I’m surprised that the Observer’s deservedly-respected editor may have succumbed to a “Vancouver Festival of Fire” allure – that is, to the rapidly declining practice of fireworks as a community event.
Ordinarily, I wholeheartedly share that respect for our editor’s highly regarded journalism, but in the Observer editorial of Nov. 6, Ms. Hughes promotes an outdated, inappropriate return to fireworks – despite its scientifically well-established reality as an environmentally unfriendly practice, and one being discontinued – not promoted – in many, many communities.
As well, the editorial doesn’t tell the “whole story” of the wisely-ended Salmon Arm Canada Day fireworks issue of the recent past. It incorrectly characterizes the issue as being solely concerned with the disturbance that fireworks would cause waterfront wildlife, and that for proposed future fireworks, the disturbed wildlife would have (mostly) “migrated” out of harm’s way by Hallowe’en, anyway…” Certainly, the disturbance impact of fireworks on wildlife was one part of the fireworks issue at the waterfront, but even more so was the toxic metal pollution of the air (that we breathe) and the water (that we drink), generated by fireworks and their chemical debris during explosive combustion. Potentially dangerous fireworks metals include lithium, strontium, zinc, antimony, magnesium, barium, phosphorus and copper – the chemistry of which was published in an Observer Letter to the Editor at the time.
Sadly, the air we breathe and the water we drink do not “migrate” south out of harm’s way; the toxic chemical fall-out’ from fireworks may persist, unhealthily, in the air, water and soil ecosystems right here with us.
In this, the 21st century, (apparently) an era of ecological, “green awareness”, communities are ill-advised to lapse backwards into a “celebration of dangerous metal pollution”- no matter how deceptively bedazzling and appealing it might appear to our eager, but incautious eyes.
Thos. J. Crowley
