EAGLE BAY, N.Y. -- The remarkable thing about Big Moose Lake on a bright summer day is what is not happening.
Canoeists paddle across the sparkling lake, which lies close to this sleepy Adirondacks village. Teen-agers water-ski. Children mount a high-pitched campaign to win permission from their mothers to go swimming.
Nobody is fishing.
Anglers used to come to Big Moose Lake for the trout, but the trout have not been plentiful for many years, thanks to a long-distance pollution problem that was supposed to be well on its way to being solved almost a decade ago.
But acid rain never went away.
The water in Big Moose Lake, like the waters of more than a quarter of the 2,800 streams and lakes in the Adirondacks, is still too acidic to support a robust trout population. Sulfur dioxide, emitted from coal-burning power plants in the Midwest, becomes sulfuric acid when it mixes with atmospheric moisture. After traveling hundreds of miles, it falls as rain and snow on this scenic pine-covered mountain range.
"It's like living downwind of a volcano that's erupting 24 hours a day," said C.V. "Major" Bowes, owner of the Cove Wood Inn, which overlooks Big Moose Lake.
Clean Air Act
Acid rain, which emerged as an environmental threat in the late 1970s, was tackled in the 1990 amendments to the Clean Air Act. Sulfur dioxide emissions at the nation's largest power plants have been cut in half, thanks in part to an innovative pollution-credit trading scheme that gives utilities an incentive to reduce their emissions even more than required.
But a recent government report found that despite the cuts "the recovery anticipated in 1990 has not been realized" in the Adirondacks, one of the regions most severely affected by acid rain.
"There's less sulfur hitting the ground now, but that doesn't restore the damage that's already been done," said John Sheehan of the Adirondack Council, a regional environmental group. "We need a lot less hitting the ground to begin to recover."
And because of concentrations of other acid-producing pollutants in precipitation, the report found that many parts of the country that were not previously thought of as acid-rain hot zones could be affected in the future.
Environmentalists in upstate New York say the latest assessment shows the need for further reductions in emissions from power plants. Utilities argue that existing regulations, which will mandate further emissions cuts starting next year, should be given time to work.
"Every utility has done what's required, and in fact they've gone beyond what's required," said John Kinsman, manager of atmospheric science for the Edison Electric Institute, a Washington trade group that represents shareholder-owned utilities.
Reduction in wildlife
One of the main effects of acid rain is a reduction in the variety of wildlife in areas whose lakes and rivers become too acidic to support fish and other aquatic life, such as frogs and clams.
Big Moose Lake, for instance, used to be home to close to 20 kinds of fish, recalled Bowes, who has lived in the Adirondacks since 1948. Now, perhaps a half dozen hang on. Brook Trout Lake, also in the Adirondacks, no longer has any brook trout.
As fish populations decline, so do the numbers of their predators, such as otters and bears.
"It absolutely has an impact on diversity," said Walt Kretser, who runs a lake-monitoring program for the New York Department of Environmental Conservation. "You'll no longer have mink in there. Even the raccoons might be gone."
And nuisance species that would have been kept in check skyrocket. Black flies, whose painful bites raise welts and cause bleeding, have proliferated in the Adirondacks because the fish that normally eat their larvae are no longer there.
'Spring shock'
Even lakes that have relatively normal waters most of the year have shown a decline in fish life because of a "spring shock" of acidity that washes into the lakes when the winter snows melt, Kretser said.
Studies have found that although 27 percent of Adirondack lakes are acidic year-round, up to 58 percent of the lakes become dangerously acidified for several weeks in the spring. That timing coincides with the spawning season for fish.
"If you have changes in the [acidity levels], we'll lose a lot of those fish populations," Kretser said. "It can wipe out a year of brook trout."
Scientists and environmentalists believe that acid rain also affects trees by leaching nutrients out of the soil. That robs the trees of food and weakens their ability to survive. In low-lying areas of the Adirondacks, large stands of stark, barkless dead trees are a common sight.
"Acid rain is like AIDS of the forest," said Bowes. "It doesn't kill trees outright, but it weakens them. Other things take them down."
When President George Bush signed the Clean Air Act amendments in 1990, many in the Adirondacks felt that the acid-rain problem would soon be a thing of the past.
"Yup, problem's solved," said Kretser, recalling the reaction at the time. "There was a sense of complacency after that."
Not solved
But the latest report by the National Acid Precipitation Assessment Program, a joint effort by several federal agencies, makes it clear that simply controlling sulfur dioxide emissions from power plants does not solve the problem.
Acid rain, it turns out, is a more complicated phenomenon that involves the interplay of several kinds of emissions. Some contribute to acid rain, but others help control it.
Monthly monitoring of 52 Adirondack lakes since 1992 has revealed that the amount of sulfates reaching the area from power plants has gone down in recent years, by an average of about 20 percent.
But in addition to sulfur dioxide, power plants also emit some substances that neutralize acids, such as calcium, sodium and potassium. And less of those chemicals is reaching upstate New York, apparently because the pollution-control devices that remove sulfur dioxide from the power plants' emissions also remove these beneficial chemicals, Kretser said.
And, the report noted, acid rain emissions of nitrogen oxides from a host of sources, including automobiles, factories and power plants, appear to play a bigger role in the formation of acid rain than previously suspected. In the atmosphere, nitrogen emissions mix with water to form nitric acid.
"I don't think people realized the importance" of nitrogen oxides emissions, Kretser said. "We were receiving a lot more sulfur dioxide."
The acid rain study reported that high concentrations of nitrogen-based substances have been found in lakes and streams in the San Bernardino and San Gabriel Mountains in the Los Angeles area, portions of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado, the Allegheny Mountains in West Virginia, and the Great Smoky Mountains in Tennessee.
And over the years, monitoring in the Adirondacks has shown that more nitrogen emissions are reaching the region, possibly because of increases in the number of vehicles in the area, Kretser said.
Stopping acid rain and restoring area streams and lakes will require further cuts in emissions of not only sulfur dioxide but also nitrogen oxides, said Sheehan of the Adirondack Council. The group has called for sulfur dioxide levels to be cut by another 50 percent, for a total reduction of 75 percent from pre-Clean Air Act levels.
The council wants nitrogen oxide emissions to be slashed 70 percent.
Sen. Daniel Moynihan, a New York Democrat, has introduced a bill that would give the Environmental Protection Agency the power to reduce emission levels and establish a pollution-credit trading system for nitrogen oxide similar to the existing sulfur dioxide program.
More regulations aren't the answer, counters Kinsman of the utility trade group.