't sound terrific, that there's a lot more dimensions to dealing with the climate crisis than just how much pollution is comng out of the air and how much electricity use.

"It's about people coming together," he added. "It's about trying out new things."

The activities included pedal-powered midway games; The Pedal Power Tower, enLIGHTenment Challenge and a giant projection of Calgary’s cycle paths.

"Energy efficiency is not very sexy," said Byerly. "But when you see that you're paying less for the power on your house, and that you have ways of getting cheaper power, things like solar panels, and energy efficient light bulbs, and things that conserve water, those are going to be so important to us going into the future here in Calgary.

"We're looking at a drought year," he added, "so doing things that can reduce the amount of water that your washer, your toilet, your lawn, other uses of water, they're very important."

Calgary landmarks and businesses participating included LEED office buildings operated by Brookfield Properties, the Saddledome, Calgary Tower and many City landmarks such as Reconciliation bridge.

Earth Hour began on Saturday, 31 March 2007.

The world's first Earth Hour in Sydney, Australia, saw more than 2.2 million people turn off their lights for one hour to show a climate-sceptic government that people were concerned about climate change.

50 million people in 35 countries took part in the second Earth Hour.