Tomorrow we\u2019ll celebrate the founding of the United States. How will we do this? People have different ways but the most noticeable one is to make tons of noise and display lots of colors, using fireworks! Last night, two nights before the \u201cbig\u201d night, people in the neighborhood I was visiting were blasting these incendiary devices for several hours. I guess people\u2019s celebratory zeal was just too much to contain.<\/p>\n
With all the talk about \u201cprotecting the environment\u201d and \u201ccleaning our air and water,\u201d you might reasonably ask, \u201care fireworks a sound practice?\u201d Given that the air blackens and smells horrible after a fireworks event, the answer to this simple question seems obvious. However, as usual in environmental thinking, the \u201cdevil is in the details.\u201d So are fireworks safe and should we continue to use them as we do? (I decided to write this on the day before the \u201cBIG\u201d day, so as not to be too much of a \u201cDanny Downer.\u201d)<\/p>\n
Apparently, fireworks consist of gun powder, heavy metals and other toxins, such as perchlorate (ref 1<\/a>). Many of these are known to have carcinogenic impacts or interfere with human hormones (ref 2<\/a>). What chemicals that are used change while \u201cexploding\u201d and take on new chemical forms and properties, many of which haven\u2019t been carefully studied. And these chemicals stay in our air (more than 12 hours afterwards) eventually settling in the soil and ultimately ending up in our waterways. Not good, right?<\/p>\n Yet, maybe since we normally only use them on one BIG day, everything is fine; famously, \u201ceverything in moderation.\u201d Unfortunately, this doesn\u2019t work either. First of all, we are beginning to use them at many public events (baseball home runs often come with a firework display and colleges are using them at pre-graduation celebrations, and recall the pre-July 4th eruptions in our neighborhoods). Also, the chemicals used are often persistent meaning that they don\u2019t easily break down into \u201csafe\u201d forms, so they remain toxic to our environment for years to come. Additionally, fireworks result in a huge numbers of hospital visits–in 2014, there were over 10,000 emergency room visits during the \u201cmonth\u201d of fireworks (ref 3<\/a>). And lastly, you would be surprised how many thousands of cities, towns, and even neighborhoods have their own large firework displays. Last year, while driving around St. Louis looking for Ted Drewes’ amazing ice cream, I witnessed at least four such events going on at the same time.<\/p>\n Despite all of the above information (and books more of it at our cyber fingertips), I have a hard time thinking that we\u2019ll make any headway stopping people from enjoying their city\u2019s firework displays or blasting off a few bottle rockets in their backyards. (Though apparently there are 8,700+ people who have signed a petition to ban the private use of fireworks in New Zealand, ref 4<\/a> And, due to this years terrible drought many communities in Michigan are calling for reducing or cancelling displays (ref 5<\/a>)). Sadly, this just represents one more thing that we know we shouldn\u2019t do but we just can\u2019t seem to do. This is particularly confusing when we realize that we are talking about something that is completely unnecessary to us and our collective health. As such, it represents another instance of the need to completely rethink how we function as a society. We need to have principles that we adhere to (such as, “we shall not poison our air and water without due cause and consideration”) and don\u2019t deviate from just because its \u201cfun\u201d or \u201cthe thing we do.\u201d Change is hard but challenges make life interesting, don\u2019t they? Celebrate tomorrow, but do so with a small kernel of awkwardness and contemplation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Tomorrow we\u2019ll celebrate the founding of the United States. How will we do this? People have different ways but the most noticeable one is to make tons of noise and display lots of colors, using fireworks! Last night, two nights before the \u201cbig\u201d night, people in the neighborhood I was visiting were blasting these incendiary … Continue reading “fireworks”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-92","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-challenges","category-health"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7BrNb-1u","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/solarutopia.org\/onehuman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/solarutopia.org\/onehuman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/solarutopia.org\/onehuman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/solarutopia.org\/onehuman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/solarutopia.org\/onehuman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=92"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/solarutopia.org\/onehuman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":93,"href":"https:\/\/solarutopia.org\/onehuman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92\/revisions\/93"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/solarutopia.org\/onehuman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=92"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/solarutopia.org\/onehuman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=92"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/solarutopia.org\/onehuman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=92"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}