Once upon a time, Virginia had clear air. From the northern end of Shenandoah National Park, people often say, you could look east and see the Washington Monument, more than 65 miles away.
Today that almost never happens. Average visibility from Shenandoah has decreased from 115 miles to just 25. Shenandoah perennially appears on lists of the 10 most threatened national parks in the country, including one published by the National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA). It’s also the second most polluted park in the nation—topped only by Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee—according to Dan Holmes, an air pollution expert with the Piedmont Environmental Council (PEC).
Stretching 101 miles from Front Royal to Rockfish Gap, Shenandoah is a narrow swath of woodland that curves along the crest of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Throughout the park, a section of the 2,200-mile Appalachian Trail parallels Skyline Drive, the north-south parkway that defines the Shenandoah experience for most visitors. Within park borders are more documented plant and animal species—well over 2,000—than in all of Europe.
At its southern end, Shenandoah National Park just happens to share a border with Albemarle County, and while the park contributes tourist dollars to Albemarle, it may be getting something a lot less useful in return: pollution.
“The views here at the park are the main reason we have a national park to begin with,” says Christi Gordon, Shenandoah’s air resource program manager. “Scenery is fundamentally important to the purpose and national significance of the park.” With 90 percent of visitors experiencing the park from their cars, it’s safe to assume that long, lovely views (as opposed to wildlife sightings, or the challenge of a mountain hike) are their primary reason for coming. During the warm months and the fall foliage season, pullouts on Skyline Drive are rarely empty of cars, their occupants taking in a view as expansive as that from an airplane window.
Those occupants also spend $45 million each year in the counties that surround the park. Unfortunately for those counties, the number of visitors at Shenandoah has decreased dramatically in the last decade—down from 2 million to 1.5 million. Theories vary as to what could have caused a 25 percent drop in the number of visitors—Quinn McKew, a policy analyst at the NPCA, thinks the park suffered first in the late ’90s, when flush economic times allowed more overseas travel, and again after the September 11 attacks, when tourism decreased nationwide.
Air pollution is probably part of the cause too, McKew says. “The number of Code Red air quality days has been going up over the last couple of years,” she says. On a Code Red day, ozone levels are so high that the public is discouraged from driving unnecessarily or doing strenuous activities like hiking—exactly the wrong weather for a visit to Shenandoah. “While air quality has been improving across the nation, it’s getting worse in the park,” says McKew.
Holmes says that on hot, humid summer days, a phenomenon called climatic inversion traps pollutants (ozone, nitrogen oxides, and sulfur dioxide are some major ones) that would normally be carried northeast by the jetstream. So, when visitors stand on Skyline Drive and look east toward Albemarle County, for example, they see little more than a heavy haze, instead of a rolling carpet of trees and farmland. On the worst days, visibility is less than a mile, according to McKew.
Gordon says that the park’s ozone pollution “is still getting worse overall.” As air resource manager, she can do little more than monitor the crisis. Shenandoah’s pollution problems are hardly within her jurisdiction to change.
The emissions clouding Shenandoah are, in fact, amazingly well-traveled. Sulfur pollutants, says Gordon, come from industrial burning of fossil fuels, and originate in a variety of places: the Ohio River Valley, Kentucky, Pennsylvania and North Carolina, among others. Coal-burning power plants, constructed before the 1977 Clean Air Act and exempted from its requirements in “grandfather” amendments, are the biggest source of such emissions.
“They basically have a permit to pollute,” Holmes says. “What the grandfather sought to do was say ‘We know these things will be replaced soon. We won’t require them to do pollution control updates.’” Decades later, many of the dirty plants are still around, and still spewing thousands of tons of pollutants a year. Besides obscuring views, their emissions contribute to acid rain and stunt forest growth.
While out-of-state polluters are a big problem for Shenandoah, Virginia itself is hardly blameless. “There’s a significant amount of evidence to show that Virginia is responsible for a lot of its own pollution woes,” Holmes says. For example, according to PEC data, nearly 300,000 tons of sulfur dioxide were generated in Virginia in 2001. Large coal-burning power plants accounted for 73 percent of these emissions. (There are smaller coal-burning plants, too—in fact, one is located right here in Charlottesville, and is owned by the University of Virginia. Built in the 1950s, the plant produced 430 tons of sulfur dioxide in 2001.)
And, since energy deregulation took effect in 1998, the power industry has proposed a raft of new plants in Virginia—30 in all, with 16 approved so far. With 22,183 megawatts already in production in Virginia, and last year’s peak demand at around 19,000 megawatts, Holmes says the new plants are unnecessary. “We have a surplus right now,” he says. “At what point is all this power going to become superfluous and shipped out of state?”
