The warmer temperatures of summer draw millions to the national parks each year, but this season's forecast is a bit troubling. Visitors to many national parks this summer will discover that, on days with a particularly high amount of ground-level ozone or smog, the air is unhealthy to breathe. Some will experience shortness of breath or coughing. Others will learn the grim news from signs posted in the park, warning visitors to avoid physical activities like hiking.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently designated several parks "unhealthy" areas that fail to comply with federal ozone standards, including the most visited national park, Great Smoky Mountains in North Carolina and Tennessee.
"The visitors who expect clean, clear mountain air in the Smokies are surprised when they learn that the air is not healthy to breathe on many summer days," says Jill Stephens, NPCA's Southeast regional program analyst. "They are discouraged to find air pollution rivaling that of the city they left behind."
Ground-level ozone affects the lungs of people, especially children and asthma sufferers. At even lower levels, it can also harm plant life-such as at Acadia National Park, one of the parks that EPA deemed unhealthy, whose white ash and eastern white pines suffer from pollution.
Another threat to parks is pollution from coal-fired power plants, which forms a thick wall of haze that obscures vistas in many national parks. It limits how far visitors can see while distorting the color and clarity of park sights. Sulfate particles emitted by power plants create more than three-quarters of the haze in the Smokies, where views of mountain ridges have been greatly blurred.
"We often get complaints," Jim Renfro, an air-quality specialist at the Smokies, recently told USA Today. "People say 'the mountains aren't there. I thought you could come and see seven states.'"
Park haze is a widespread problem that affects parks from Big Bend in Texas to Shenandoah in Virginia. The National Park Service monitors air quality at a few dozen of the 388 national park units. At Big Bend, vistas on bad air days drop from about 100 miles to ten, and at Shenandoah, where vistas once stretched to the Washington Monument nearly 100 miles away, they now average 25.
In April 2004, EPA officially designated hundreds of polluted cities and counties as unhealthful because of ozone, including the following national parks that monitor ozone pollution: Great Smoky Mountains, Sequoia-Kings Canyon, Acadia, Shenandoah, Rocky Mountains, Yosemite, and Joshua Tree, along with Cape Cod National Seashore. These parks exceed EPA's ozone standard set to protect human health. In a report, Code Red: America's Five Most Polluted Parks, released in June by NPCA and two other enviromental groups, the Department of Interior is quoted as saying that poor visibility is "the most ubiquitous air pollution-related problem in the national parks."
Also this spring, EPA released proposed rules to clean up hazy park skies by requiring some of the oldest, dirtiest power plants and industries to install modern pollution controls. But clean air advocates have criticized the administration for not enforcing this program and instead relying on reductions from the proposed Interstate Air Quality Rule (IAQR). Although IAQR targets the same pollutants, it would not require facilities near parks to clean up or reduce pollution far enough or fast enough to protect parks and dozens of polluted communities.
"Requiring power plants to install readily available pollution controls would improve air quality in our national parks and polluted communities," says Stephens. "We urge EPA to finalize a strong, effective, and enforceable rule to clear the air in our parks."
