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[av_heading heading=’EDITORIAL | Eco-friendly fiestas’ tag=’h3′ style=’blockquote modern-quote’ size=” subheading_active=’subheading_below’ subheading_size=’15’ padding=’10’ color=” custom_font=”][/av_heading]
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Friday, May 19, 2017
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THE MERRY month of May is a “fiesta month. Many towns and barangays celebrate fiestas in honor of their patron saints. The revelries are marked with a profusion of religious rites, colors and glitters. Fun activities are carried out with utmost delight, spending spree and typical wastefulness.
Fiestas bring people together in a celebration of our rich cultural heritage, enabling families, neighbors and communities to rekindle spiritual ties, to honor ethnic roots and renew relationships, to feed and entertain guests, and to partake in a spectacle of drama, excitement and fun. But the fiesta’s environmental impacts are hardly ever considered. Our customary feasts and rites, fairs and concerts, parades and pageants, fireworks displays and even our salo-salo can severely spoil the environment, set off pollution and climate change.
For instance, the wasteful use of materials, electricity and water, the penchant for single-use plastic and other disposables, the lack of ecological system for reducing and managing discards, the bursting of firecrackers or the burning of used plastic buntings or PVC-coated tarpaulin can cause stress and damage to our ecosystems and impair the health of humans and other creatures with climate-changing greenhouse gases, persistent organic pollutants (POPs) and other harmful chemicals.
From being unmindful of the environmental consequences of our vibrant community celebrations, we must pay serious attention in reducing the fiesta’s health and environmental impacts, and strive to transform the fiesta into a “zero waste celebration of life.” We can celebrate without causing further damage to our ecosystems that are crying for healing and protection.
Let us be reminded by our Catholic bishops’ thought-provoking pastoral letter on ecology way back in 1988: “The relationship which links God, human beings and all the community of the living together is emphasized in the covenant which God made with Noah after the flood. The rainbow which we still see in the sky is a constant reminder of this bond and challenge (Gen 9:19). This covenant recognizes the very close bonds which bind living forms together in what are called ecosystems. The implications of this covenant for us today are clear. As people of the covenant, we are called to protect endangered ecosystems, like our forests, mangroves and coral reefs and to establish just human communities in our land.”
We can make our fiesta a fitting expression of our communion as stewards of Mother Nature by striving to reduce waste to zero or darn near, preventing all forms of pollution, conserving water, electricity and other resources, and saving funds for basic needs and charities.
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