Question

what is no rain campaign

Answer 1

analysis on the strength and weakness of campaigns done in rainy season, the agency do.

Answer 2

WEARYING of this country's failure to deal with what many believe to be the most dangerous threat to North America's environment, the Atlantic Chapter of the Sierra Club has started an Americans Against Acid Rain campaign in New York State.

It is fitting that this effort was born in New York, whose Adirondack region has been hard-hit by acid rain. In the Adirondacks alone, more than 200 lakes and ponds are so acidic that they cannot support fish life.

''This is an effort,'' says Bill Hewitt, who is a co-chairman, with Kathy Jones, of the New York City campaign group, ''to heighten public awareness of the issue and to raise funds to finance both that and political lobbying.''

''Congress is involved in a long, slow process of reauthorizing many of the major environmental bills,'' says Mr. Hewitt, ''and at some point, hopefully in this session, will do so with the Clean Air Act of 1970, the legislation under which acid rain is included.''

The phrase ''acid rain,'' is, although handy, too simplistic. Airborne acidity - sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides resulting from the combustion of fossil fuels - can arrive in rain, fog, snow, sleet, hail and dew as well as dry particulate matter. Coal-fired power plants contribute nearly two-thirds of the sulfur dioxide emissions in this country, according to the Environmental Defense Fund; Ohio, Illinois and Indiana are responsible for perhaps a quarter of this. Motor vehicles account for about 50 percent of the nitrogen oxides, according to the National Clean Air Coalition. The nitrogen oxide emissions have trebled in the last 30 years

Because of prevailing air currents, the northeast United States and eastern Canada receive a heavy charge of acid deposition from this country's Middle West. In Ontario, some 1,200 lakes have become too acidic to support fish, and thousands more face the same fate. Quebec is also having problems with acidifying lakes and streams and has informed the United States that it believes that more than half of that province's acid deposition comes from this country. As one might expect, our northern neighbors are exasperated by our unwillingness to stem the flow of airborne garbage flung in their direction.

Concerned over the transport of these pollutants across state and national boundaries, the Sierra Club, other environmental organizations and the state of New York have sued the Environmental Protection Agency and several midwestern states. Earlier this year, Norma Holloway Johnson, a Federal District Court judge in Washington, ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, stating that the agency must issue rules to control, as Mr. Hewitt puts it, ''the transboundary transportation of acidic pollutants.''

Acid deposition has also been found in portions of the West and Far West, including California and Washington State.

As Robert and R. Alexander Boyle noted in their book ''Acid Rain'' (Nick Lyons/Shocken, 1983), it is not possible to pinpoint the precise source of acidic pollution in a given area, nor can one deny that it is unclear whether such pollution is increasing in intensity in the East. What is clear is that lakes and forests are dying.

North America is not the sole victim of the acid arriving from on high. Lakes in Norway and Sweden are dead or dying from the same cause.

This month's issue of the Smithsonian magazine notes that the spruces, firs, oaks and beeches in Germany's Black Forest are being swept by a fatal disease whose genesis has not been precisely identified. For a time after the trees began dying, the usual theory was that ''imported'' -perhaps from this country - sulfur dioxide was the cause, but that theory has been largely ruled out. It now appears, to quote the Smithsonian piece, that ''the Germans have had to confront the possibility that their love affair with the automobile is doing in their trees. There are 26 million cars in Germany, one for every 2.35 persons.''

Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H., recently announced that its Environmental Studies Program has been awarded an initial $194,000 grant from the Environmental Protection Agency for a three-year study of the effects of acid precipitation on the red spruce/balsam fir forest atop the state's 4,000-foot Mt. Moosilauke. This will be one of several agency-financed monitoring stations in the east

hope it helps you