Brian Rudman: Where there's fire we're not allowed smoke

How things have changed. It only seems like yesterday that every Auckland backyard sported a 44-gallon drum incinerator and the weekend wasn't complete without a pall of smoke spreading across the isthmus from gently smouldering grass clippings.

Yet this week the Auckland Regional Council announced plans to ban outdoor rubbish fires and not a squawk was heard. The council also plans to ban all new indoor domestic open fireplaces "that exhaust straight up through the chimney and have no double burning capacity."

Now I know they're right. If we want to save the planet we can't just sit back and blame smoky buses and farty livestock. According to the Auckland regional emissions inventory, on an average winter day 20 tonnes of fine soot, 140 tonnes of carbon monoxide and 60 tonnes of hydrocarbons pour out our chimneys to blight the surrounding air.

As for rubbish fires, they annually spew 110 tonnes of fine soot, 600 tonnes of carbon monoxide and 200 tonnes of hydrocarbons into the sky along with a variety of other toxic, carcinogenic and mutagenic nasties.

Despite this evidence, for a child of a generation who, if they'd had such a thing as constitutional rights, would have listed the right to strike a Beehive match whenever they felt like it as one of them, these edicts come as a bit of a shock.

I'm just glad my mum's not still around. I wouldn't have wanted to be the one to trot out to the burner and break the bad news.

She was a great gardener, but often when I drove into her street and saw the clouds of smoke billowing from the backyard, I wondered if all the weeding and clipping of a day wasn't really just the warm-up for the true highlight, which was her late afternoon endeavours to burn off the evidence of the day's activities.

But not on a Monday, of course. Her generation knew that Monday was washday, a day when tradition ordained that smoky fires and drying clothes did not mix.

I've rather let the family tradition down. My last outside fire was a good 15 years ago. And that was more guerrilla action against a noisy neighbour than rubbish disposal. I'd discovered that fresh ivy clippings produced a black, acrid, almost heavier-than-air smoke which crept along the ground and up and over the fence into the noisemaker's windows.

Excellent therapy it was, too. But when peace finally broke out I did appreciate that open fires were rather antisocial, particularly amidst the pocket handkerchief sections of the inner-city.

However, I do persevere with my inefficient basket-grate inside fireplace. Call it my caveman genetic inheritance but even in sub-tropical Herne Bay on a bleak winter day you need a good roaring open fire. Not only does it keep away the wild bears and wolves, it also warms and dehumidifies the air better than any of the portable electric devices on offer. On top of the that, it's therapeutic.

Perhaps these new houses suffering from rot and excess humidity and mould problems could learn a lesson from the old villa fireplaces. Inefficient and all as they are, according to the experts.

Okay, okay, and they also spew muck into the sky. You only have to see the white paint on my front steps of a winter's morning to see that.

We Aucklanders used to thank our lucky stars we lived on a narrow, windy isthmus and convinced ourselves all the coal dust and other fumes and fine "particulate" rapidly blew out to sea.

The experts say this is not altogether true. Last winter "fine particulate pollution" in Mt Eden, Henderson and Takapuna at times reached "alert" levels. Domestic fires, says the ARC, are the second-biggest contributor to the region's air pollution after motor vehicles. In winter, they are the largest source of fine particulate.

I was surprised to discover that only one-third of all houses in the metropolitan area and half in rural Auckland have domestic fires. I'd have thought it was more. Must be all those new apartments.

The ARC's planned ban will mean that from next year any new domestic open fires will have to be of the double burning variety. So my fireplace is safe, for now anyway.

As for outdoor fires, well apart from hangis and barbecues, they will be a thing of the past.

I doubt my mum would have been amused.