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Documentary Screening: Earth Hour 2023

Wingecarribee's Earth Hour celebrations will be bigger and better than ever in 2023, with the event to be held in the beautiful Southern Highlands Botanic Gardens in Bowral on March 25 from 5 pm.

Since 2018, the Southern Highlands Botanic Gardens has invited the community to celebrate environmental sustainability and action by putting on a community Earth Hour event with support from Wingecarribee Shire Council.

A recycled materials sculpture competition (Sculpture in the Gardens) will highlight the show with the winner announced that night. There will be local environmentally sustainable business stall holders, family fun, entertainment, activities, drinks and food.

The event will also feature the broadcast of the newly released Black Cockatoo Crisis documentary from 7:30 pm as a symbolic suggestion for lights out, with all other lights turned off during the screening which will conclude at 8:45 pm.

The film looks at the near extinction of the black cockatoos of Western Australia and raises the concern of habitat loss, which is applicable across Australia. This issue is particularly relevant in the Southern Highlands, where the Glossy black cockatoo is vulnerable to extinction and work is being done to help this species through the Glossies in the Mist Conservation Project.

Black Cockatoo Crisis has been recognised by the prestigious 2021 Brian Beaton Award for Social Impact due to its potential to make positive change for the species. The film aims to encourage our political leaders to put an emergency plan in place to save the three black cockatoo species of WA.

“If we do nothing, they will disappear in two decades," says the film's producer and director Jane Hammond.

Earth Hour was stablished in 2007 by WWF Australia and is now an internationally recognised event with millions of people around the world taking part in switching off their lights for 60 minutes as a symbolic gesture of solidarity to show they care about our planet’s future.