Diwali, India’s Festival Of Light, is the most important holiday for the global Indian community. As much as it is a time to participate in family traditions, it is also a huge commercial opportunity for businesses, retailers and vendors that cater to the needs of the growing Indian community.
Pittsburgh, PA. A place known for its peoples’ good ol’ blue collar fervor, our enthusiasm for everything from our football team (STEELERS!!) to our beer (Iron City) to our hoagies (Primanti’s, brother!). We are thus naturally inclined to encourage bombastic public demonstrations of our affection–in this case, in celebrating ourselves!
I viewed the record-setting Pittsburgh 250 fireworks display from a wonderful vantage point on the North Shore, as I cheered my city on from the balcony of McFadden’s with a massive group of Couchsurfers visiting Pittsburgh for their regional meet-up weekend. All the while I was marvelling at the bright splashes and the thundering bursts–thirty minutes in duration!–the thought kept flitting across my mind: “what exactly is IN that massive smoke cloud pooling across the river?”
The Composition of Fireworks, a page compiled by Reema Gondhia at Imperial College in London, gives you the factual rundown of the makeup of fireworks. A firework’s chemical arrangement, however ingeniously designed to manifest our titillating visual delights, provides some unsettling names–chemicals with long rap sheets from research institutions indicating their threat to living systems. Read on for some distrubing examples.
On Saturday, October 4, 2008, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania celebrated its 250th birthday in a climax
of a fireworks display, thirty minutes long and launched from 17 different locations around the city, including barges floating on Pittsburgh’s three rivers and off of downtown skyscrapers.
Pittsburgh loves its fireworks.
I’ve noticed that after every Pirates game, whether the outcome is good or bad, there are fireworks. Steelers games. Community events. And now, Pittsburgh’s 250th birthday warrants the biggest blast of them all. How many folks out there have actually watched fireworks for thirty straight minutes? Since Pittsburgh’s 250th birthday celebration, I have. Your neck hurts!
In the official press release about the event from Zambelli Internationale, Pittsburgh set a record of 17 firework launch positions, “the largest in the country.” The site also describes a formidable array of effort: 40 professional pyrotechnicians and nearly 40,000 fireworks went into Pittsburgh’s big day.
Personally, while I was watching the spectacular displays, after a while I stopped being awed by the visual splendor and noticed my mind wandering to this thought: “what exactly is in those thick black clouds of firework byproduct eclipsing downtown?”
Fireworks displays create surges of pollutant ozone in lower levels of the atmosphere, where it is a respiratory irritant, greenhouse gas, and plant toxin. Some scientists believe fireworks are an “insignificant source of pollution”, because they occur infrequently; however, no source of greenhouse gases is insignificant considering our current climate crisis, not to mention the heavy metals and potassium perchlorate in these grand patriotic displays.
The idea of a sabbath, a period of rest from work or whatever, is something no longer exclusive to Jews and Christians. However, in its original biblical context, the ancient Hebrews also extended this idea of a period of rest to their farming practices by letting their fields “go wild” every seventh year. The precedent for this, a direct command from their God to Moses on Mount Sinai, is recorded in Leviticus 25:2-7:
Speak unto the children of Israel, and say unto them, When ye come into the land which I give you, then shall the land keep a sabbath unto the LORD. Six years thou shalt sow thy field, and six years thou shalt prune thy vineyard, and gather in the fruit thereof; But in the seventh year shall be a sabbath of rest unto the land, a sabbath for the LORD: thou shalt neither sow thy field, nor prune thy vineyard. That which groweth of its own accord of thy harvest thou shalt not reap, neither gather the grapes of thy vine undressed: for it is a year of rest unto the land. And the sabbath of the land shall be meat for you; for thee, and for thy servant, and for thy maid, and for thy hired servant, and for thy stranger that sojourneth with thee, And for thy cattle, and for the beast that are in thy land, shall all the increase thereof be meat.1
Like the people and even their God, then, the farmlands were given time to rest from their productive toil, to rebuild their strength in order to be fruitful again after the period of rest so that they might yield bountiful harvests for years to come. As the ancient Hebrews restrained from working their fields, they honored their God and the land itself.
I mention this practice of a “sabbath of the land,” almost entirely forgotten in modern farming (and especially in agribusiness), because it provides a potentially useful paradigm for more than just agriculture. It also provides a good model for us today, for how we might live sensibly and sustainably in a time when natural resources are threatened and the Earth is endangered, at least to some degree, by human actions.
Ah, the Fourth of July. The grand American holiday where fireworks come standard and the 'ooohs, and aaaahs' compete with the scream of bottle rockets, crackling jumping jacks and whatever makes that big boom that gets the dogs barking. Here's a few things you can think about to green up your patriotism.
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