Frank Burbank, a spokesman for the Department of Environmental Quality (which approves new plants), says his agency is only responsible for making sure plants will comply with existing guidelines. “It’s not our decision whether or not we need them,” he says. “If someone comes to us saying ‘We want to open a plant and here’s our application,’ we review it as an individual project.”
While new, non-coal-burning plants are usually cleaner than the smoke-belchers of yore, Holmes believes the proposed plants are still a serious threat to Virginia’s air quality and to Shenandoah National Park. “Shenandoah is by far the most threatened national park when it comes to new proposed [pollution] sources near its boundaries,” he says.
Holmes and McKew are both particularly galled by a proposal by Competitive Power Venture, a power company, to build a plant just five miles from the northern entrance to the park. “When you compare it to a coal facility, it’s not bad,” Holmes says. “But it’s equivalent to 5,000 new homes with two cars apiece. It’s another step in the wrong direction.”
McKew agrees and says the NPCA supports a moratorium on new power plants until their potential effects can be better studied. Burbank refused to comment on this idea.
Speaking of cars, from Skyline Drive you can see thousands of them—even on a hazy day. Interstates 81 and 64 are major arteries, not to mention 29N. And several busy urban hubs—including Charlottesville—are within a quick drive of the park.
Charlottesville and Albemarle may be adversely affected by industrial pollution blowing in from other places. But they generate plenty of pollution too, mostly through auto emissions. Whereas power plants and other industrial sites are known as “point sources,” since their emissions can be traced to a single point on the map, vehicle exhaust is a “non-point source”—a nebulous haze attributable in part to each person who drives.
Jeff Werner is the PEC’s field officer in Albemarle County and specializes in land-use issues. He says sprawl not only encourages driving, thereby increasing pollution, but chips away at the beauty of the countryside—and that both these effects detract from visitors’ experience in Shenandoah. He imagines disappointed park visitors: “‘It was hazy and gray and all I did was look down on a bunch of swimming pools and houses. Let’s go to West Virginia next year.’”
Smog hanging over Albemarle not only affects the view from the park, but may also physically travel to the park, Gordon says. Scientists had long assumed that prevailing winds always carried pollution eastward, but recent data suggests the movement of air throughout the state is more complex. “Some of these more recent findings defy conventional wisdom when we consider that Eastern Virginia is important to air quality in the park,” she says.
It’s tempting to point to Skyline Drive itself as part of the problem—after all, it’s a road, and one that sees its fair share of gas-guzzling RVs. But Gordon says vehicle emissions within the park are miniscule compared with those from the eight counties surrounding the park.
If anything, emissions on Skyline Drive point out the fact that a pollution crisis is made up of many smaller problems, and that Shenandoah cannot be considered separately from its surroundings. “Pollution is incremental; it all adds up,” Holmes says. “Pollution generated in Albemarle County does affect the park.”
And the park, in turn, affects Albemarle County. “For us the Skyline Drive and Shenandoah are a pretty significant part of our product mix,” says Mark Shore. As the director of the Charlottesville Albemarle County Convention & Visitors Bureau, Shore promotes an industry that pours more than $300 million into local coffers annually—and that’s not counting restaurant and hotel taxes. “Scenic beauty ranks high on the list for visitors”—not just in the park, but throughout the region.
So has declining visitation in Shenandoah meant a hit to tourism here at home? Not so far, Shore says. “The great thing about this area is there are a lot of things to see and do,” he says, making Albemarle more resilient than communities banking on only one tourist attraction. “I think for us the significant issue is, is there going to be a general decline in the scenic beauty?” he says. “Scenic assets are fairly unrecoverable. We are supportive of the preservation of open space and scenic vistas.” Meanwhile, his office continues to send visitors to Shenandoah and hope for the best—even on Code Red air quality days.
John Holden is the manager of Blue Ridge Mountain Sports, in the Barracks Road Shopping Center, and a hiking guide in the West Virginia mountains. He says that his store hasn’t seen any significant drop in business because of Shenandoah’s declining visitation. “While air pollution affects visitation to the park, overall feelings about the park are positive,” he says. Still, he believes that pollution in Shenandoah may be preventing some out-of-state visitors from coming in the first place. “Certainly the negative publicity for the park has taken those people and sent them to other places,” he says.
