Earth's Very Own Hour

We were trudging through what appeared to be the middle of the desert, squinting through the dust haze, with dogs trotting by our sides. The blurred vicinity resembled little more than a wasteland with lumps of plastic bags skimming the scarred ground, buffeted by the wind.An eight year old boy walking with us in silence dutifully squatted down every few minutes or so and picked up a scrap of recyclable material that lay abandoned in the middle of nowhere.By the end of the walk however, the boy was laden with a box full of things that could be easily sorted and recycled for future use.I was rather startled looking into the carton; bottles, cardboard, paper and an array of other things had been procured from what I had imagined was a scarcely inhabited area.Sure, the boy would have gone home and dropped his collection into one of Bahrain’s set of brilliantly coloured recycling bins. But if he could fill a box with litter from a relatively empty lot of land, what could we fill with the litter that lines the pavements of Bahrain and mars its natural beauty?

Recently, the World celebrated the ‘Earth Hour’ with participants plunging themselves into darkness for an hour. It was a worldwide message raising awareness about the amount of electricity we waste and how much more we can conserve. We experimented with Earth Hour at our house and to our surprise we realized the large number of hardly necessary lights that were switched on regularly.It cannot be denied that Bahrain itself uses a colossal amount of electricity to keep the Kingdom alive and whizzing with life. If you’ve ever just sat out on your porch at night and leaned back and gazed into the heavens above, you would have realized that hardly any stars twinkle back at you. Instead, you stare into a cloudless, murky purple sky, with the glow of city lights and football floodlights dotting the horizon.

The World may not crumble into oblivion in 2012 or be conquered by zealous aliens with webbed fingers and green antennae but the Earth is undoubtedly dying, unable to cope with our profligate ways. We can’t boycott electricity or eradicate Styrofoam, but we can help, maybe by recycling all the papers we accumulated in the past academic year or walking to the shop at the corner - Small gestures to improve the grand scheme of things. So take shorter showers and save the world!