The Adirondack Council

News Release

Released, Thursday, February 14, 2002

SILVER SPRING, Maryland -- The Adirondack Council today praised President Bush's Clear Skies Initiative, telling a crowd assembled here for the President's announcement that he wanted to halt the acid rain damage that has been destroying the forests and aquatic life of the Adirondack Park for decades.

"The President's plan would end a decades-long nightmare for New York and New England, where we have been suffering the most severe acid rain damage in America," said Bernard C. Melewski, Acting Executive Director of the Adirondack Council, who was present for Bush's announcement at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration here. "Without deep cuts in sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides, we can count on more than half of our lakes and ponds being too acidic to support their native life by 2040. This plan would make cuts deep enough to stop the damage and allow our battered lakes and forest to recover.

"We urge Congress to adopt similar cuts as soon as possible," Melewski said. "The sooner we start cutting, the sooner our lakes and forest will begin to heal. The President, the House and the Senate all have viable proposals to stop acid rain."

The Adirondack Council is the largest environmental organization working full time to protect the Adirondack Park, a six-million-acre reserve in Upstate New York is the place where acid rain was first discovered. It is the most sensitive region in the United States to the ravages of acidic precipitation.

Roughly the size of Yellowstone, Yosemite, Glacier and Grand Canyon National Parks combined, the Adirondack Park contains the largest intact deciduous forest (mixed hardwoods and conifers) ecosystem in the world. It holds almost all of the ancient, never-logged forests remaining east of the Mississippi River and contains wildlife habitat found nowhere else in the United States.

Prevailing winds carry coal-fired power plant emissions from the Ohio Valley into the Adirondack Mountains, where they fall as acid rain, acid snow, acid fog and dry acidic particles. The acidity alters soil chemistry, inhibits plant growth and releases heavy metals (mercury, aluminum, etc.) that are toxic to plants, animals and fish.

Reports conducted by a host of federal agencies have shown that more than 500 of the Park's 2,800 lakes and ponds have become too acidic to support their native life over the past 40 years. The same is true for 28 percent of the Park's 2,000 miles of navigable rivers, which are fed by 30,000 miles of brooks and streams. Each spring, the percentage of acidic rivers explodes to 58 percent as the winter's acidic snowpack melts over the course of a couple of weeks. This "spring shock" levels off again in the summer, but gets a little worse each year.

"This will also work to protect our fisheries and our citizens from mercury contamination, which goes hand-in-hand with acidic lakes and streams," Melewski said. "We look forward to the day when mercury warnings for New York fish are a thing of the past."