Anglers and Air Pollution

Like his father, George W. Bush is a fisherman. But unlike his father or any past president, he is emasculating America's oldest and most successful environmental laws, laws that protect and restore fish and the ecosystems in which they function. Reflect on the Clean Air Act. Since passage in 1970 it has reduced airborne lead by 98 percent. Emissions of sulfur dioxide, the main cause of acid rain, are down almost a third from 1993. A sharp decline in carbon monoxide emissions has produced a measurable decline in human deaths. There is no question that the Clean Air Act has been a stunning success.

So it is perplexing and disturbing to see Mr. Bush rendering it ineffective. In so doing, he ensures that fish will continue to be dangerous to eat throughout much of North America. This, of course, isn't just about our food. Fish are indicator species; the fact that they're so full of bioaccumulating airborne toxins that they are killing pisciverous creatures, humans included, means that our planet's life systems are desperately, systemically sick. Currently 43 states have health advisories against eating fish. In 19 the advisories are statewide.

Anglers need to pay just as much attention to air pollution as water pollution. For example, something has gone terribly wrong with Atlantic salmon restoration; but, with a few exceptions, the trouble isn't in the rivers. Juvenile salmon are thriving in freshwater, then disappearing into a black hole at sea. It's happening not just in New England but to the species throughout much of its ocean habitat as well. Satellite imagery reveals drastic cooling in the North Atlantic, and the favored theory attributes it to runoff from the melting ice cap, caused by greenhouse gases.

Consider also two of the more damaging airborne toxins-mercury and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCB's). When mercury hits water, bacteria transform it into methylmercury-a neurotoxin that destroys brains, eyes and spinal cords, especially in young children and fetuses. Symptoms include blurred vision, slurred speech, hearing loss, memory loss, coma and death. PCB's produce some of the same symptoms, cause cancer, and reduce IQ's in children.

As a general rule, the better-tasting the fish, the more dangerous it is to eat. For instance, according to the Vermont Department of Health, women of childbearing age and children under six should never eat walleye, not even one. And according to a study by the Environmental Working Group, farmed salmon is "likely the most PCB-contaminated protein source in the U.S. food supply"-16 times more so than wild salmon (unless they're from the Great Lakes). My home state of Massachusetts advises women of childbearing age and kids under 12 to not eat fish from "rivers, lakes and ponds," which doesn't leave them a whole lot unless they happen to fish in the ocean, where the state warns them not to eat bluefish or tuna, and where the FDA warns them (and women and kids everywhere) to avoid swordfish, shark, tilefish and king mackerel. Haddock and cod might be okay (or at least wouldn't poison you so badly), but there are scarcely any left (see Conservation, November/December 2003).

The fact that women and kids should limit or cease consumption of a long list of delicious species doesn't exactly make the rest of us want to dig in. Some states have complicated formulas that let you eat, say, one lake trout or salmon per month, if it's under a certain length. But after all the measuring and all the calendar flipping, who's hungry? Rhode Island says women and kids shouldn't eat striped bass. Supposedly, stripers are okay in Massachusetts, but because they move back and forth between the two states with each tide and since I can never tell exactly where I am anyway, I don't think I'll be serving striper to my daughter, daughter-in-law or granddaughter.

I have it from Rhode Island and Massachusetts that the one fish we can all feel good about eating is a "stocked trout." However, I don't fish for stocked trout because of the way they look and behave; I don't eat them when I accidentally catch them because of the way they taste; and the fact that they're relatively poison-free should comfort few health officials because 99 out of 100 license holders couldn't tell a hatchery trout from a wild one if it rolled over and jabbed them with the stumps that used to be pectoral fins.

Mercury is responsible for about 60 percent of the fish-consumption advisories. And coal-fired power plants are the largest source of mercury pollution. In addition, these power plants emit 65 percent of the nation's sulfur dioxide pollution, which damages aquatic ecosystems by acidifying them and mobilizing soil-bound aluminum and mercury.

Mercury polluters other than utilities and coal companies have been subject to strict regulation. For example, medical and municipal incinerators have been ordered to reduce mercury emissions by 94 and 90 percent respectively. Mandated mercury reduction by paint and pesticide manufactures cut domestic sales of mercury by 75 percent from 1988 to 1996. But so aggressively have the utilities and coal companies lobbied against mercury regulation that Congress specifically exempted them under the far-reaching 1990 Clean Air Act amendments. Even today there is still no federal rule for this source of mercury, though thanks to a citizens' lawsuit, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is under a court order to require "maximum achievable control technology" by 2007.

The Clean Air Act exempts plants built before its passage from modern emissions standards. But, under a program called "New Source Review," companies must install the "best available retrofit technology" if they rebuild or expand a plant in ways that increase pollution. As a result, utilities use their oldest, dirtiest facilities to gain unfair cost advantages by implementing massive, enormously expensive modifications which increase production and pollution but which they claim are "routine maintenance." EPA finally got fed up with the ruse, and in November 1999 the Clinton Justice Department sued nine companies for illegally expanding, sans retrofits, 51 power plants in 12 states. A month later New Jersey's then governor, Christine Todd Whitman, announced that her state would join the federal lawsuit. Shortly thereafter presidential candidate George W. Bush started sounding like a Sierra Club activist. In September 2000 he promised to "establish mandatory reduction targets for four main power-plant pollutants: sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, mercury and carbon dioxide" and to "propose legislation that will require electric utilities to reduce emissions and significantly improve air quality."