This past summer our Wonderful West Virginia had unhealthy air in the form of smog (called also haze or ozone) for a total of 27 days. In Parkersburg this was one out of every 5 days from April to September. This regional haze is everywhere in West Virginia. It comes into our state, and we effect western Maryland. The West Virginia Department of Natural Resources Director spoke to a group gathered at Canaan Valley State Park during one of these days when the distant view was obstructed by the yellow brown haze. He saw it in the mountains in a State Park. This is the summer season when so many are enjoying our wonderful outdoors - tourists too, who surely expected "Wonderful West Virginia" to have clean air. Think of the effect on tourism of air health advisories, announcements and notices. Just the reduction of views hurts tourism.

Such unsafe levels of ozone air pollution increases our risk of lung problems. It causes burning through lung cell walls, and causes airways to become swollen and inflamed. Even healthy adults with no history of respiratory problems can experience chest pains, coughing, congestion, as well as permanent reduction in breathing capacity when exposed to ozone concentrations exceeding the Federal health standards. It is an irony today that healthy adults bicycling or running for their health, or those mowing their lawns or gardening in the suburbs, or those backpacking in the forest - all may actually be harming their health. For the elderly, and the young at play outdoors, and the 100,000 asthma sufferers in West Virginia, ozone pollution means thousands of emergency room visits and missed work or school. For them it means, at best, staying inside - imprisoned, perhaps with an oxygen bottle to breathe.

We now have more protective standards to improve our air, but we need greater reductions in smog forming air pollutants to make air safe to breathe without these harmful excesses. Emissions from coal burning electric power generating stations produce one-third of the nitrogen oxides that cause ozone/smog. Car exhausts produce another third. The cheapest and most effective means of reducing nitrogen emissions is to require that when coal is burned that it be burned cleanly.

The increased cost is modest. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates West Virginians will have to pay only 1% more to reduce our nitrogen emissions by half to meet our share in cleaning up the eastern air. It will evidently not be generally supported in any way from general taxes, but will be passed on to the consumer - the way business always does. It will not "skyrocket" as the reluctant power companies (and even our Governor) claim. They use this rhetoric, and would like for you to believe it, for they are poised to send us these big bills, if they can get away with it. However they must justify increases and they can not. Even if it costs us $100 more a year on our electric bills, this is only what we should have been paying all along to prevent damage to our health and to our environment. Health costs alone far outweigh these costs; perhaps 40 to 1.

The cost of the damage to our environment is staggering also. These same nitrogen emissions contribute to Acid Rain, which in the last 50 years has accumulated to over a ton of acid on every acre of the eastern forest. This alone may have caused the noted recent reduction in forest tree growth. Surely with forest soil acidification and leaching of nutrients, dissolving out toxic aluminum, etc., it has contributed to forest decline. Above ground it makes trees more susceptible to insects and disease and even drought and freezing. There is great concern about our high elevation spruce ecosystems. They may become areas too toxic for much of anything to grow. Their unique characteristics altered, gone forever - for they get even more acid, four times more. These ecosystems are appropriate, unique, rare and priceless.

In our back yards and throughout the forest the flowering Dogwood tree may vanish. Vanish from sight, then memory in a continually degraded environment. We must not let this happen. We must clean up our air. It may be that if we preserve this priceless beautiful little tree of our springtime, we will preserve ourselves - surely our quality of life.

Another loss from forest acidification is the trout in now acid streams that drain the eastern forest. Perhaps 1/10 are already lost; perhaps most of these forever lost. This is a priceless heritage this generation had no right to even risk. The loss of this fishing opportunity has reduced our quality of life.

All these environmental indicators reflect ecosystem degradation of which our survival is a part. This generation of West Virginians must pay these modest increases in electric power bills and do our share in cleaning up our air. We must support the leadership to do this wherever we find it.