Songkran (Thailand)

The Songkran festival,or literally "astrological passage") is celebrated in Thailand as the traditional New Year's Day from 13 to 15 April. It coincides with the New Year of many calendars of South and Southeast Asia.
The date of the festival was originally set by astrological calculation, but it is now fixed. If these days fall on a weekend, the missed days off are taken on the weekdays immediately following. If they fall in the middle of the week, many Thai take off from the previous Friday until the following Monday. Songkran falls in the hottest time of the year in Thailand, at the end of the dry season. Until 1888 the Thai New Year was the beginning of the year in Thailand; thereafter 1 April was used until 1940. 1 January is now the beginning of the year. The traditional Thai New Year has been a national holiday since then.
Songkran has traditionally been celebrated as the New Year for many centuries, and is believed to have been adapted from an Indian festival. It is now observed nationwide, even in the far south. However, the most famous Songkran celebrations are still in the northern city of Chiang Mai, where it continues for six days and even longer. It has also become a party for foreigners and an additional reason for many to visit Thailand for immersion in another culture.

New year traditions

The most obvious celebration of Songkran is the throwing of water. Thais roam the streets with containers of water or water guns (sometimes mixed with mentholated talc), or post themselves at the side of roads with a garden hose and drench each other and passersby. This, however, was not always the main activity of this festival. Songkran was traditionally a time to visit and pay respects to elders, including family members, friends, neighbors, and monks.
Besides the throwing of water, people celebrating Songkran as a Buddhist festival may also go to a wat (Buddhist monastery) to pray and give food to monks. They may also cleanse Buddha images from household shrines as well as Buddha images at monasteries by gently pouring water mixed with a Thai fragrance (Thai: น้ำอบไทย) over them. It is believed that doing this will bring good luck and prosperity for the New Year. In many cities, such as Chiang Mai, the Buddha images from all of the city's important monasteries are paraded through the streets so that people can toss water at them, ritually 'bathing' the images, as they pass by on ornately decorated floats. In northern Thailand, people may carry handfuls of sand to their neighborhood monastery in order to recompense the dirt that they have carried away on their feet during the rest of the year. The sand is then sculpted into stupa-shaped piles and decorated with colorful flags.
Some people make New Year resolutions - to refrain from bad behavior, or to do good things. Songkran is a time for cleaning and renewal. Besides washing household Buddha images, many Thais also take this opportunity to give their home a thorough cleaning.
People in a tuk tuk getting soaked during Songkran in Chiang Mai
The use of chalk (Thai: ดินสอพอง) is also very common having originated in the chalk used by monks to mark blessings.
Some children having fun at the Bangkok Zoo during Songkran.The throwing of water originated as a way to pay respect to people, by capturing the water after it had been poured over the Buddhas for cleansing and then using this "blessed" water to give good fortune to elders and family by gently pouring it on the shoulder. Among young people the holiday evolved to include dousing strangers with water to relieve the heat, since April is the hottest month in Thailand (temperatures can rise to over 100°F or 40°C on some days). This has further evolved into water fights and splashing water over people riding in vehicles.
Nowadays, the emphasis is on fun and water-throwing rather than on the festival's spiritual and religious aspects, which sometimes prompts complaints from traditionalists. In recent years there have been calls to moderate the festival to lessen the many alcohol-related road accidents as well as injuries attributed to extreme behavior such as water being thrown in the faces of traveling motorcyclists.
The water is meant as a symbol of washing all of the bad away and is sometimes filled with fragrant herbs when celebrated in the traditional manner.
Songkran is also celebrated in many places with a pageant in which young women demonstrate their beauty and unique talents, as judged by the audience. The level of financial support usually determines the winner, since, to show your support you must purchase necklaces which you place on your chosen girl.
Astrological calculationAlthough the traditional calendar of Thailand like most of Southeast Asia utilizes a lunisolar calendar, the date of the new year was calculated on a purely solar basis. The term Songkran comes from Sanskrit "Sankranta" and means "a move or change" - in this case the move of the sun into the Aries zodiac - Mesha Sankranti.
Chola Dynasty ruled Thailand during Rajendra Chola I's reign 1012 C.E. – 1044 C.E. Hence this festival coincides with the Tamil New Year, Puthandu, which follows the Nirayanam vernal equinox and generally falls either on 13 or 14 April of the Gregorian year. 13 or 14 April marks the first day of the traditional Tamil calendar and is a public holiday in both Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka. Tropical vernal equinox falls around 22 March, and adding 23 degrees of trepidation or oscillation to it, we get the Hindu sidereal or Nirayana Mesha Sankranti (Sun's transition into Nirayana Aries). Hence, Songkran falls on the same date as observed by most traditional calendars in India as in Tamil Nadu, Assam, Bengal, Kerala, Manipur, Orissa, Punjab, Tripura etc. not to mention Nepal, Bangladesh, Burma, Cambodia, Laos and Sri Lanka.

