Our top health professionals, along with ordinary citizens in the Cowichan Valley, are calling for us to do more to improve our collective air quality.
So why is it so hard to get anything meaningful done on this score?
Air quality advisories have been a normal part of both winter and summer around Duncan for several years now, in spite of the City of Duncan being one of the municipalities in the area that has banned backyard burning outright.
On what should be crisp, clear winter mornings we can all see smoke billowing from chimneys linked to inefficient, probably old, heating sources.
Old woodstoves are a particularly troublesome culprit in fouling our winter air.
Jenny Lawson of the Cowichan Fresh Air Team ably described in a Citizen news story in Wednesday’s edition how the air surrounding some homes resembles “a bad day in Beijing”.
That’s not an exaggeration.
And it’s a big health problem.
Poor air quality contributes to poor health. This we know.
And yet we continue to largely take our air for granted.
These types of calls for action almost inevitably rile up woodstove owners and those who wish to continue to burn in their backyards whenever they like.
We’d like to see replacement of old models and proper use of the first, and a total ban of the second.
It’s past time for the Municipality of North Cowichan to join the Town of Ladysmith and the City of Duncan with a full backyard burning ban. Ditto the electoral areas of the Cowichan Valley Regional District.
There are other disposal methods for the waste people are burning, and far too many people burn outside of the permitted burning windows, burn things they are not allowed to, burn when the venting index is not good enough and burn wet fuel that creates a miasma that chokes everyone in the vicinity.
We would also like the see the regulations revisited for farms. We’ve seen similar problems created by farmers (who are under different regulations) who are not properly building burn piles and instead creating a smoky mess that pollutes for kilometres in every direction.
Perhaps it’s time for some enforcement, at the least, to ensure farm burning is being done properly.
The CVRD is working on an airshed protection strategy that will hopefully lead us in the direction of change, with everyone on the same page rather than adhering to a patchwork of regulations. We all live in the same valley and smoke and other pollutants don’t notice our human-drawn lines on a map.
For some of our citizens it really is about being able to draw the next breathe.
