A Yuppie Vendetta Against Wood-Stove Owners?

WE are children of the earth. Fire - ages ago - separated us from the rest of the animal kingdom and permitted human advancement. The campfire was the center of social gatherings and the place where folklore, history and survival information were passed on from storyteller to storyteller and from generation to generation.

Fire permitted human penetration to the remotest climates of the globe. For tens of thousands of years mankind has existed with wood smoke in caves, cabins and camps. Our lungs have survived over the millennia.

Internal-combustion engines, by comparison, have spewed their poison for barely a century. Notwithstanding this, however, bureaucrats from a number of alphabet-soup agencies seek to extinguish the fires of the homesteaders while they continue to foul the air with fluorocarbons, carbon monoxide and other exotic poisons from their BMWs and Volvos.

They maintain this yuppie arrogance despite the fact that their own questionable statistics allocate 40 percent of the region's total air pollution to automobile exhaust and 20 percent to wood stoves. (How much of the 20 percent is from slash burns and the ubiquitous burn barrel?)

Most stove owners want a clean atmosphere. Most do not use stoves as trash incinerators of plastics, synthetics and other toxic waste. Most stove owners have cooperated during air-pollution alerts. The stove industry has designed burners that are a vast improvement over past products and are capable of burning as clean as an oil burner.

We have retrofitted our abodes with these improvements. Now we are rewarded by threats to outlaw all wood-stove use categorically. I wonder if the grand architects of our ecosystem have considered the effects of a total ban on wood stoves?

Many families use their wood stoves to augment their expensive electric heating systems. Expect an enormous increase in electrical use during the winter months with attendant blackouts, brownouts and breakdowns. This will lead to a need for an increased supply of voltage. Many of the rivers are already dammed. Nukes are in disfavor.

That leaves us with the imperative construction of more Centralia-style coal-fired electrical plants. Now we are talking big-time air pollution. Those homes that supplement their oil-heating systems with wood fires will increase the demand for that commodity, thus further jacking up the price and making this nation further dependent on imported petroleum.

Another factor overlooked by the ivory-tower bureaucrats and anti-stove extremists is the human dimension. These financial high-rollers have no conception of what is going on in the lower socioeconomic depths. They are unaware that many families heat with wood because they cannot afford alternatives and do not want their children to freeze.

The yuppies are oblivious to the fact that during the ``supply side'' 1980s, when their incomes were climbing higher and higher, the incomes of the nation's economic underclass - a majority of us - were getting smaller and the economic crunch was getting tighter.

Consider this example of the insensitivity of the fanatics. For years it has been customary in the Northwest to pay a small fee to the U.S. Forest Service and have access to firewood in national forests. Anti-stove extremists have filed a lawsuit to prevent this tradition from continuing. Thus the noose ever tightens.

Where will it end? What will satisfy the bureaucrats and elitists in their lust for absolute control? Global warming is a concern. Certainly our collective respiration breathes a large amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. So what if mankind has inhaled oxygen and exhaled carbon dioxide since Adam and Eve?

I honestly fear that if we permit these fanatics to continue to run our lives, none but the elite will be permitted to breath. Think of it - a total ban on all breathing by ``non-essential elements.'' Aspiration privileges shall remain only for the yuppies . . . and enough mechanics to service their BMWs and Volvos.

Jack Silverback is a farmer and laborer who lives on Vashon Island.