In June, the NPCA released a report on Shenandoah, authored by McKew, which can only be described as gloomy. It details serious budget shortfalls that hamper park officials’ ability to manage pollution, as well as staff shortages, outdated management plans and development encroaching on park boundaries. For “stewardship capacity,” the park was given an overall score of 63 out of 100. For stewardship of air quality, the score was just 38. But McKew says park officials are doing the best they can.
“The stewardship capacity rating in the report was never designed to reflect the park’s management of itself, but how well they were given the tools to manage the resources,” she says. While costs went up 31 percent between 1980 and 2000, she says, the park budget increased only 24 percent. “The park’s done a very good job of making ends met, trimming a little thing here, a little thing there,” she says. “Now they’re seriously looking at cutting visitor services,” like ranger and visitors centers.
McKew believes the Federal government is to blame. “Ultimately the responsibility runs right back to Congress,” she says. “It’s Congress that controls the legislation and money and staffing levels in our national park system. They’re ultimately the stewards.”
McKew and others also complain that the Bush administration is trying to weaken pollution controls. Though the administration claims its proposed “Clear Skies” program will reduce emissions and make pollution regulation less convoluted, environmentalists have attacked it for not requiring industry to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas. The existing Clean Air Act, they say, has bigger teeth.
Notably, the power industry favors the Clear Skies plan. “The current administration seems intent on weakening preservation and protection of natural spaces for the sake of economic short-term gains,” says Holden.
From Congress to the State DEQ, all levels of government have some responsibility for fixing air pollution. Though he’s not making excuses for the Feds, Jeff Werner emphasizes local solutions to local problems. He says that looking down from Shenandoah is more than a momentary disappointment. “Why would people in Albemarle and Charlottesville be concerned that some elderly couple from Iowa was not impressed with the view from Skyline Drive?” he asks. “Well, because it indicates that something is happening. Air pollution is telling us something.”
The PEC recently produced a mock newspaper called the “Albemarle County Clarion” that warns of high-density development in Albemarle’s designated Rural Areas—95 percent of the County—which are zoned for up to 110,000 homes. (There were 33,000 in 2000 when the last Census was taken). “Albemarle should either revise its ordinance to be consistent with the intent of its Rural Area policy, or rename the Rural Area the ‘Suburban Area,’” he says.
The PEC’s strategy primarily focuses on frightening middle-class homeowners with visions of scenery ruined by cheap-looking sprawl. But Werner says sprawl menaces more than the view. “It’s the dispersed development that we’re concerned about,” he says. “That does create the need to drive everywhere.”
Tobin Scipione, director of the Charlottesville-based Alliance for Community Choice in Transportation, agrees and says that auto emissions, in turn, are a culprit in some health problems. “School nurses and doctors will tell you that there’s an air quality problem in most places. They’re seeing growing incidents of asthma and upper respiratory problems in children and seniors.”
Interestingly, no one knows just how bad local air pollution is in the first place. Other counties in Virginia have air-quality monitors—small machines that measure the amount of ozone at ground level—and there’s one in Shenandoah National Park. On a recommendation from the Department of Transportation, the Charlottesville-Albemarle Metropolitan Planning Organization has considered siting a monitor in Albemarle County, but so far none exists. Werner says the MPO may be afraid of what the monitor would show. “When you begin to determine you have pollution, a lot of localities are concerned about what the implications are,” he says. “Once you have the data you have to pay for it.”
Specifically, if ozone levels were high enough, Albemarle could be declared a Nonattainment Zone by the DEQ. This would make road-building projects much harder to implement. “You have to actually prove that any transportation project will not exacerbate the current situation, which is very hard to do,” says Holmes. Chances are, a monitor in Albemarle would deliver bad news. “Every single county [in Virginia] that has a monitor is classified Nonattainment,” he says. “That tells you something.” In fact, the American Lung Association has recommended that the entire state of Virginia be declared a Nonattainment Zone.
Scipione says that air pollution data, cheerful or not, is something the County needs. “There’s a very real, very human issue, which is that the people of this community need to know what the quality of the air is,” she says.
Ultimately, Shenandoah National Park is just a long, skinny bit of land around which humans have drawn an arbitrary line. As a national park, its pollution problems receive special attention. But as part of a greater ecosystem, it’s a bellwether for its entire region. “You can’t create small zones of ecological diversity and expect them to stay diverse without creating connections to other zones,” says Holmes.
McKew says there is a need to update the basic philosophy behind national park protection. “The truth about the national parks is they were created with an eye toward finding the interesting places and protecting them because they were seen as good tourism destinations,” she says. “There’s a movement in conservation circles to expand the thinking so these aren’t islands, they’re considered part of the larger ecology.”