The Part We Used to Burn

By Marcus Osei, Chief Agronomist, Greenway Cooperative -- The Kadmiel Chronicle I'\''ve been watching the flare on Biodigester 4 for three years now. It sits at the edge of Plot 12-North, a squat ceramic dome that eats crop residue and kitchen scraps and breathes out two things: a dense compost we spread on the eastern fields, and methane. The compost, I love. The methane, I'\''ve always treated like a problem to manage. We burn most of it. Pipe some to the Cooperative'\''s drying sheds, where it heats the dehydrators that preserve our surplus harvest. A little goes to the communal kitchen — my groundnut soup owes its consistent flame to Biodigester 4, which I admit I'\''ve never thanked publicly until now. The rest, we flare. We stand in the predawn dark and watch perfectly useful gas turn into heat nobody asked for, and we call it waste management. Ada came to find me on a Tuesday. She was carrying her tablet with the screen brightness turned up too high — I could see it from forty m