Gabriola Island Clean Air Society

Please consider reading this article/declaration on the risks associated with exposure to wood smoke. It was written by a coalition of scientists, physicians, and others. Unfortunately no local media or even provincial media will touch this topic. Please feel free to share it. Heating Your Home With Wood Is More Dangerous Than You Likely Realize It may be natural, but there’s nothing safe or environmentally sound about heating your home with wood or clearing debris and yard waste in a burn barrel or pile. Many communities around North America and elsewhere are grappling with how best to manage exposure to wood smoke, and to understand more fully the community level and individual impacts associated with this serious and growing environmental health risk issue. Currently 1 in 9 deaths on a global scale are due to air pollution. In Canada, air pollution kills 9 times more people than automobile accidents.  In many rural communities in British Columbia, the main source o

If you thought that air pollution was a more general phenomenon, you thought wrong. Wood smoke from wood stoves and fireplaces creates these hyper local risk environments. These screenshots show how massively different risk levels can be from one spot on Gabriola Island to another. The reading of 157 on the AQI scale is very high and what you would expect in Beijing or Delhi and not a little island of 4000 people with no industry or traffic. Note how much higher these readings are from other spots with AQIs of 1 only a few kilometres away. The graph in the second image shows the prototypical pattern from wood burning and nothing else.