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July 26, 2004

Lost in the Haze

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.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company