If Professor Robert Bruck of North Carolina State University has anything to say about it, this state will begin to do something about its air quality problems now.

Mixing humor with animated anger, Bruck was by far the most entertaining of speakers at an air quality meeting held last week at Lake Junaluska. The meeting was arranged by the state Senate Select Committee on Mountain Air Quality, a group whose very existence is a recognition of the serious problem these mountains are facing.

“We’re gonna pay, you might not know when, but we’re gonna pay” for our inattention to the environment, Bruck said, mimicking the Fram Oil Filter commercials.

Scientists attending the meeting showed that the evidence of short-term detrimental health effects from pollution is irrefutable. Long-term studies have not been as numerous or as overwhelming in their conclusions.

The seminar participants said that, except for Los Angeles, the worst air pollution problems in the country are in the Southeast. From Atlanta to the Smoky Mountains, we are in the worst area in this region. Plant life has been damaged for years, evidenced by scenes like the fraser firs on Mt. Mitchell.

“Twenty three years ago I made my first trip to Mt. Mitchell. I’m tired, so tired. But the truth is that nothing has changed between now and then,” Bruck told the audience.

Sen. Dan Robinson (D-Cullowhee), one of the co-chairs of the committee, said the urgency of the problem has become, pardon the pun, all too clear in the last two or three years.

“I honestly did not know the problem was this bad, not to the degree it is. But in the last two or three years, the visibility has gotten progressively worse in the summer, and I’ve seen it with my own eyes,” Robinson said.

Scientists have been beating the drum for years. Robinson and Rep. Charles Taylor are now coming around, which means the scientists may be on the verge of getting the political support they need to remedy the problem.

Sen. Robinson and others on the committee must go to Raleigh this legislative session and make the case that we need help. Taylor must do the same thing in Washington. We need our entire congressional delegation to unite behind this problem, to search for regional solutions. The scientific evidence is overwhelming. What we need now is effective, untiring political support.

 

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The Smoky Mountain News