[Mb-civic] NYTimes.com Article: Lost in the Haze

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Lost in the Haze

July 26, 2004
 


 

In 1886, a naturalist named George Freeman Pollock paused
at a promontory along what is now the Skyline Drive in
Shenandoah National Park and found himself transported by a
view of the Virginia countryside stretching 100 miles into
the distance. "To say that I was carried away is to put it
mildly," he wrote later. "I raved, I shouted." Pollock
would have less to rave about today; the Industrial
Revolution, then in its infancy, has since shrunk the
100-mile vistas he encountered to little more than 20 miles
on an average summer day. 

Shenandoah is not alone. Dirty air and its consequences -
haze, smog, acid rain - afflict many of our great national
parks, but especially those that lie eastward and downwind
of the big coal-fired power plants of the Midwest and
Appalachia. Of the five most polluted parks in the country,
according to a recent study by the National Parks
Conservation Association, four lie east of the Mississippi:
Shenandoah; Great Smoky, straddling the Tennessee-North
Carolina border; Mammoth Cave in Kentucky; and Acadia in
Maine. The fifth is Sequoia and Kings Canyon in California.


Distance provides no protection. Acadia is fairly remote as
national parks go, but last April the Environmental
Protection Agency designated Acadia an ozone nonattainment
area, meaning that smog levels over the course of the year
exceed the agency's health standards. Meanwhile, the once
reliable 100-mile views of Acadia's rugged Maine coastline
have shrunk, on average, to 54 miles, and on some days to
less than 20. Things got so bad that a few years ago the
park, with the help of private financing, started its own
shuttle bus system, partly to ease traffic but mainly to
cut pollution. 

But Acadia, like other parks, has no control over the
industrial pollution that drifts in on prevailing winds.
That problem can be addressed only by national regulation,
and on this score Washington has long been astonishingly
negligent. Congress asked that something be done about park
haze as long ago as 1977, but it was not until this year
that the Bush administration - to the surprise of its
critics - actually came up with a detailed strategy. 

But even that strategy is suspect. The plan would require
companies to install new pollution controls at every plant,
beginning in 2018. In the meantime, however, companies
would be asked only to meet broad, industrywide targets for
individual pollutants and would be allowed to use a trading
system to meet those targets. That could leave some of the
dirtiest plants completely undisturbed for the next 14
years. 

Michael Leavitt, the E.P.A. administrator, could improve
the Bush administration's generally deplorable record on
clean air issues if he toughened these rules so that
companies are forced to clean up all their plants in a
shorter time frame. That would also give future generations
of visitors a fighting chance of seeing what Pollock saw. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/26/opinion/26mon1.html?ex=1091860181&ei=1&en=ec247b4c52dfd3a4


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