In Pennsylvania, state law allows rural households to burn “domestic refuse” unless prohibited by the local townships. 🔥Many small towns look the other way, and plenty of small farms and homesteads burn their trash – everything they throw away – except maybe food waste that they compost and metals and glass which they either take to the landfill or the transfer station for in some cases for recycling once a year or so.🚮
It actually works pretty good and saves the rural homesteads money while keeping garbage out of the landfill.🏡 I’ve burned garbage over the years, composting, and saving recycling metals and glass aren’t rocket science. Burn barrels, while smelly and somewhat toxic, have proven a solid way of rural households to dispose of most of their ordinary household trash. Trash disposal in country isn’t a big deal if you have land, and can burn most of it.🔥 Many if not most homesteaders and farmers in states that allow open burning do so, despite the smell and the sometimes noxious compounds released.
And it can and does smell bad, especially when people burn it in barrels without additional fuel. I had actually forgotten how pungent it can be driving through small town Pennsylvania on a warm summer night with smoldering trash barrel out back. The smell of polystyrene breaking down in a smoldering fire is particularly pungent. ☁Makes me think when I own my off-grid home I’ll probably want to have garbage cans, save the garbage then build a hot fire and burn what I can without as many noxious fumes.
I do like fire and I do like the idea of living without expensive trash pick up,💸 limiting my landfill disposal to a small bag every year, 🚮burning and comparing the bulk of it. Maybe even getting money rather than paying money 💵 for my aluminum cans and tin cans at a scrap yard. ♻ I’m not that worried about pollution in the kind of rural area that I eventually want to live in. More power to the Pennsylvania redneck that burns! 💪🔥
Smokey Bear, the U.S. Forest Service's symbol of fire prevention, turns 75 on Friday. Smokey is the longest-running public service ad campaign, first appearing on a poster on Aug. 9, 1944. While his look has changed quite a bit, his message has shifted only slightly.
They have a lot of Smokey Bear stuff at the Pennsylvania State Forests. But then again, in Pennsylvania people are always burning stuff, because fire is just a way of life, whether on the farm or at the rural homestead.
We called farmstead number five the Old Magie Place for the people who once lived there. (Locals also knew it as “Skunk Hollow.”) I never knew these particular Magies, but some of their relatives are still around, and are part of the nearby farming community of Healy, which is home to the smallest school district in the state of Kansas, with a high school enrollment of less than 25 students. The Magies had been gone for decades by this point (circa 2009), and their farm house had become a refuge for wild animals and trespassers looking to drink light beer and break shit. As such, there were little piles of crushed cans, liquor bottles and cigarette butts throughout.
Near the house was fencing around the gardens, which I ripped out with a loader tractor. I demolished the other small barns on the property partly by hand before bulldozing them into a pile to burn. The farm ground all around the house was fallow and not in use. We would till it up later, but first, the house and barns needed to be dealt with.
When I’m out driving the backroads of western Kansas, there’s an empty home like the Old Magie Place every few miles. They remind me that the region has a serious population decline problem, where there’s only the bare minimum number of people to even call it a community. That is, my home county (Lane County) has been losing population since its population peak in the 1960s; the decline, however, has greatly accelerated in my lifetime. Statistically speaking, in the last 20 years, more than a fifth of the local population has gone: fled, retired, moved on or died.
