The Case for Retiring Fireworks
One word, pollution: audio, visual, particulates.
Fireworks pollution leads to unhealthy air across Southern California - 2024
There is a particular irony in writing this on the eve of America’s 250th birthday. This is supposed to be the big one, the semiquincentennial, the blowout to end all blowouts. Until the 300th anyway.
So have a great holiday weekend and a very Happy 4th of July Independence Day!
Be safe out there and have fun! That being said…
And this week, while Utah’s governor is declaring a statewide state of emergency and banning personal fireworks outright, while Colorado Springs has canceled its display because a wildfire fifty miles south just burned through fifty-five square miles of foothills, while Colorado and New Mexico’s governors are begging their citizens for restraint, the rest of the country is still lining up at TNT stands to buy explosives to set off in their backyards. That contradiction is the whole essay in miniature. We keep doing this because it is tradition, not because it still makes sense.
I am not writing this as someone who hates spectacle or fun.
As a kid, I loved fireworks. I loved explosions. Until I ended up in the middle of one once at a party. It was harmless, mostly, but a nightmare. It was an accident. It gave me perspective of what a real war explosion must be like in a roller coaster effect, in being safe but “I fully get the point!” My younger brother as a kid blew off part of one of his fingers with a firework.
I spent time in the Air Force. I understand the appeal of a big, loud, unifying show of national pride. But tradition is not a reason on its own. Slavery was tradition. Leaded gasoline was tradition. At some point you look at the actual costs of a thing and decide whether the payoff still justifies them.
Strip away the nostalgia and fireworks reduce to one word: pollution. Not metaphorically. Literally, on three separate axes at once. Audio pollution, in the form of unpredictable concussive noise blasted into neighborhoods with no warning. Visual pollution, in the form of light and smoke thrown into airspace that plenty of creatures depend on staying dark and quiet.
Bremerton, Washington July 5, 2026, 6:40AM- 1MPH winds - no reported fog
Particulate pollution, in the form of the exact chemical byproducts you’d expect from detonating explosives over a city. Run the case on any one of those three and the argument holds. Run it on all three at once, which is what actually happens every time we do this, and it stops looking like a tradition worth defending.
Particulate pollution: the air we’re breathing afterward
Start with the simplest fact: fireworks are an air quality event. If you’ve ever been in the middle of a post fireworks display with stagnant air, it sucks.
A study of 315 monitoring locations across the United States found PM2.5 levels spiking anywhere from 42 percent to 370 percent above baseline on the Fourth of July, with elevated concentrations sometimes lasting until noon the next day. In Albany, New York, particulate concentrations in the hours after a fireworks show ran up to ten times normal.
A more recent study using low-cost sensor networks across California found PM2.5 spikes of three to five times baseline, with the worst-hit cities running fifteen times higher than the cleanest ones, and the burden falling hardest on lower-income, higher-minority, higher-asthma-rate communities. This is not a fringe finding. It is the consistent, repeated result of every air quality study anyone has run on this question. We are choosing, once or twice a year, to deliberately degrade the air over our own cities, and the people who pay for it hardest are the ones least equipped to absorb the hit.
Audio pollution: the veterans we say we’re honoring
This is the one that should sting the most, because the Fourth of July is explicitly a holiday about honoring the country that veterans served. And every year, without fail, we retraumatize a meaningful share of them doing it. Somewhere between six and thirteen percent of veterans live with PTSD, and for a portion of that population, unpredictable explosive noise is not an inconvenience. It’s a trigger in the clinical sense, the kind that drops a grown man to the pavement because his amygdala has just decided he’s back in a war zone.
VA psychologists talk about it every year around this time: the hypervigilance, the withdrawal, the sleeplessness that stretches for days afterward. Grassroots groups have handed out tens of thousands of “combat veteran lives here” lawn signs since the 2010s, asking neighbors for a courtesy heads-up. A Georgia veteran took his own life on a Fourth of July after fireworks he’d specifically asked people not to set off went off anyway. We do not have to guess whether this harm is real. It is documented, it is repeated, and it happens to the exact population the holiday claims to be honoring.
