An article appeared in the press the other day complaining of all the smoke from the house chimneys in the countryside owing to the open log fires that are all the rage with the new life people. How the do gooders forget that once all the country depended on fire to make this England great.
Then it was king coal that did the polluting. Now that has stopped the earth friends look for another enemy to attack, compared to 50 years ago this country process very little smoke to harm its atmosphere, all the smoke we billow into the air is at ground level well below the cloud base that the rain soon sorts out and brings back to earth. Once this part of England was famous for its hops and the wise farmer knew that his hops always did better when he grew them down wind from the local railway line. The soot from the smoke, pollutants they call it, gave the fields of binds a liberal coating of sulphur that killed the harmful bugs. The grass and crops benefited from the stream trains Now the killer in our midst is the combustion engine giving off toxic lighter than air gasses. The biggest culprit of all is the one in the sky that you seldom see and with luck less seldom hear. A real silent killer. Our government are hell bent on encouraging us to use this killer more and more in the years ahead. Not a year goes by without some proposal to promote the increase of this traffic. Now they plan to make larger three decker machines and increase the number of runways to accommodate them! These huge aircraft burn not gallons but tens of tons of fuel, depositing their evil dirt high above the clouds with no hope of it being washed down, no rain falls from above the clouds. These gasses rise and eat the ozone away.
While we still have an earth let us look after it and enjoy our land. The winters are defiantly getting warmer, why even this last December primroses were out under the hedge in my back garden and daffodils were up an inch. crocus were in bud – all at least four weeks early.
JIMPER
Rye’s Own February 2004
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