This is the Guardian.

Today, the middle-class status symbol that's endangering our lives.

There's no question that wood burning stoves create a nice warm feeling in more than one sense.

They glow, they emanate heat in a very tangible way and you get a sort of sense of deep comfort and

connection by sitting beside one and feeling that he radiating onto you. You feel like you're doing

something that people have done for hundreds of years. George Monbio writes about the environment

for a living. He cares deeply about it. And when it came to refitting his own home,

he tried to make careful choices that would have as little impact on the planet as possible.

I was living in a pretty drafty house which was quite sort of disaggregated. It was hard to

heat it from a single source. I was really trying to get it right and I put a lot of work into

getting it insulated, draft-proved, changing the windows, but I still needed a heat source, of course.

And I wanted to get off fossil fuels. And so it seemed like the obvious choice to go for wood burning

stoves. It was a choice that many others have made in good faith. And wood burning fires have

certainly been sold to us. In home improvement magazines and TV shows, they're there,

a status symbol at the heart of the so-called ideal middle-class living room.

It was an expensive decision. In fact, I had to take out a loan in order to afford it.

I think including the rebuilding of one of the chimneys that I had to do, the fitting of the

flus and the purchase of the stoves, it must have been around £30,000. And then I'd bought my first

load of seasoned wood to go in them. And that was the moment when I began to have my first crumbs.

Well, since then, I've discovered that wood burning stoves are among the greatest sources of

the most dangerous kind of pollution, which is small particles. The more George read into the

evidence, the more concerned he became. He found out that wood burning stoves are among the greatest

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