Earth Hour 2011

 

Some of you might already be aware that on the 26th of March at 8.30pm (local hour) the Earth Hour will take place.  This event began in Sydney, Australia, in 2007.  For one hour, participants are asked to turned their lights in order to raise awareness about the changes we can make for the planet. 

There is a little controversy around the event as some believe that it is pointless and will not make any difference.  However, it is not about the savings made during this hour, but rather about the savings we could make all year round if we were a bit more conscious and careful.

For me, the Earth Hour began in 2008.  At the time, I had just moved from Waterford to East Cork, in a village in the Irish countryside.  I started becoming more conscious about the way we led our lives in a fast-paced society and realised that little details could make a difference, like smiling to people in the street.  When I heard about the Earth Hour, I embraced the idea.  For more than an hour, I turned off all source of electricity in the house, including my fridge.  I sat down with a blanket, a few candles, a pen and paper, and reflected about the changes I could make.  Since then, I have tried to improve my habits and make them more eco-friendly.  I am not a tree-hugger, but I realised that we could all make a difference just by changing our habits and adopting a different attitude.  At the pace things are going, mother Earth is not going to be able to provide for us much longer and we need at least to slow things down.

That year, I talked about the event on Facebook, trying to promote it.  After the Earth Hour had taken place, a woman emailed me to thank me to have brought this event to her attention.  For her, it had taken an even more important dimension than for me.  She sat down with her two sons and was able to talk to them without the playstation or tv being on.  She then discovered that one of them wanted to learn how to play the guitar and the other one to practice a sport.  She had no idea…

This is what I mean when I say the Earth Hour is much more than turning the lights off for an hour.  It is about reflecting on our lives and the world we live in.

For the next two years, I was working for the Earth Hour, in a restaurant.  I could not imagine not taking part to the event and I made that clear to my boss.  He let me bring the Earth Hour in the restaurant.  At 8.30pm (the busiest time in a restaurant), I turned off the lights, the stereo and the heating in the restaurant room.  I had previously put extra candles on the tables and given customers little flyers in which I explained the purpose of the Earth Hour.  Most customers loved it and thought it was a brilliant idea.  I hope it had an impact on some of them.

This year, I will not be working.  I will probably be at home with a book in front of the fire.  However, I want my Earth Hour to be more than that.  Since the first year, I have changed many of my habits and I keep trying to improve them and find new little things I could do.  I realise that for many, some of these habits are not necessarily evident.  They are in a way, but one might not think of them.  I have thus decided to run a feature on this blog for the month preceding the event.  I will offer tips and thoughts about how to become more conscious about the environment and more eco-friendly.  Four other bloggers will also join me to discuss a topic related to the environment in one way or another: David @Tiny Planet, Shannon @Giraffe Days, Steph @Bella’s Bookshelves and Brigid @Kookaburra.

I hope you will enjoy this feature and that it makes you reflect on what changes you can make to preserve the planet.  I encourage you to comment and leave your own thoughts, suggest more tips or share how you intend to spend the hour.  In the couple of days before the Earth Hour I will put up some posts with all the readers’ tips that have been suggested and with some of your experiences and thoughts.  I think we can learn a lot by sharing.

Links related to this post:

• The Earth Hour website
• The Earth Hour facebook page
• My Earth Hour 2008: before and after the event
• My Earth Hour 2009

“La mort de l’auteur”/”The Death of the Author” by Roland Barthes

Although I had heard and read a lot about “La mort de l’auteur” (“The Death of the Author”) by Roland Barthes, I had never read it in its entirety.  I found it nice to be able to read and understand Barthes in French for once.  I know, I should be able to read in French, but I find literary theory more difficult to understand in French than in English.  As a result, it is such an effort for me to read French theory in its original language that I tend to avoid it.  However, this essay is easier to understand than other essays written by Barthes.

“La mort de l’auteur” was originally published in 1967 in the American journal Aspen and only appeared in its French version in 1968 in the journal Manteia.  Roland Barthes is a structuralist, and later post-structuralist, whose interest in semotics is evident in many of his works, including “La mort de l’auteur”.