Greetings

Monks receiving blessing at a temple in Ban Khung TaphaoThe traditional greeting is "สวัสดีปีใหม่" (sa-wat-di pi mai), basically "Happy New Year". Sawatdi is also used for "hello" or "goodbye". Pi and mai mean "year" and "new" respectively in Thai. Another greeting used is "สุขสันต์วันปีใหม่" (suk-san wan pi mai), where suksan means "happy".
However, most people use "สุขสันต์วันสงกรานต์" (suk-san wan songkran) — meaning "Happy Songkran Day" — since pi mai is more often linked with 1 January. Suksan is also used as an attribute for other days such as Valentine's Day ("สุขสันต์วันแห่งความรัก" suk-san wan haeng khwam rak; Happy Valentine's Day).
In other calendarsSongkran is also celebrated in Laos (called pee mai lao), Cambodia (called Chaul Chnam Thmey, Cambodian New Year), Myanmar (called Thingyan), and by the Dai people in Yunnan, China (called Water-Splashing Festival). The same day is celebrated in South Asian calendars as well: the Assamese (called Rongali Bihu), Bengali (called Pohela Boishakh), Oriya (called Maha Visuba Sankranthi), Malayali, Punjabi, Sinhalese, and Tamil New Years fall on the same dates, based on the astrological event of the sun beginning its northward journey. Songkran as such is similar to the Indian festival of Holi, with a lot of splashing of water as paints, colored dusts, and fragrances.
The traditional new year celebration in Sri Lanka also coincides with the Thai new year.
In Nepal, the official new year is celebrated on the 1st of Baisakh (Baisākh) according to astrological calendar Vikram Samwat and day often falls somewhere between 12–15 April.
It occurs at the same time as that given by Bede for festivals of Eostre — and Easter weekend occasionally coincides with Songkran (most recently 1979, 1990, and 2001, but not again until 2085.)

Greenpeace

Greenpeace is a non-governmental environmental organization with offices in over forty countries and with an international coordinating body in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.Greenpeace states its goal is to "ensure the ability of the Earth to nurture life in all its diversity" and focuses its campaigning on world wide issues such as global warming, deforestation, overfishing, commercial whaling and anti-nuclear issues. Greenpeace uses direct action, lobbying and research to achieve its goals. The global organization does not accept funding from governments, corporations or political parties, relying on more than 2.8 million individual supporters and foundation grants.Greenpeace is a founding member of the INGO Accountability Charter; an international non-governmental organization that intends to foster accountability and transparency of non-governmental organizations.
Greenpeace evolved from the peace movement and anti-nuclear protests in Vancouver, British Columbia, in the early 1970s. On September 15, 1971, the newly founded Don't Make a Wave Committee sent a chartered ship, Phyllis Cormack, renamed Greenpeace for the protest, from Vancouver to oppose United States testing of nuclear devices in Amchitka, Alaska. The Don't Make a Wave Committee subsequently adopted the name Greenpeace.
In a few years, Greenpeace spread to several countries and started to campaign on other environmental issues such as commercial whaling and toxic waste. In the late 1970s, the different regional Greenpeace groups formed Greenpeace International to oversee the goals and operations of the regional organizations globally.Greenpeace received international attention during the 1980s when the French intelligence agency bombed the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland's Waitemata Harbour, one of the most well-known vessels operated by Greenpeace, killing one individual. In the following years, Greenpeace evolved into one of the largest environmental organizations in the world.
Greenpeace is known for its direct actions and has been described as the most visible environmental organization in the world.Greenpeace has raised environmental issues to public knowledge,and influenced both the private and the public sector.Greenpeace has also been a source of controversy;its motives and methods have received criticismand the organization's direct actions have sparked legal actions against Greenpeace activists
First campaigns after AmchitkaAfter the nuclear tests at Amchitka were over, Greenpeace moved its focus to the French atmospheric nuclear weapons testing at the Moruroa Atoll in French Polynesia. The young organization needed help for their protests and were contacted by David McTaggart, a former businessman living in New Zealand. In 1972 the yacht Vega, a 12.5-metre (41 ft) ketch owned by David McTaggart, was renamed Greenpeace III and sailed in an anti-nuclear protest into the exclusion zone at Moruroa to attempt to disrupt French nuclear testing. This voyage was sponsored and organized by the New Zealand branch of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. The French Navy tried to stop the protest in several ways, including assaulting David McTaggart. McTaggart was supposedly beaten to the point that he lost sight in one of his eyes. Luckily, one of McTaggart's crew members photographed the incident and went public. After the assault was publicized, France announced it would stop the atmospheric nuclear tests.
In the mid-1970s some Greenpeace members started an independent campaign, Project Ahab, against commercial whaling, since Irving Stowe was against Greenpeace focusing on other issues than nuclear weapons. After Irving Stowe died in 1975, Phyllis Cormack left from Vancouver to face Soviet whalers on the coast of California. Greenpeace activists disrupted the whaling by going between the harpoons and the whales, and the footage of the protests spread across the world. Later in the 1970s the organization widened its focus to include toxic waste and commercial seal hunting.

