Earth Hour

Posted by Kan Hong Hong , Thursday, August 19, 2010 11:39 PM


I love the concept introduced in the Earth Hour campaign. The awareness created is tremendous. Most people think that recycling is the only way to make our world a better place to live in. However, energy conservation is important too. 
Energy is transferred/converted from 1 form to another, it has to be in a form and most of the time the latest form is the heat produced. Heat contributes to global warming. In 100 hundred years, global temperature has increased by 0.74ºC whereby, the 0.4ºC  increase happened in last 30 years. 
Read below, it's scary to even think about it. 
[Averaged over all land and ocean surfaces, temperatures have warmed roughly 1.33°F (0.74ºC) over the last century, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. More than half of this warming—about 0.72°F (0.4°C)—has occurred since 1979. Because oceans tend to warm and cool more slowly than land areas, continents have warmed the most (about 1.26°F or 0.7ºC since 1979), especially over the Northern Hemisphere.]
It concerns me and I always try my very best to bring out awareness among my family and friends. Here hopefully, I can contribute a tiny bit to help our future, our children and even children's future. 
There was a online essay contest which I took part and I was surprised I got a call from the organiser who announced I was one of the winners!! Tell me what you think of it!
My son holding the prize, a limited edition Earth Hour bag

My winning essay:
Remember the days when people drove with the car windows wound down?
That was 30 years ago………Remember the days when our mothers used to sit at the porch doing their daily chores eg. plucking vegetables, sewing or reading newspaper while watching their children playing in the gardens? That was 30 years ago…..Remember the days when we only heard the classroom fans spinning loudly during our exams? That was 30 years ago…

Scientists say that the earth appears to have been warmer since 1980 than at any time in the last 18 centuries. Just imagine that we took less than 30 years to heat up a planet which has existed more than 4 billions years!!! The main culprit? Human’s lifestyle. Most people can’t survive without air-conditioners now. As for me, I love the sun so much that without it shining brightly for even a couple of days would make me feel gloomy. I’m not saying that I would sit under the sun like most westerners like to do during summer. It’s just that I could bear with our hot weather just fine without air-conditioners at most times.

How do I keep my body cool? What I always do is to imagine that I’m feeling cool! Sweating is just a part of cooling process, so it’s fine to sweat! I don’t mind if my body feels sticky! It’s all in our mind. Yoga played a big part to control my mind. Though I seldom practice it now, at least my mind is set to be cool!


When I really really need to use the air-conditioner (especially on hazy days), I would just set it to 26 degrees Celcius and together with a fan operating at lowest speed. This will help in slowing down global warming and help save on my electricity bills too!

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How I become an environmental freak

Posted by Kan Hong Hong 11:10 PM

I came from a struggling middle class family, not too poor if compared to some families with women who had to work on farms while carrying their children on their back, not as bad as that. My dad was a salesman for a hardware store and mom used to babysit children. 

We got through fine with the 'saving' mindset in every one of us in the family. We were taught to save whatever and whenever we can. My mommy used to teach us to collect rainwater and the water used to wash rice to water our plants later in the day.My mommy also taught us to switch off lights in all unoccupied rooms in the house. 
These were mom's simple instructions for the purpose of saving money. Now we do what we did because we have a different vision. The vision is to save our beloved Mother Earth. 
Being obsessively devoted to this issue, it used to make me feel upset over the critical deterioration of our Earth in less that 3 brief decades.
I starting caring for the environment since I was a teenager. I was inspired by the cartoon we used to watch : Captain Planet..I still remember its theme song, my goodness...and the other day I just sang it to my children...I love it so much that I had used some of the phrases in my poem submitted to my school mag.
My published poem inspired from the cartoon series 'Captain Planet'.

I had greater awareness when I started scuba-diving....seeing and hearing about coral bleaching made me so sad, that I decided to be eco-friendly in whatever I do. I've known some diving instructors who are super-aware on the environment, that inspired me too. 
Underwater living organisms are in great danger from cyanide fishing (a method using poisonous compound to fish) as well as the pollution caused by human...I found some countries actually use their sea to become garbage slums! 
Turtles are especially attracted to these slums as they see plastic bags as their main source of food, the jelly fish!! They end up choking to death or trapped in the tonnes of garbage....:(
I love turtles. Knowing about turtles extinction (especially the ever-graceful princess, the leather-back turtle, the largest of its species, also called penyu belimbing in Malay) awakens me more. My school text books used to display pictures of leather-back turtles, that were still landing in Malaysian beach, 'Rantau Abang' in the 1980's. It only took less than 1 decade to make them disappear...started with people eating their precious eggs...:( and of course the disturbance they get during their process of laying eggs.



But we certainly cannot give up on her...Recently, it is discovered that she has returned to Rantau Abang in 32 years!! Yipee!..
Click here to read article courtesy from Yahoo! GREEN.

Tune in to read more about more animals under threat.

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