It's weird and wonderful that the experts who unleashed atomic energy, napalm and frozen dinners on the world are also in the forefront when it comes to issuing Dire Warnings (DWs, for short). At the same time the officially recognized boffins call for the bombing of the Lower Mainland with poison in case a disoriented gypsy moth should take a wrong turn and blunder across the border, they crank out a DW telling us that milk or coffee or even whisky is almost sure to kill us. One group of experts dumps flourides and chlorine into drinking water while another sets its collective hair on fire over the chance that these additives will cause crossed eyes or votes for the NDP.

Periodically there are DWs about wood-burning fireplaces. We should all switch to politically correct natural gas or electric simulations so we don't pump carbon dioxide into the sky. A laudable notion, if these lab-lords would get just as excited over the huge amounts of smoke generated by the slash-burning by the timber industry or my neighbour's horrifying experiments with his barbecue. But I'm supposed to feel guilty when I light up some well-seasoned alder in my little heat-circulating fireplace, right?

Well, Mr. Science, as my old granny used to say, you can go boil your head.

How many hundreds of home fireplaces are represented by one of the dozens of "beehive burners" still operating around the province to dispose of mill waste? Why do the experts approve an industry that destroys the mature forests needed to absorb the harmful gases produced when the waste from the destruction is burned?

But raising issues like that doesn't fit well with the festive season. You might as well ask why we allow the petro-chemical industry to keep a billion gunk-generators out on the road instead of pressing hard for relatively harmless electric vehicles. Or why the death-dealing tobacco companies, supposedly banned from advertising their toxic wares in Canada, are free to plaster their brand names over a number of sports events each year. Bitter? Of course not. We know the world is safe in the hands of the big corporations, watched as they are by the best politicians and scientists that can be drawn to their trough.

We still have time to sit back and soak up the warmth and beauty of a wood fire - a not scientific phenomenon that magically blends the campfires of summer with the livingrooms of winter. A nineteenth-century philosopher, a friend of Mark Twain, once called a gas fireplace with artificial logs a blasphemy. "Do you think a cat would lie down before it?" asked Charles Dudley Warner in an 1872 book called Backlog Studies. "Can you poke it? If you can't poke it, it's a fraud." To poke a wood fire is more solid enjoyment than almost anything else in the world. The crowning virtue in a man is to let his wife poke the fire. I don't know how any virtue whatever is possible over an imitation gas log. "What a sense of insincerity the family must have, if they indulge in the hypocrisy of gathering about it."

No hypocrisy at our house. Dorothy, I say, please poke that fire.

Tony Eberts, now retired, is an environmental columnists whose 40 years with The Vancouver Province newspaper won him much esteem and respect. abeberts@telus.net