Organizational development

MV Esperanza, a former fire-fighter owned by the Russian Navy, was relaunched by Greenpeace in 2002Greenpeace evolved from a group of Canadian protesters in a sail boat, into a less conservative group of environmentalists who were more reflective of the counterculture and hippie youth movements of the 1960s and 1970s. The social and cultural background from which Greenpeace emerged heralded a period of de-conditioning away from old world antecedents and sought to develop new codes of social, environmental and political behavior. Historian Frank Zelko has commented that "unlike Friends of the Earth, for example, which sprung fully formed from the forehead of David Brower, Greenpeace developed in a more evolutionary manner."
In the mid-1970s independent groups using the name Greenpeace started springing up world wide. By 1977 there were 15 to 20 Greenpeace groups around the world. At the same time the Canadian Greenpeace office was heavily in debt. Disputes between offices over fund-raising and organizational direction split the global movement as the North American offices were reluctant to be under the authority of the Vancouver office and its president Patrick Moore.
After the incidents of Moruroa, David McTaggart had moved to France to battle in court with the French state and helped to develop the cooperation of European Greenpeace groups. David McTaggart lobbied the Canadian Greenpeace Foundation to accept a new structure which would bring the scattered Greenpeace offices under the auspices of a single global organization. The European Greenpeace paid the debt of the Canadian Greenpeace office and on October 14, 1979, Greenpeace International came into existence. Under the new structure, the local offices would contribute a percentage of their income to the international organization, which would take responsibility for setting the overall direction of the movement with each regional office having one vote. Some Greenpeace groups, namely London Greenpeace (dissolved in 2001) and the US-based Greenpeace Foundation (still operational) however decided to remain independent from Greenpeace International.

Climate and energy

An inflatable snow man conveying "Stop Global Warming!" at the G8 (2007)Greenpeace was one of the first parties to formulate a sustainable development scenario for climate change mitigation, which it did in 1993. According to sociologists Marc Mormont and Christine Dasnoy, Greenpeace played a significant role in raising public awareness of global warming in the 1990s.The organization has also focused on CFCs, because of both their global warming potential and their effect on the ozone layer. Greenpeace was one of the leading participants advocating early phase-out of ozone depleting substances in the Montreal Protocol.mass production together with the refrigerator industry. United Nations Environment Programme awarded Greenpeace for "outstanding contributions to the protection of the Earth's ozone layer" in 1997. In 2007 one third of the world's total production of refrigerators were based on Greenfreeze technology, with over 200 million units in use.
Currently Greenpeace considers global warming to be the greatest environmental problem facing the Earth.Greenpeace calls for global greenhouse gas emissions to peak in 2015 and to decrease as close to zero as possible by 2050. For this Greenpeace calls for the industrialized countries to cut their emissions at least 40% by 2020 (from 1990 levels) and to give substantial funding for developing countries to build a sustainable energy capacity, to adapt to the inevitable consequences of global warming, and to stop deforestation by 2020. Together with EREC, Greenpeace has formulated a global energy scenario, "Energy [R]evolution", where 80% of the world's total energy is produced with renewables, and the emissions of the energy sector are decreased by over 80% of the 1990 levels by 2050.
Using direct action, Greenpeace has protested several times against coal by occupying coal power plants and blocking coal shipments and mining operations, in places such as New Zealand,Svalbard, Australia,and the United Kingdom. Greenpeace is also critical of extracting petroleum from oil sands and has used direct action to block the oil sand operations at Athabasca, Canada.
The Kingsnorth court caseIn October 2007, six Greenpeace protesters were arrested for breaking in to the Kingsnorth power station, climbing the 200 metre smokestack, painting the name Gordon on the chimney, and causing an estimated £30,000 damage. At their subsequent trial they admitted trying to shut the station down, but argued that they were legally justified because they were trying to prevent climate change from causing greater damage to property elsewhere around the world. Evidence was heard from David Cameron's environment adviser Zac Goldsmith, climate scientist James E. Hansen and an Inuit leader from Greenland, all saying that climate change was already seriously affecting life around the world. The six activists were acquitted. It was the first case where preventing property damage caused by climate change has been used as part of a "lawful excuse" defence in court.The Daily Telegraph and The Guardian described the acquittal as embarrassment to the Brown Ministry. In December 2008 The New York Times listed the acquittal in its annual list of the most influential ideas of the year.