'at First, It Was Just Me And My Little Computer'

Sun Herald

Sunday January 20, 2008

Erin O'Dwyer

Earth Hour in Sydney inspired Nathan Tyler to do the same in San Francisco, writes ERIN O'DWYER.

Nate Tyler is sitting in a San Francisco cafe, watching the passing parade of oversized SUVs. "One person," he says, pointing to a woman driving a four-wheel-drive BMW with an American flag on the bumper. "One person," he says again as a jeep speeds past in the opposite direction. "One person, always one person. I'm going to make a movie called One Person. Every image will be just one person driving."

Tyler can be forgiven for letting off steam about motorists. The former Google spokesman and one-time adviser to the Clinton-Gore administration stopped driving his car eight weeks ago. These days he walks or gets around on two wheels. It's going well, except for the little problem of getting to his favourite beach. Still, this is a man used to making sacrifices.

When Tyler quit Google early last year, it was to launch his own public relations company. First he needed to rejuvenate. He was midway through a surfing tour of Australia and New Zealand when he found himself sitting in darkness in a Circular Quay restaurant. It was March 31 and 2 million Sydneysiders had flicked the switch for an hour to raise awareness about climate change.

"It was a pretty remarkable experience," Tyler recalls. "I had no idea it was going to happen and they came and served food with candles. It was a gorgeous thing. I felt that it was such an impressive idea and I had been looking for something to work on, so I brought it back here to the United States."

The result was Lights Out San Francisco. Tyler's first project cost him money, rather than made him any, but he believed it was a worthy cause. With a laptop, a web page and $10,000 of his own money, the 38-year-old rallied thousands of Californians to turn off their lights for an hour on October 20.

"At first, it was just me and my little computer," he says. "I typed up a web page and I published it using Google's free software. I paid for most of it personally out of my own bank account. It was just the fastest way to do it. It was exciting but it was also urgent."

Eventually Tyler hired a small team and raised $40,000 from sponsors. He persuaded City Hall (the local authority) to black out major monuments such as the Golden Gate Bridge and the Bay Bridge, and convinced countless businesses and restaurants to come on board. Thousands of people joined in and the local electricity company pitched in to distribute energy efficient light globes. All in just five months.

Where Sydney saved 10 per cent in energy consumption across the city centre, San Francisco did not manage to record any saving. But, says Tyler, saving energy was never the main game.

"I think that we did save energy, it's just that it wasn't measurable," he says. "We knew that lots of people were doing it so we knew we were saving energy. In the park the night we celebrated, we had 1500 to 2000 people."

"The other level of success is the amount of awareness that we created. We had so much press it was crazy and so we raised a lot of awareness both locally and nationally."

With his uniform of blue jeans, button-down shirt and woollen pullover, Tyler is no activist. Nor is he comfortable with the environmentalist tag. Rather he is a neo-conservationist, created in the Al Gore image. Like Gore - for whom Tyler worked as a young publicist on the 2000 advance presidential campaign - Tyler's easy manner and boyish good looks make him the perfect environmental pin-up.

His interest in the environment comes from a six-week trip to the remote Brooks Range in northern Alaska as a college student with the National Outdoor Leadership School. But his special skill is as an ideas man, who also gets the job done.

Tyler's next project was to be Lights Out America - a nationwide event with sponsorship from some of the biggest corporate names in the US to be held on March 29.

Tyler had hoped the event would coincide with the second Earth Hour, launched by the Sydney headquarters of the World Wildlife Fund. But he never intended to compete. And here the plot thickens.

"When we were doing Lights Out San Francisco we spent a lot of time trying to call the people in Sydney on the phone," he says. "We were like 'How did you guys do it? We want to do it too.'

"An interesting wrinkle in the story is they never called us back. Maybe they were busy, who knows?"

By then he had a date and a deadline.

"We looked at what they had done and we thought, 'Right, you need City Hall, you need the utilities' and then we went for the monuments, and the restaurants. It's not rocket science, it's not like you need a blueprint, but we really wanted their support."

The kick in the guts came a couple of weeks ago when Tyler learned that WWF Australia had called San Francisco's City Hall, inviting the city to be part of the newly launched global movement.

"I got a call from someone I knew in City Hall saying WWF had just come and talked to them," he says. "We were like 'Oh man! We want to do that. Ah!"'

The WWF team eventually contacted Tyler. There were discussions and even a job offer. But Tyler has graciously allowed WWF to take the lead. He does not intend to denigrate WWF and has even handed over his contacts and sponsorship partners. But he says the moral of the story is that the conservation message needs to be communicated clearly and co-operatively.

"We're going to support the WWF effort because we want to make sure that the event is a key success," he says. "It's a group effort and we want to reduce energy for the earth."

"But I think they were not clear about the kind of event they wanted to do in the US and my event, and the national media attention I was able to get, forced their hand."

Not that Tyler is backing away altogether. He is working on plans to encourage San Francisco's 15 tallest buildings to turn off their lights after hours and is doing publicity for the cutting-edge solar panel manufacturer Nanosolar - a company poised to release extremely low-cost film-thin solar panels this year.

"I'm not an environmentalist," he says. "I'm really not smart enough to tell you what we need to do. But I can tell you there is an issue and it's addressable. If you give people really simple things to do, then they will do it. Turning off the lights is one example. But you need to build other programs around it. What we are trying to say is why waste now so that the people who come after us are going to be in worse shape?"

This year's Earth Hour will no doubt be bittersweet for Tyler. But by then, he'll be frying bigger fish.

"In reality, I'm the guy who brought this to America," he says.

© 2008 Sun Herald

Back to News Index | Back to Home