By David Topping

If you had any doubt that Earth Hour—a little less than two weeks away now—is an all-but-empty symbolic gesture, click on over to its website. As Brett Lamb writes on his blog: “There is actually NO CONTENT about useful things you can do for the environment on the Earth Hour website. Not a single thing … unless you count turning out the lights for an hour at the end of March. The website does offer product placements. Corporations receive mention for token gestures. Did you know that Coke is shutting off its billboard in Times Square for an hour? Wow, that must be a real sacrifice.” As Lamb puts it, Earth Hour is less about awareness of environmental issues—many of the problems, after all, are perpetuated by the very companies sponsoring the whole thing—and more about “awareness of awareness.”