SAN FRANCISCO -- Nate Tyler was finishing off his salmon dinner at a restaurant in Sydney, Australia, last spring when suddenly the lights went out. The eatery went dark, along with much of downtown, including the city's famous opera house.
"I thought 'Holy moly, this is gorgeous!' You could see stars in the sky," he said. "The restaurant used candles. It was atmospheric. The food tasted better."
Tyler happened to be Down Under during Earth Hour, an annual event in which Sydney residents switch off lights for 60 minutes as a symbolic gesture to cut energy use and help reverse global warming.
That's when a bulb -- the energy-efficient kind -- flashed on inside his brain: "I told myself, 'Why can't we try this in San Francisco?' "
The former Google spokesman returned home to launch Lights Out San Francisco, an ambitious grass-roots campaign. For one full hour -- between 8 p.m. and 9 p.m. on Oct. 20 -- he wants the people of this city to turn off all unnecessary lights as a way to reduce carbon emissions and preserve natural resources.
Tyler isn't talking about creating a public safety hazard by shutting off street lamps or traffic lights. He's targeting nonessential lighting: floodlights at used-car lots, atmospheric illumination of the Golden Gate Bridge, the neon movie marquee and all the bulbs left burning at night in empty high rises.
He's also not advocating major personal lifestyle changes -- at least not yet. For now, he wants family members, neighbors and colleagues to join together in taking one simple, hourlong stand against mindless energy use. Turn off a hallway light, a computer, a TV. See how good it feels, he says, and you might begin to reconsider the extent of your personal energy use.
"People are burning needless energy and not even knowing it. They're walking out of the office at night without turning off the light or shutting down the computer. We need to hit restart and start a conversation about how important this is," he said.
"If we don't do something, by 2050, all the polar bears will be gone. That's where Santa Claus lives, man. That's a bummer."
With the slogan "Good Things Happen in the Dark" emblazoned on campaign T-shirts and posters, Tyler plans to give away 110,000 energy-efficient bulbs on his Lights Out day.
Tyler, 38, has long walked the environmental walk. Growing up in New Haven, Conn., he helped refurbish hiking trails and apprenticed in one of the nation's last remaining wooden-boat shops in Maine. His car runs on reprocessed vegetable oil.
