Ecologically unfriendly festival

In the past few years, I have started to feel uneasy about Loy Kratong festival in Thailand. The latest figure in the news confirmed my gut feeling. This year, Bangkok Metropolitan Administration officials have harvested almost a million Kratong floats from river and canals in Bangkok: 946,838 floats as of 3 a.m. today to be exact. (I am amazed that how exact they could have counted those ! I 'll ignore a possibility that they did not miscount a few.)  And about 12 % of those are made of styrofoam which is not bio-degradable.

For hundreds of year in Thailand, Loy Kratong festival is a beautiful festival on a December 's full-moon night when people, few thousands I guess, would bring their small floats made of banana leaf, with flowers, lit candle, and incensed stick to beg pardon from angle of the river. It 's a rare traditional good chance for boys to meet girls at night.  Nowadays, however, people attending the festival are in the tune of a million, or 3 fold order of magnitude (1000 x) more. So this the the amount of float garbage is now a big environmental burden to the river and needs to be cleaned up by the city within hours after people went home. I often sighed in my thought at this ceremony around this time of the year.

Despite the complain above about it, I have not started complaining of my dislike of another more dangerous floating (into the air) festival yet, called Yipeng floating.

โรงเรียนสีเขียว

ไปเจอวีดิโอจาก TED ก็เลยเอามาโพสต์ที่นี่ น่าดู เป็นโรงเรียนสีเขียว (Green school) ตามแนวทางฝรั่ง ผมว่า ถ้าเอามาประยุกต์กับโรงเรียนวิถีพุทธ อย่างของ อ. อาจอง หรือ ของ คุณ มีชัย จะดีมาก