“La mort de l’auteur” is probably his most controversial essay; however, the ideas he proposes in it are not as extreme as the essay title would suggest.  In fact, I think that most of what he argues makes a lot of sense.

Barthes’s essay can be seen as a reaction to critics’ and readers’ urge to find the author’s ultimate meaning in a text.  What Barthes argues is that the text exists in the here and now, that it is enunciated/read, and that there are multiple interpretations to a text.  The author as we know him is the one we construct through reading the text.  Barthes thus proposes that instead of deciphering a text to find the author’s message, we should untangle its various meanings.  When talking of a text, Barthes uses weaving metaphors, which actually lie in the latin origin of the word text.  He differentiates between the text and the work.  The work is material, whereas the text comprises many discourses and other texts that interact and result in our own interpretation.  The way we interpret the text relies on intertextuality.  The text is thus fluid and has infinite meanings.  Although he does not directly refer to intertextuality in “La mort de l’auteur”, Barthes’s argument points to this concept:

“un texte est fait d’écritures multiples, issues de plusieurs cultures et qui entrent les unes avec les autres en dialogue, en parodie, en contestation ; mais il y a un lieu où cette multiplicité se rassemble, et ce lieu, ce n’est pas l’auteur, comme on l’a dit jusqu’à present, c’est le lecteur”

“a text is composed of multiple writings, issued from various cultures that intersect through dialogue, parody, contestation; but the only place where this multiplicity is unified is not the author, as we have said until now, but the reader”

Therefore, according to Barthes, we should not try to explain texts by looking at their authors, but rather by looking at the language and how it speaks to us.  For him, it is the langage that creates meaning, not the author.  He notes that:

“l’écriture est la destruction de toute voix, de toute origine” 

“writing leads the destruction of the voice, of the origin”

Indeed, authors cannot control the meaning that will be given to their texts.  This so-called message of the author can only be a supposition from the reader.  Moreover, texts take on a life of their own by surviving their authors and being read year after year, century after century, by various readers who will impose their own interpretation on the text.

This is something important for Barthes because it enables us to resist the totality of the message from an over-controlling author, that is to resist ideology.

“un texte n’est pas fait d’une ligne de mots, dégageant un sens unique, en quelque sorte théologique (qui serait le ‘message’ de l’Auteur-Dieu), mais un espace à dimensions multiples, où se marient et se contestant des écritures variées, dont aucune n’est originelle: le texte est un tissue de citations, issues des mille foyers de la culture”

“a text is not composed of a series of words, giving a single meaning, somehow theological (which would be the message of the Author-God), but a site with multiple dimensions, where various writings interact and contest each other, none of which original: the text is a fabric of quotations, from culture’s thousands of sources.”

What seems to shock the most in Barthes’s essay is that he replaces the Author by a scriptor, someone mainly laying words on the page.  This is somewhat disturbing taken out of its context.  However, I do not think that Barthes rejects the author as such, but rather the over-controlling author and the possibility to find the author’s meaning.  All we really have is the work, those words on the page and we are ultimately free to interpret them the way we want, depending on our own circumstances.  He therefore concludes that the only way to liberate the reader is to get rid of the Author:

“la naissance du lecteur doit se payer de la mort de l’Auteur”

“the birth of the reader necessitates the death of the Author”

Although Barthes’s statement is radical, I think his argument is convincing.  How does it make you feel?  How do you read a text?  Do you always try to find out about the author or do you give more importance to the significance it has for you?

In my opinion, the author is one of the texts we use to understand the work.  I believe we can only guess what the author’s intended message is.  Each of us creates her/his own meaning of the text and the text will have a specific significance for each of us, depending on our own context.  As we try to interpret the text, we might consider the author and, by doing so, we create the author through the text we have read, but also by using other texts about the author.  Ultimately, the meaning of the text results from our own interpretation and use of the texts and discourses surrounding us and our reading.

All translations are mine and are probably imperfect.  You can read the English version here.