Let it snow! Let it snow! Let it snow! - Ella Fitzgerald
I write this from beside a warm wood stove, from which this cozy song ― the weather outside is frightful, but the fire is so delightful ― feels particularly relevant. I enjoy a fireplace, but with more internal conflict than I did a few years ago.
During a particularly bad forest fire season in 2020, my roommate in California bought an air quality monitor, and I was quite shocked that, on the graphs it produced, I could see that actions like “frying some dumplings” and “blowing out a candle” absolutely filled our apartment’s air with particulate matter. And, quoting The Fireplace Delusion:
The reality of our situation is scientifically unambiguous: If you care about your family’s health and that of your neighbors, the sight of a glowing hearth should be about as comforting as the sight of a diesel engine idling in your living room.
I hope that attention towards both indoor and outdoor air quality becomes more commonplace over my lifetime. My parents’ generation in Canada was exposed to cognitively harmful levels of lead through leaded gasoline, which was (finally!) eliminated globally last year, and I sometimes wonder what similar environmental poisons might horrify my children, should I become a parent. It might be the microplastics or the agricultural antibiotics, but, unfortunately for my delusional delight, it might also be the wood smoke.
In indoor cat mode,
Tessa