Doug Clark: Farmers should fight back with ‘Year of Flame’

So some federal Commie court has ruled that field burning is illegal in the great smoldering state of Ida-choke.

I have three words for these pinkos: Burn, Bubba, burn!

The poor Rathdrum Prairie pyros have been pushed around long enough.

Each year, the clean-airheads try to thwart these humble grass seed growers from doing the Lord’s work: Burning fields and polluting summer with gigantic mushroom clouds of noxious, unhealthy smoke.

And what do these farmers get for their service?

It’s asthma this. And emphysema that.

Yak-yak-yak.

It’s time the grass seed farmers made an environmental impact statement of their own.

You don’t like our summertime field burning?

Get ready for YEAR-ROUND field burning.

(More details on my exciting “Year of Flame” plan later.)

This ruling from the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is an insult to every hayseed who can strike a match. The issue is way too complex for a columnist to explain. Essentially, three judges unanimously decided that field burning violates the Clean Air Act.

“We’re obviously disappointed in the decision,” said Toni Hardesty of the state Department of Environmental Quality in a front-page news story.

Who knew Ida-choke had a department of environmental quality?

That’s sort of like “American Idol” having a department of quality control.

(EDITOR’S NOTE: Or The Spokesman-Review having a department of accuracy.)

But I digress.

In the same story, environmental lawyer David Baron crowed: “This decision shows that the handwriting is on the wall for field burning.”

Well here’s some more news for you, pal.

The handwriting may be on the wall. But once farmers begin my 360-day field burning campaign nobody will be able to read those words because of the constant haze.

Fighting fire with more fire is the only way, farmers. The feds can have your Zippos only when they can pry them from your cold dead fingers.

I know I sound emotional.

But this is Ida-choke, a land where normal concepts of civility or common sense don’t apply – not when they get in the way of agriculture.

If they did, field burning would have been extinguished as a barbaric practice.

Ida-choke lawmakers, however, believe a farmer has a constitutional right to char his land and smoke out his neighbors.

Mainly that’s because all the lawmakers are farmers.

Ah, I’ll never forget my first breathtaking experience with field burning.

It happened the summer after my lovely wife, Sherry, and I moved into our first home. The house wasn’t much, just a cramped cracker box.

But it did have one impressive plus: an unfettered southerly view of the Rathdrum Prairie.

Oh, how we enjoyed that view.

Then one day I gazed out my dining room window to see a roiling, billowing conflagration. Our beautiful prairie had become an inferno slightly smaller than the firebombing of Dresden.

“Somebody call 911!”

Silly me. Soon I discovered that this was no emergency. This was simply farming on the Rathdrum Prairie.

And so Sherry and I adjusted to our sooty situation.

We moved.

There’ll be a lot more moving once the farmers strike back.

Obviously, the grass growers can only burn their fields in late summer. And that’s where my genius plan comes in.

Tires.

That’s right, Farmer Firebugs. You’ve stunk up the pristine North Idaho skies for decades by just burning stubble.

Imagine the fun you’ll have with a field full of radials.