“I hunted for, and stole, a source of fire … and it has shown itself to be mortals’ great resource and their teacher of every skill.”
So says Prometheus, the Titan of Greek mythology, in Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound, explaining why he suffers in chains. For giving fire to mankind, he was condemned to eternal torment, bound to a rock while an eagle fed upon him each day. Fire was not merely warmth. It was power, independence, production, protection, and the first great escape from literal and figurative darkness. The human story began to change not when mankind learned restraint, but when it learned mastery. Civilization began not with renunciation, but with defiance.
Atop this civilization rests an odd, yet revealing modern ritual: Earth Hour. Today, Saturday, March 28, 2026, at 8:30 p.m. local time, people around the world will again be asked to switch off their non-essential lights for one hour. Organized by the World Wildlife Fund, or WWF, which was founded in 1961, Earth Hour is meant to dramatize concern for nature and the conservation of the planet’s resources. The campaign now marks 20 years and includes landmarks such as Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro, the Sydney Opera House in Sydney, and the Empire State Building in New York City.
Originally a grassroots movement, Earth Hour now presents itself as “a symbol of hope for nature and climate.” Lofty appeals to help nature and wildlife recover, reduce deforestation, and protect future generations now accompany the annual ritual of switching off the lights on an otherwise unremarkable Saturday in March. Yet even on its own terms, the story is less straightforward than the rhetoric suggests. As Song et al. wrote in a 2018 Nature study, “contrary to the prevailing view that forest area has declined globally—tree cover has increased by 2.24 million km2 (+7.1% relative to the 1982 level).”
The point is not that every environmental problem has vanished, but that global improvement does not always depend on a mass movement of symbolic austerity. Earth Hour’s gesture remains simple enough: dim the world briefly to express concern for the planet. But that symbolism points, perhaps unintentionally, to a deeper truth. Turning the lights off is easy. The true achievement of civilization was learning how to turn them on in the first place. If future generations are to inherit a better world, they will need more than rituals of restraint. They will need the abundance, safety, and human progress that only widespread access to energy can provide.
That is where rugged individualism shines most brightly in history. Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla were not men of managed consensus, however they both belonged to the same civilizational current: the transformation of electricity from scientific possibility into mass reality. Their fierce competition in the 19th century sparked invention after invention. Edison’s incandescent lamp patent, US Patent No. 223,898, was issued on January 27, 1880; two years later, his Pearl Street Station began selling electricity in lower Manhattan. Tesla’s great leap came in 1888, when George Westinghouse purchased the rights to his polyphase alternating-current system, helping launch the battle of the currents and laying the groundwork for long-distance power transmission.
The true genius of capitalism was not merely generating power, but to conduct it outward until light, warmth, and safety ceased to be luxuries for the few and became ordinary facts of life for the many. More than a century later, we still live inside the world that this rivalry charged into existence.
Electricity did not merely give cities more light. It gave them more order. In New York City, added street lighting has been associated with significant reductions in nighttime crime, including assaults, homicides, and weapons offenses. It also gave them greater protection from the elements. The Health Department reports that more than 500 New Yorkers die prematurely each year because of hot weather, with lack of air conditioning being the clearest risk factor for heat-stress death. Furthermore, electricity made cities more productive, not less. Research on US manufacturing shows that electrification raised labor productivity by reorganizing production around more efficient machinery and factory layouts. Light, warmth, safety, and output, these were the real gifts of electrification.
It is precisely this history that makes today’s sneers at rugged individualism sound so hollow, especially in New York City. For example, in his inaugural address on January 1, 2026, Mayor Zohran Mamdani promised to replace “the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.” But in the very city where Edison’s Pearl Street Station began selling electricity in 1882, that line reverses cause and effect. After a winter that brought one of New York City’s longest freezing stretches since 1963, the real source of warmth was not collectivist poetry, but the electric infrastructure that competition, capital, and invention made possible. If collectivism had accomplished even half of what competition did, New Yorkers might still be warming themselves by candlelight while calling it moral progress.
For one hour each year, Earth Hour asks the world to rehearse darkness. But from Prometheus onward, the human story has been one of escaping it. Fire, then electricity, enlarged human freedom. The achievement worth honoring is not symbolic dimness, but the civilizational brilliance that made light ordinary.
