Twelve years ago was the start of the burn ban 🔥
I was sitting up here on that much colder Columbus Day Weekend next to campfire, truck cap camping with my old rig, listening to WGNA Country radio during the Sunday night call in show. People were bemoaning no more big ol’ bonfires under the new regulations.
That weekend I drove up out to Stanford to drive up Mount Utsaythana and spotted a country boy standing next to a burning barrel out back of their barn, watching as the first bag of garbage burned down, waiting to add a second one, probably for the one of the last times. People were burning a lot of stuff that weekend – if you needed to get rid of it – that was the time over the holiday weekend. Big piles of debris going up in smoke, as I drove down to Delhi and ultimately down to the high peaks region of the Catskills to do some very colorful hiking that Columbus Day back in 2009. I always liked burning stuff so I was pretty saddened too.
The burn ban lead to rural garbage collection becoming a major industry in rural New York. The two burn barrels placed on the far side of the barn was replaced by hurby curbies, dumpsters and garbage trucks traversing long rural roads to haul every sheet of discarded paper and plastic bottle to a distant landfill. Pickup trucks full of garbage bags were hauled to the transfer station. Some rural recycling exists but maybe the challenges of transporting low value scrap that was generated at far flung homes and farms meant little is actually recycled. Sometimes just getting a large dumpster that’s emptied every month or two is the only real practical option for rural waste disposal.
This was all happening against the back drop of the expansion of the Rapp Road Landfill into even more of the Albany Pine Bush. I was absolutely aghast at how wasteful city folk where when I was in college, especially at SUNY Albany where it seemed like recycling was non-existent. This was compared to us country folk – many of which with their compost piles, pigs and livestock, and trash burn barrels made maybe one or two trips a year to the recycling center – and mostly just to recycle cans and glass. The rest they were able to manage themselves – they didn’t need forever bulging landfills full of rotting food and plastic discards as most of the their stuff was returned to earth as soil or smoke.
Some stubborn rural residents and fatns continued to burn their trash, especially on the back roads and in the most deep rural parts of the country. Many get caught or decide its not worth the risk. You can occasionally smell that pungent burn barrel smell on the back roads. Many still burn paper products on woodstoves or other types of homemade incinerators far from the road. Some because they can’t fatham trucking every piece of discarded cardboard to a landfill often hundreds of miles away, some to save money or because they like just like fire and burning things like I do. There is definitely something therapeutic about watching one’s trash go up in flames and smoke.
I absolutely despise the burn ban to this day and all involved in it. I testified against it, signed petitions against it. It really changed my outlook on a lot of things in this state, streghened my resolve to eventually leave New York State for greener pastures. I saw it as the beginning of the end for redneck freedom and towards a society of more waste and landfilling. I swore I would never help another environmental cause again. I was frustrated but realized basically the only thing I could do eventually plan my exit from New York.
The institutional environmentalists and urban politicians are horrified that hillbillies, rednecks, homesteaders and farmers burned their trash. Couldn’t they smell how awful and toxic smoldering plastic really is? I don’t recommend standing down wind of a trash fire, and people should be considerate of neighbors. People shouldn’t light a bag of wet household garbage and then go to town while it smolder and kicks embers up starting a wildfire. But if you have acerage or a farm, then so be it. Just be careful with the fire.
I live in the suburbs, I don’t have a dog in the fight. But I sure like having fires up in the woods and I’d much rather burn my trash then have it sit in a landfill for a million years. Kind of fun to watch the plastic bottle melt away and the paper char. And some day, I really do want to live out in the country – off-grid with solar energy, livestock and no noisy garbage truck stopping in front of my house. Burn it hot and have no neighbors nearby who can smell it, taking the metals and other unburnables in a few times a year to the transfer station for scrap or landfill. Or maybe just bury it myself.
More than a decade later – am I still angry and resentful? Somewhat but I realize that it was never in my control and I don’t really have a dog in the fight. I haven’t lived out in the country in many years. I know there are many different parts of the country where people live differently and have different values and laws. Homesteaders and farmers overwhelmingly like to burn things and in many other parts of the country like Pennsylvania, Iowa and Missouri still do to this day. It’s part of being self reliant and not supporting the mob run, polluting landfill operations.