[Greenbuilding] No place for wood burning fireplaces inGreenBuilding

[Kat]

I feel as though I've been attacked by Rushd45.  I don't appreciate that.  I didn't save the original message I sent out, so 
I can't check and see if I was being sufficiently lucid that day, but I think he took me completely wrong.

That said:

>From the American Heritage Dictionary: "Pollute: 1. To make unfit for or harmful to living things, especially by the addition 
of waste matter."

Thus, the phrase, "acceptable levels of pollutants."  Meaning, waste matter added only to a point where it is not harmful to 
living things.  As Donna Soroka pointed out, we cannot possibly quit polluting unless we go back to pre-fire cave-man days. 
Even then we'd still be polluting - by shitting.  Get enough people shitting in one area and what have you got on your hands? 
A dangerous, nasty mess.  The real problem is that you can only add pollutants into a system as fast as that system can break 
those pollutants down to something unharmful (shit becomes soil).  One (efficient) fire in the middle of nowhere isn't going 
to hurt anyone or anything because the system can recover from the smoke pollutants before you add more in again.  Fires in a 
city (or any concentrated area, such as a crowded campground) are going to lead to unacceptable levels, because you're 
generally going to have too much smoke going into the system too quickly.  You have take into account the ability of the 
system to recover.  Any level of pollutant above that recover-point is going to be unacceptable.  For example: I can drink a 
lot of alcohol before I die of alcohol poisoning.

Radioactive waste has no acceptable level, in my mind.  Anything that takes that long to break down and has the potential to 
do that much damage to everything alive should be avoided completely.  Burning coal is, well, burning coal.  It's a fossil 
fuel: a finite resource that puts carbon that has been sequestered for millenia back into a system that no longer exists... 
bad idea.  Hazardous waste is classified as such because it's so *very* nasty.  I imagine it would be just as nasty for the 
plants and animals in the ocean as it would be for us - therefore, dumping it in the ocean?  Unacceptable.  It's spurious to 
compare these to burning wood.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Rushd45" <RushD45 at ironandwood.org>
To: <greenbuilding at listserv.repp.org>
Sent: Thursday, December 07, 2006 9:35 PM
Subject: Re: [Greenbuilding] No place for wood burning fireplaces inGreenBuilding


Kat wrote -

> Burning a wood fire in the middle of nowhere isn't going to hurt anyone.

So I guess it is alright to put an electrical plant that burns coal in the middle of nowhere, it isn't going to hurt anyone, 
besides it will produce electricty. And I guess it is alright to bury some radioactive waste way down deep in a hole, cause 
down there it isn't going to hurt anyone. And it is alright to dump hazardous waste way out in the ocean, cause there is so 
much water and it is so deep....

Come on, get your head out of the sand...

I live in Tucson AZ, actually about 25 miles west in 3 Points. Very rural, and now that it is 'winter' here, in the mornings 
people build fires to warm their houses. Wood fires, easily recognizable by the mesquite smell and the smoke that lays like a 
blanket slowly speading away from the chimney. It is very very visible when there is no wind. And even more so, when the 
smoke plume goes across a road and you have to drive thru it, you notice it very much.

Here is another way smoke pollutes, it increases the particulate level in the air. So that at night the light level in the 
skies in our area actually increases during the winter because of the fires and smoke. Observatories have real problems with 
this, it impacts their abiity to clearly monitor the skies.

Rush
Tucson AZ
www.ironandwood.org