Visual pollution: the wildlife we’re flushing out
The audio problem doesn’t stop with people. Animals experience fireworks as the same unpredictable, concussive threat that veterans do, minus the ability to understand what’s happening or reason their way through it. Nesting bald eagles, herons, and other colonial nesting birds treat the abrupt light and noise as an active threat, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reports that panicked birds regularly abandon nests outright, leaving young exposed to predators. Coastal birds sometimes flee so far out to sea that they don’t have the energy to make it back. Researchers studying greylag geese found a measurable stress response, elevated heart rate and body temperature, from a single night of fireworks, and Berlin researchers tracking corvids after New Year’s found erratic flight patterns and abandoned roosts well after the show ended. The Fourth falls during fledgling season for a lot of species, which means the birds least equipped to handle a startle response are the ones getting it. None of this requires speculation. It’s the same pattern every year, documented by wildlife rehab centers who see their intake numbers climb every July 5th.
Pets fare no better. Animal shelters report a 30 to 60 percent spike in lost-pet intakes in the days immediately following the Fourth, and July 5th is routinely one of the busiest single days of the year for shelters nationwide.
Dogs and cats bolt, crash through windows and fences, and end up disoriented miles from home. It’s such a predictable pattern that “microchip your pet before the Fourth” has become standard seasonal advice from veterinarians, which is itself a tell. We don’t issue that kind of advance warning for a holiday that isn’t reliably harmful. I always felt bad for my dog around holidays that involved fireworks.
A fourth cost the triad doesn’t cover: the wildfires we’re setting
Air, ears, and eyes aren’t the whole ledger, either. Fire risk is no longer a hypothetical. Fire ecologists are blunt about the mechanism: wildfires need fuel, weather, and an ignition source, and July Fourth is simply a day when we manually add thousands of extra ignition sources to a landscape that, in a lot of the West this time of year, is already primed to burn.
This year that’s not an abstraction, it’s the lead story. Utah has banned personal fireworks statewide. Colorado Springs canceled its show outright because of an active fire nearby. States across the Southwest and into Oregon and Washington are restricting displays at the local level because the fuel and weather conditions leave zero margin for error. We are, quite literally, gambling with people’s homes and lives for a light show, in the exact years when the gamble has gotten most dangerous.
What we’d be trading it for
Here is the part that should make this an easy call rather than a grim sacrifice: the replacement already exists and it’s good. Drone light shows have matured fast. Cities like Arlington Heights and Schaumburg, Illinois are running them this Fourth in place of fireworks entirely, and municipal event planners report audiences frequently prefer them once they’ve seen one.
The cost comparison is no longer the knockout argument against drones that it used to be. A mid-size professional fireworks show and a comparable drone show now land in overlapping price ranges once you factor in permitting, insurance, security, and pyrotechnic cleanup, and drone shows carry no fire risk, no debris, no reliance on favorable wind. They can spell out a city’s name, animate a veteran salute, or trace the shape of a local landmark, which is a kind of storytelling fireworks simply can’t do.
They’re not a perfect substitute for every veteran, since the drone hum itself has been reported as a trigger for some, which only underscores that the deeper problem is unpredictable, unannounced loud aerial events in general, not fireworks specifically. But as a default public celebration format, drones solve the fire risk and most of the noise problem in one move, without asking anyone to give up the spectacle.
What this isn’t
I’m not arguing for banning personal freedom or turning this into another front in the culture war. Professional, permitted, well-sited displays run by trained operators are a different risk category than backyard mortars, and I’m not naive about the fact that a lot of people will keep buying the backyard kind regardless of what any essay says. What I am arguing is that our default should shift.
Cities and towns planning a public show in 2026 have a genuinely better option sitting right there, one that doesn’t spike the local air quality, doesn’t traumatize the population it’s meant to be honoring, and doesn’t risk igniting the hillside behind the stadium. Given all of that, defaulting to the fireworks display because it’s what we’ve always done isn’t tradition. It’s just inertia dressed up as patriotism.
We can still have the spectacle. We can still have the noise, for the people who want it, at a professional show with the right permits and the right site. What we don’t need anymore is the assumption that fireworks are simply what celebration looks like. That assumption has a body count, a smog signature, and, this week, an active fire perimeter attached to it. Two hundred fifty years in, the country can afford to update the tradition.
Not to mention that today we’re finding new alternatives through technology and the sky’s the limit on this one, literally.
Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!
JZ Murdock is a filmmaker and author based in Bremerton, Washington. His novel Death of Heaven received the New York City Big Book Award for Horror in 2024. His film Pvt. Ravel’s Bolero has been lauded worldwide with many international festival awards. The film companion book is currently under review at a UK publisher. If this work means something to you, you can support it at Ko-fi.