Public Pays Field Burning Price

A Guest Viewpoint
The Register Guard
By Victor Rozek
Published: Monday, October 8, 2007

I’ve never actually met anyone who thought field burning was a swell idea unless they were profiting from it. It’s exasperating, because the solution seems quite obvious to anyone not doing the burning, yet regulatory agencies steadfastly refuse to do anything more than study the problem which, in politics, is a smokescreen for doing nothing — witness how long we’ve been “studying” global warming.

I have the misfortune of living downwind from the field burners, and I can confirm what should be evident to any creature with lungs. Burning 65,000 acres of biomass creates a huge amount of smoke. When that smoke floods over the Coburg Hills and fills the Mohawk Valley, it becomes impossible to work or recreate outdoors.

On stifling hot nights, you can either close the windows and nearly suffocate from the heat or open them and literally suffocate from the smoke — with the added bonus of having your entire house smell like yesterday’s campfire.

If you opt for open windows, within moments your eyes will burn and tear, your voice will get husky like that of a heavy smoker, your throat will become irritated and constrict and you will begin to cough. It’s not hard to imagine what a whole night of that would do to your system, certainly nothing good. It’s been so bad we’ve been forced to leave our home and stay in town with friends rather than subject ourselves to breathing the foul air.

While the investigation continues, here’s what common sense tells us: Field burning is dirty, bad for the environment, unhealthy and dangerous. When the winds shifted along Interstate 5 in 1988, the smoke caused a 23-vehicle, seven-death accident. Yes, the amount of burning was phased down after that needless tragedy, but why does it always takes a catastrophe of that scale to prod government into action?

Even then, regulators can’t manage to say, “This is wrong, we’re going to stop it.” Instead they say, “OK, you can keep poisoning people and fouling the environment, you just can’t do it as much.”

Ultimately, the problem is not one of science but of influence and money. Look at almost any issue, from forest management to global warming, and good lobbyists trump good science nearly every time. The field burners rail against regulation, claiming that it restricts their business — but that is not its intention. The purpose of regulation is to restrict the egregious behaviors that allow business to profit at the expense of the public and the environment.

This is a classic example of privatizing profits while socializing costs. All producers have a problem: how to dispose of the waste products of their production. If they can pass the cost of disposal on to the public, they make more money. Thus, the chemical producers on the Mississippi Delta have for generations dumped their refuse into the river, creating a massive dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. Likewise, mining operations leave toxic pools that leach into water supplies, poisoning fish and people alike. The public pays for the cost of cleanup, suffers the loss of fishing and recreation, and endures the long-term medical consequences of the pollution.

Socializing the cost of waste disposal is exactly what the grass seed industry is doing. Growers increase their profits by graciously allowing the rest of us to inhale their refuse. We all share in the cost of their garbage disposal by breathing it in.

Tens of thousands of people are held hostage to the ridiculous notion that we must keep doing something that is harmful because it benefits a small group of people financially. Funny, but I don’t recall being asked if I was willing to participate in this annual rite of gassage.

By the same logic, if I wanted to save money by not paying for garbage pickup, I should be able to store a year’s worth of trash, load it into a large truck and dump it on the doorstep of, say, a grass seed grower. Because that’s exactly what they’re doing — dumping their garbage on my doorstep.

Of course the growers would complain; but I could appeal for a gradual phase-down so that by 2015 I would be dumping only a quarter of my garbage at the homes of the growers. I’m sure they could live with that.

After all, it’s what they’re asking us to do.