Blame it on the rain
Twenty years ago you couldn’t open a newspaper without reading about acid rain—the toxic mixture of pollution and precipitation that devastated forests and lakes across Canada in the 1970s and 1980s.
Now the issue seems to have completely disappeared. So‚ did we actually solve the problem?
Well‚ we have made some progress: In eastern Canada‚ emissions of sulphur dioxide have declined by more than 60 percent since 1980‚ when trees and fish all over Ontario‚ Quebec and the Maritimes were dying at alarming rates. (Some of the early improvements were illusory. Sudbury’s moonscape originally started regenerating because Inco built a smokestack so high that it dispersed emissions as far away as—seriously—Greenland.)
One big reason for this turnaround was the Canadian Coalition on Acid Rain‚ CCAR was one of the first environmental groups that included the public health sector and tourism industry. “It wasn’t just the usual suspects‚” says Dan McDermott‚ former acid rain co–ordinator for Greenpeace International. “They were organized and media–savvy.” It didn’t hurt that a number of the lakes affected were in prime cottage country.
CCAR’s efforts paid off. In 1991 George Bush I and Brian Mulroney signed the Canada–U.S. Air Quality Agreement (AQA) pledging to end acid rain.
Unfortunately‚ it is now evident that scientists overestimated how much acid rain our soil and lakes can withstand. Environment Canada now warns that without stricter limits‚ an area of eastern Canada equal to the United Kingdom and France combined could be damaged‚ and up to 95‚000 lakes acidified.
Scientists also predict that acid rain will start to become a problem in the West (which is not covered by the AQA). Why?
Says Chris Severson–Baker of the Pembina Institute‚ “With the growth of the oil and gas industry‚ Alberta has become the biggest emitter of nitrogen oxide and sulphur dioxide emissions.”