There are a lot of people out that think that I should give up on my advocacy against a statewide trash burning ban. They give me more literature then I can digest on the dangers of dioxin and other toxins in solid waste today, and argue that trash burning is a practice that should have long ended both on the farm and rural household a long time ago.

There arguments are convincing to a degree. Indeed, our solid waste contains a variety of toxins, and dioxin is an increasingly frightening series of chemicals that we are increasingly discovering accumulating around us. Science has shown that burning trash is bad for our environment, and that mass-burn incinerators need to be tightly controlled.

Yet the critics of trash burning ignore some important arguments. They have yet to prove that our rural environments are seriously compromised by people burning trash—except by the nuisance of a nearby neighbor with a smoldering burn barrel—or the health implications of an elderly person breathing in acrid plastic smoke. Indeed, there are many communities, particularly rural hamlets and enclosed cloves were temperature inversions make sense to ban trash burning.

On the other hand, the burn barrel provides a valuable service to rural residents. It gets rid of their trash without cost, instead of mandating that farmers or rural residents pay for yet another unfunded mandate. That means less money leaves Rural America to line the pockets of wealthy solid waste company, and less trash leaves to fill the mega-dumps that more and more often are ending up in the country far away from the original generator.

They say, a single trash truck produces less particulate matter then burning one burn barrel or that most regulated sources of dioxin like mass-burn incinerators produce far less then a single burn barrel. But a single shopping mall replacing a farm is far worst for the environment. Maybe when the neighbors have to smell acrid trash burning or be forced to burn their own, then they won't be so likely to build their suburban mansion next your once rural house.

The mass society of cities is where pollution is created. Intensive farming that provides food at low cost food has run-off pollution problems, and that's also a concern. That little burn barrel, is now quantified as the biggest source of dioxin out there. But that was only after we reduced most of the other big polluters dioxin emissions. Indeed, yearly dioxin emissions are 10 times less of what they were 20 years ago. For example, the ANSWERS mass-burn plant released far more dioxin then 50,000 burn barrels when it was in operation in 1980s.

We have to be concerned about air pollution. Global warming is a real problem as is air pollution from major polluters such as coal generating plants. We can see the effects of acid rain on our lands and forest, especially after we pay the bill for all the lime we are putting on our fields. We can see shorter winters and what they are doing to our forests and our maple sap.

None of those problems is caused by filling up our pickup tank, by turning on the lights, torching the trash, or the 83 cows out back. The problem is our cities and suburbs, and the many people that live there. The impact of urban living is too high, and we need even further restrictions on our big factories and smoke stacks, to clean our air.

Living out in the country, we see the impact of pollution directly. But it's not from our burn barrels or the smoke they put out. Indeed, the emissions of landfills, incinerators, and trash trucks in our cities and their 250 million people probably far exceeds what the 50 million or so people that live in the our 90% of our country.