Unhealthy haze over Northeast's wilderness
HIKING WITH ME in the Presidential Range of the White Mountains in June, my 9-year-old son took a header on a rocky trail. A well-stocked first aid kit and a fellow hiker who happened to be a physician made blessedly quick work of a head wound that will leave my son with nothing more than a neat scar and a blood-stained baseball cap -- both things he already brags about. There is something more ominous, though, that any parent of children who are hiking or exercising outdoors should be concerned about: unhealthy air.
Many of us look to escape in summer to places like the White Mountains and Acadia National Park, expecting clean air and endless views. The reality on our public lands in New England is often shockingly different. There, high haze levels and diminished views are vivid reminders that we are at a time in our planet's history when there is no promise of finding good, clean ''country air."
Each summer in the Northeastern United States, regional haze, primarily caused by sulfur dioxide emissions from coal-burning power plants in the Midwest, cuts visibility in the most scenic of our national parks and wilderness areas by up to 70 percent. Humid summer conditions in the Northeast cause particulates to expand and exacerbates the pollution-induced haze.
In 1977, the Clean Air Act called for clearing the views in what should be pristine national parks and wilderness areas. But the Environmental Protection Agency just issued a Final Regional Haze Best Available Retrofit Technology rule that was very disappointing in a number of ways.
Last month's rule missed a significant opportunity to clean up many of the sources of haze and ground-level ozone. Instead, the EPA is allowing Eastern and Midwestern power plants to opt into a ''cap and trade program," rather than requiring emission controls on the dirtiest power-generating boilers. While this may lead to some incremental improvements in visibility, it falls short and leaves high priority Class I areas, including wilderness areas in the White and Green Mountains and Acadia National Park, with the short end of the stick for significant improvements in air quality.
We're not just losing the endless views from a mountaintop or ridgeline, either. Some of the same pollution that causes haze, namely nitrogen oxides, is responsible for the formation of ground-level ozone (the unhealthy byproduct formed when pollutants combine with heat and sunlight). The Appalachian Mountain Club, Brigham and Women's Hospital, and the Harvard School for Public Health have studied the impact of air quality on hiker health. Their research shows that increased ozone levels impair lung function of healthy adult hikers -- even when those levels are at what the EPA says is ''acceptable."
As if this isn't enough of a wakeup call, there is also substantial evidence that the Northeast is warming up. Whether or not you view the whole issue of fossil fuel-induced climate change as sky-is-falling rhetoric, a new report of Clean Air-Cool Planet and the University of New Hampshire (www.cleanair-coolplanet.org) summarizes tangible impacts of global warming in the Northeast. These include increasing average temperatures, earlier ice-out dates on the region's lakes, earlier bloom dates on vegetation, declining snowfall levels, and increasing sea levels in New York City.
The Appalachian Mountain Club has launched a ''citizen science" program -- called Mountain Watch -- to engage volunteers in observing plant activity and air quality in the mountains and contributing their findings to a database designed to track environmental trends over the long term (www.outdoors.org/mountainwatch). Data on such things as ground level ozone, visibility from mountain peaks, and the timing of plant blooming are collected and correlated by AMC researchers with information on weather and ambient air quality. The result: a long-term scientific database designed to track environmental trends and enhance our understanding of air quality and climate change. On the warm and hazy June day when my son took his tumble, we happened to have a Mountain Watch ozone test kit. Its reading showed an ozone level of ''moderate" (between ''good" and ''unhealthy for sensitive groups"), on that ridgeline trail more than 5,000 feet above sea level.
The scrapes, bruises, or cuts that a child might encounter on a hike along a rocky wilderness trail shouldn't really come as a surprise to anyone. Some might say such things are unavoidable. But what about diminished views in that child's wilderness? Impairment of that child's growing lungs and the risk of asthma? A natural landscape that is altered over that child's lifetime? Aren't those things worth fighting for?
William M. Hill is president of the Board of Directors of the Appalachian Mountain Club. He practices law in Boston.
