Mount Moran and Jackson Lake at Grand Teton National Park. (Photo by Kimberly Finch courtesy of National Park Service)
Even our most remote national parks are
polluted. That’s according to a six-year government
study of parks from the Arctic to the Mexican border.
Rebecca Williams reports:
Transcript
Even our most remote national parks are
polluted. That’s according to a six-year government
study of parks from the Arctic to the Mexican border.
Rebecca Williams reports:
You might think it’d be safe to eat a fish you catch in a lake way out in
the middle of nowhere. But the new study found high levels of mercury, DDT
and other chemicals in some fish in national parks. Levels that make the
fish unsafe for both people and wildlife.
Dixon Landers is a researcher with the Environmental Protection Agency. He
says the team also found low levels of 70 different chemicals in snow, water
and plants in national parks.
“There’s probably no place left in the world that has no sign of human
activities and largely because of atmospheric transport.”
Landers says that means some chemicals get transported in the air and end up
hundreds or thousands of miles away from their source. He says chemicals
from nearby cities and farms also end up polluting the parks.
For the Environment Report, I’m Rebecca Williams.