Every year when forest fire season starts, the Deep Purple song 'Smoke on the Water' fire in the sky, plays in my head.

ItSA国际影视传媒檚 a great song with a great story. The band was touring Europe in 1972 and went to their next gig at Lake Geneva. They arrived in time to see a big, fancy casino across the lake burn to the ground. Apparently Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention were playing a concert there. Someone in the audience fired a flare gun and this set the casino ablaze. This is a reminder that humans do start a lot of fires.

I was doing a little research on the effect of breathing forest fire smoke on people, physically and mentally. There wasnSA国际影视传媒檛 a lot of information, and one site even commented that this topic had not been researched much. This is rather surprising since people have been breathing in fire smoke since they evolved on this planet.

People would spend a lot of time sitting around the fire to keep warm, cook food, for the light at night and to keep wild animals away. And we all know if you sit around a campfire, you get a good dose of smoke, no matter which side you sit on. People used to carry fire or smouldering coals around with them, until they learned how to make fires on their own.

ItSA国际影视传媒檚 a little hard to wrap oneSA国际影视传媒檚 mind around the idea that forest and grass fires are a part of our natural ecosystem and part of the ecology of the planet. So, we have to learn to live with them and how to better control them.

People realized that after an area burned, things seemed to grow better. So around 12,000 years ago, humans developed slash and burn agriculture. ThatSA国际影视传媒檚 where you cut all the trees down, let them dry out and then burn them. This adds charcoal, wood ash and carbon to the soil and, for a few years, is good for farming. Around the world, some people are still doing this. In some areas, people also used fire to clear out the undergrowth. They did this to make the area more productive for wildlife and to help protect themselves from big summer wildfires. It's another practice some question, but it has also been going on for thousands of years.

Even in Canada, some farmers, after harvest, will burn off the stubble left behind to ready the field for the next year's seeding. Railroads used to burn the weeds beside their tracks as did various businesses and highways department. In the fall as a kid, neighbours would rake their leaves into a pile by the road and burn them until the authorities passed a law against burning leaves. Now that material all could have been collected and composted to create a mulch to fertilize the soil but burning was easier, apparently.

Over the centuries, humans have learned a lot more about farming and forests but there is still much to learn. That said, we should try to apply what we already know. If we are going to have towns and cities in fire-prone areas, then we should build them so they are more protected from wildfires. Most communities are near lakes and rivers, particularly in the North, so infrastructure should be installed to wet the entire city down if a fire is getting close.

Ah yes, the politicians will argue they canSA国际影视传媒檛 afford to do this but when you add up the costs that rebuilding what winds up burned, it is a reasonable precautionary expense. It is a matter of changing attitudes as well. Even during extreme fire conditions, people are out there throwing lit cigarettes on the ground, driving all-terrain vehicles or having campfires and not putting them out. So, individually and collectively, we need to take living in a boreal forest much more seriously.

We donSA国际影视传媒檛 want smoke over water or fire in the sky if it can be avoided or mitigated.