Our view: Breath of fresh air

‘Miraculous” might be too strong a word for an apparent accord between Eastern Washington’s farmers and clean-air activists over field-burning regulations.

“Remarkable” is not.

Seven years ago, the competing interests were in court, fighting a pitched battle. Now they are aligned, at least in concept, behind a compromise approach to deciding when fields can be ignited.

The Washington state Department of Ecology is about to release the formal proposal, setting the stage for a round of public hearings in Spokane and four other Eastern Washington cities. By fall, when burning occurs, the new rules could be in place.

If their adoption can be achieved with the sustained backing of both growers and environmentalists, it will produce a peace that once seemed impossible.

Grass field burning has been forbidden in Eastern Washington for several years now, but the burning of cereal grain fields, primarily wheat, is now the major source of agricultural smoke. Burning stubble after harvest is a long-used strategy for combating pests and disease, and it is cheaper than tilling the stubble into the soil.

But it also generates clouds of smoke, triggering not only unsightliness but also documented health concerns. Depending on wind conditions, field smoke can sweep across roadways, obscuring drivers’ visibility and posing safety concerns.

As the region’s population grew and its character was transformed from agrarian to urban, public tolerance for annual fall interruption of its lifestyle became strained.

Hostility was unavoidable. Farmers had an industry to defend, an economic contribution to protect. Air-quality regulators and non-farm residents – especially those with asthma and other respiratory ailments – had significant health issues at stake. Both interests were valid, but the respective advocates saw them as irreconcilable.

That was then.

Out of a lawsuit filed by an environmental group known as Save Our Summers came an agreement by the Washington Association of Wheat Growers to reduce field-burning smoke by 50 percent over the next seven years. That period comes to an end this summer and both Save Our Summers and the wheat growers sound optimistic that the cooperative approach is working.

Not only cooperative but pragmatic. It’s based on the idea that if careful monitoring and high-tech meteorological information are used, burning can be confined to times when the smoke will be carried high into the air and dispersed in patterns that don’t aggravate health conditions, don’t drift into other communities, don’t pose highway hazards and do keep aesthetic distractions to a minimum.

It isn’t common for clashes between traditional economies and environmental pressures to be resolved amicably. This agreement suggests an encouraging level of trust and mutual community responsibility. The polarization of old is gone.

That’s, well, remarkable.