Keith Beautrais
The smoke billows across the back fence and you have to go inside and shut the windows.
That neighbour is at it again. If you're lucky it is a bit of paper and cardboard that should have been recycled but chances are an acrid smell tells you that the rubbish includes plastic.
Heat, plus plastic and other materials sets off chemical reactions leading to products that irritate the nose, eyes and skin. The plastics may contain chlorine as well as some more complicated additives, so the results of the burn can be an unpredictable brew including known carcinogens such as dioxins.
Throw some treated timber off-cuts into the mix and the neighbourhood may now be getting arsenic, formaldehyde and other serious pollutants added into the smoke. It probably won't kill you but that is an extra exposure that you didn't ask for and which is certainly not good for the lungs and other organs.
Then there is the true fire-lover who nurtures their smouldering fire regularly with weeds all day, and day after day. The wetness of the plants means great volumes of damp smoke, forcing the neighbours into the category of passive smokers with all the health impacts that entails.
I get the impression it is more commonly males who have the love affair with fire but the evidence of our ancestors using fire goes back over a million years and females also catch the cultural fire bug.
If we could see New Zealand from space in a thousand year time-lapse we would observe massive fires depleting our forests and adding a huge impost of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.
Colossal fires still consume South American and South-East Asian forests. Latest reports are that two-thirds of the planet's rainforest have been destroyed or degraded. Whether it is for palm oil plantations or soya bean fields, this destruction of forest by fire has got to be analogous to the man sitting out on a high branch sawing it off blind to the impending tipping point of self-induced pain.
In New Zealand the precious remnants of our own beautiful lowland rainforest are very limited but they contain the DNA in seeds to reverse the carnage caused by burning.
It is gratifying to see the increased awareness and actions being taken to spread the forests again. At Bushy Park Tarapuruhi school children are among the volunteers replanting paddocks. We can all join in.
As for that nuisance neighbour. Maybe offering to help them recycle more of their waste by combining loads to the recycling centre could help.
Putting a weed barrel up against the fence for them to chuck their noxious weeds into would provide you with weed tea for the garden as well as reducing the fuel for the fire.
If they are still recalcitrant offenders, you can contact the council to remind them of their responsibilities around nuisance fires.
Keith Beautrais is an Educator at Tarapuruhi Bushy Park
