Trail Ecology in the 21^st Century

Pollution is slowly poisoning us and our wildlands. Scientists compare the human health and forest health dangers of car exhaust and smokestack emissions to a debilitating two pack-a-day cigarette habit. Ironically, the worst impacts often occur where we least expect them: on alpine summits, in forests and along trails where we go to breathe clear mountain air.

The problem, first publicized as acid rain in the Adirondacks in the 1980’s, has gone national. Smog kills ponderosa pines in California’s San Bernardino National Forest. It damages fragile alpine meadows along the Front Range of the Colorado Rockies. It blots out Grand Canyon, Great Smoky Mountain and Acadia national park vistas. It toxifies lakes and streams, killing native trout from New York to the deep South. And it infiltrates human lungs and threatens hiker health along the length of the Appalachian Trail.

Before World War II, scientists counted just two dozen chemicals in our lower atmosphere. Today, the number has soared to over 3,000, most of which are synthetic. Three human-caused pollutants—ozone, nitrates and sulfates—are especially dangerous to hikers and mountain ecosystems.

Ozone has dire effects. It is created when nitrogen oxide pollutants belched from cars and old coal-burning power plants react with atmospheric oxygen in the presence of summer heat and sunshine.

Hike on a hot summer day when ozone levels are high, and you may cough and wheeze, feel tight in the chest, and short of breath. That’s because ozone is burning through airway and lung cell walls, inflaming tissues. A 1998 Appalachian Mountain Club study on New Hampshire’s Mount Washington found that even small ozone doses, at levels below the national health standard, caused a temporary 2% decline in normal hiker lung function, and an 8% decline in asthmatic hikers.

Most at risk from ozone are children, the elderly, people with asthma, emphysema and chronic bronchitis. Plants also suffer. More than thirty Appalachian species—including black cherry and sassafras—display serious ozone damage. Leaves turn black and drop off in July. As photosynthesis declines, plants starve.

Ozone is at its worst when the most hikers hit the trails. In Great Smoky National Park—dubbed “the Great Smoggies” by the New York Times—summer ozone levels are among the highest anywhere in the U.S., sometimes exceeding rush hour Atlanta. In 1999, park air violated federal health standards on fifty-two summer days.

Acid rain may have the greatest long-term effect on forest ecosystems. Acid rain occurs when sulfates and nitrates are transformed by the atmosphere into sulfuric and nitric acids. The corrosive deluge—fog, rain and snow with an acidity sometimes ranging between that of lemon juice and battery acid—has killed 50% of high altitude red spruce in parts of the Adirondacks, while 25% of Adirondack lakes are dead.

Acid rain is also wrecking Appalachian Mountain ecosystems. It leaches plant nutrients—calcium and magnesium—from soils, stunting tree growth and reducing resistance to disease and insects. Acids also release deadly aluminum, normally locked within rock. Aluminum poisons plants.

Sulfates—soot particles belched from smokestacks and tailpipes—not only cause acid rain, they reduce visibility and threaten human health. Visibility from eastern national park vistas, once averaging 90 miles, has been cut to between 14 and 24 miles by dirty air. Scarier still: what you see is what you breathe. Scientists now know that inhaling even moderate amounts of soot can trigger heart arrhythmia in people with preexisting cardiac problems, causing sudden death. Experts estimate that particle pollution may cause 1% of U.S. heart fatalities; that’s 10,000 deaths annually. The health effects of soot particles on hyper-ventilating hikers haven’t been studied.

The most aggravating aspect of the pollution problem is the ease with which it could begin to be solved. Almost 60% of pollution in the East, for example, comes from easily cleaned up stationary sources: Midwestern and Southern coal-burning power plants and factories with outmoded anti-pollution technology. A “grandfather clause” to the 1970 Clean Air Act exempted these facilities from meeting tough new air standards. At the time, Congress assumed the plants would eventually close, to be replaced by new, cleaner facilities.

“Instead, many of the worst offenders merely gutted their old plants, overhauling existing energy generation systems and leaving them as dirty as ever,” says Neil Woodworth, legal counsel for the Adirondack Mountain Club (ADK). “We feel this is a flagrant violation of the grandfather clause.”

ADK is vigorously advocating federal legislation now in congress that will clean up “grandfathered” plants, reducing utility emissions of nitrogen oxide by 70% from 1990 levels and sulfates by a further 50% (sulfate emissions have been reduced by existing legislation to 50% of their 1990 levels). ADK has already achieved victory in its home state, gaining passage of a similarly stringent New York emissions control law. The club is also working to prevent emissions trading there. “If a clean New York industry trades its emission credits (the right to pollute) with a dirty Midwest power plant upwind from us, we gain absolutely no benefit. Our air stays dirty,” notes Woodworth.

The Appalachian Mountain Club (AMC) is aggressively tackling pollution too. They monitor air quality, do research, and play a lead advocacy role. Working with Environmental Defense (ED), they gained approval of the 1999 Haze Rule. This Environmental Protection Agency standard will eliminate sulfate particle pollution and return visibility to natural conditions in 156 National Parks and Wilderness Areas over the next sixty year. While this may seem long to wait, the original rule (before AMC and ED stepped in), called for an absurd 200 year implementation! AMC is also striving to bring Wyman Station, an out-dated Maine power plant up to current air quality standards.

In summer 2000, a powerful clean air coalition was formed by three big hiking organizations. The American Hiking Society, ADK and the New York-New Jersey Trail Conference, united as Hikers for Clean Air. The group’s goal is to push for better air quality, starting with the clean-up of nitrates and sulfates emitted from grandfathered power plants.

“We need to persuade people across the country in order to get overwhelming bipartisan nationwide congressional support,” says ADK’s Woodworth. ”Otherwise we can’t get a good clean air bill passed.” Hikers for Clean Air is actively seeking out other hiking clubs to join the alliance. The Potomac Appalachian Trail Club and Appalachian Mountain Club signed on in 2001.

The Appalachian Trail Conference is also currently considering joining the alliance. “As we wrap up federal land acquisition for the Appalachian Trail, we need to start focusing on significant environmental stewardship issues,” states Pam Underhill, National Park Service A.T. park manager. “It’s likely that air pollution over the Appalachians will become an emerging issue that we pay attention to in a very proactive way.”

Hikers for Clean Air also plans to align itself with other environmental and health organizations (like ED and the American Lung Association) and sportsmen groups.

AHS President Mary Margaret Sloan sums up the coalition’s commitment: “We see air pollution as a political issue that is vital to trails, and key to hikers, especially in the Southern Appalachians where the problem is so severe. We will support congressional legislation to amend the Clean Air Act and curb coal-burning power plants. We hope all hikers rally to the cause.”

When we think of protecting wilderness, of preserving primitive places and hiking paths, we rarely consider the air over our heads. But if we, as land stewards, only think about immediate “threats to tread” and of protecting ecosystems through land purchase or easement, then the insidious and perhaps irreversible damage of air pollution will continue to rain down upon us. Plant and animal species may slip into extinction, and our own health may suffer. The air we breathe must be as wild and natural as the land beneath our feet.