Modern Hiker

I haven’t had my morning cup of joe yet, but I read this article on MSNBC and it did all the blood-boiling I need to get going on the rest of the day.

The Bush Administration, which loves the U.S. Park Service so much that it made one lame web video about it and pretended to be some horrible bizarro version of Teddy Roosevelt is at it again — this time, they want to show their love of nature by allowing more pollution in our National Parks.

The EPA wants to change the way pollution is measured around the parks, abandoning the same method that’s been used for three decades, and instead adopt an “annual average” method that would basically make it so that pollution spikes from increased power demand and other phenomena would never show up in the data. Mark Wenzler, of the National Parks Conservation Association, sums it up: “It’s like if you’re pulled over by a cop for going 75 miles per hour in a 55 miles-per-hour zone, and you say, ‘If you look at how I’ve driven all year, I’ve averaged 55 miles per hour. It allows you to vastly underestimate the impact of these emissions.”

The NPCA says this new rule change would allow 33 new coal plants to be built within 186 miles of 10 National Parks. This, at a time when Western Parks are experiencing their highest smog levels in ten years and it’s often unhealthy to breathe the air at Smoky Mountains National Park.

… At least now I know what to suggest for the President’s National Park Service Centennial Initiative — more interpretive plaques, like this one at Joshua Tree:

for good measure, read more on Bush’s abysmal environmental record.