In the capital, at 20:30, the illumination of most of the sights was turned off: Red Square, the Kremlin, GUM, Moscow City, the Towers on the Embankment, the AFIMOL City shopping center, the Capital City multifunctional complex, the Luzhniki stadium, the Bolshoi Theater, the State Duma building, the Council Federation and many others. In Moscow, the number of participating buildings is growing at an impressive rate: in 2013 there were 120 buildings, and in 2019 there are already 2200.
As for the world, such famous sights as the statue of Christ in Rio de Janeiro, the Eiffel Tower, the Roman Colosseum, the Great Wall of China, Big Ben, the Palace of Westminster, the Egyptian pyramids, the skyscrapers of the Empire State Building, the Colosseum took part in the action , Sagrada Familia, Sydney Opera House, Blue Mosque, Acropolis of Athens, St. Peter’s Basilica, Times Square, Niagara Falls, Los Angeles International Airport and many others.
Representatives of the state and WWF spoke in Moscow on that day – Director of Environmental Programs of WWF Russia Victoria Elias and Head of the Department of Nature Management and Environmental Protection of Moscow Anton Kulbachevsky. They talked about how important it is to unite to protect the environment. During the Earth Hour, environmental flash mobs were held, stars performed, and the works of the winners of the children’s competition dedicated to the action were exhibited.
Other cities did not lag behind the capital: in Samara, activists held a race with flashlights through the night streets, in Vladivostok, Khabarovsk, Blagoveshchensk and Ussuriysk, students held environmental quizzes, in Murmansk, an acoustic concert by candlelight was held, in Chukotka, the Wrangel Island nature reserve gathered residents for discussion environmental problems of the district. Even space was affected by this event – cosmonauts Oleg Kononenko and Alexei Ovchinin passed. As a sign of support, they reduced the brightness of the backlight of the Russian segment to a minimum.
The theme of Earth Hour 2019 in Russia was the motto: “Responsible for nature!” Nature cannot tell a person about its problems, it speaks its own language, which can only be understood by a person who loves and cares for her. The sea, air, land, plants and animals are exposed to many negative influences from humans, while they cannot protect themselves. WWF, with its global action, encourages people to look around and see the problems of nature, talk about it through a survey and start solving them. The time has come for man to stop being a conqueror of nature, to become its defender, to correct the harm that has been inflicted on it by many generations of people.
Every year, the lights in the buildings participating in the action were extinguished with a symbolic switch. In 2019, he became a real work of art! Modern artist Pokras Lampas created, painted with graphic images, weighing 200 kilograms. As conceived by the author, the reinforced concrete base symbolizes the stone jungle of the city in which we live, and the symbolic knife switch symbolizes the ability of a person to control urbanization and the consumption of the planet’s resources.
For four years now, the Earth Hour cup has been awarded to the most active of the participating cities. As in the past year, Russian cities will compete for the challenge cup, the winner will be the city in which the majority of residents have registered as participants in the action. Last year, Lipetsk won, and this year at the moment Yekaterinburg, Krasnodar and last year’s winner are in the lead. The results are now being counted, and upon completion, the honorary cup will be solemnly presented to the winning city.
One hour without electricity does not solve the problem of resource consumption, because the savings are meager, comparable to a grain of sand in the vast Sahara Desert, but it symbolically shows that people are ready to give up their usual benefits for the sake of the world in which they live. This year, the action is timed to coincide with a global survey dedicated to two main questions: how satisfied urban residents are with the environmental situation, and to what extent they are ready to take part in order to change the situation.
The survey will be held for some time, so all those who are not indifferent can take part in it on the WWF website: