America's acid rain

I must have told you about this friend of ours, an Englishman who pays us a regular visit in the early fall and who, we hope, will go on doing so, though Britons arriving here these days carry a new and pained expression, as well they might when they discover, with the first purchase of a meal, a theatre ticket, even a bus ride, that the value of the pounds is less than half what it was three years ago.

Well, this man, a trim, fast-moving character, like an alert fox, no sooner arrives here than he announces he's going out for a walk, which is not a standard American custom. Americans walk to get somewhere – a business call, a visit to the doctor, a shopping trip, a round of golf, a hunting, shooting trip through the woods – the walking is just a necessary adjunct of some chore that has to be done.

I don't recall in all my years in this country an American ever pronouncing the English idiom, 'Let's go for a walk!' But, as I say, this man arrives, unpacks his bags, freshens up, as he puts it, and is off tracking through Central Park or padding down the East Side or threading through the Garment Centre, or wherever. After ten years of annual visits, he knows Manhattan better than most New Yorkers and he always returns, an hour or so or two later cheerful and chuckling.

By now, I've learned to recognise the chuckle as the short overture to a recital of something absurd that he's just come across. He spots more eccentrics in one afternoon than the inhabitants notice in a year and, for a time, I used to think this was a gag, a wilful exercise in finding in New York characters transplanted from his favourite author, Charles Dickens.

There was the time, for instance, when he reported that four young hippies, with brass instruments, were playing a Mozart quartet outside a well-known Fifth Avenue bookstore. That was plausible. Then he said he'd just seen in Central Park a man dressed as a gorilla playing a black harp. I mean! I began to think that my friend suffered from a harmless, but lively, imagination until one time I actually joined him for this walking caper, pointing out as we neared home that for once we'd seen nothing weird or comical. 'But look!' he said. Outside the very canopy of my apartment house, a station-wagon was parked and on the roof of it stood a teenager, but he was standing on his head.

I'm sure that if my friend had been here early last week, he would have been the first to notice a spruce, clean-shaven, nicely dressed young man standing on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 57th Street, alongside a printed sign of his own devising. It said, 'Good advice 25 cents per question.' What sort of question? Well, he had obliging listed the categories of his expertise as business, financial, love, science, maths, sexual. And just so you wouldn't think of him as some barmy amateur guru, he'd printed neatly at the bottom, 'Two years of college'.

Incidentally, in case you're thinking of my friend as an unusually penetrating observer, an unlicensed private eye on the order of Sherlock Holmes or Sam Spade, I ought to say that he doesn't seem to spot such eccentrics when he's back home in London and this leads me to believe that we're all more observant away from home, more knowledgeable especially about how to get to places we have to see, people we have to call on. My wife knows the London bus routes better than any of our London friends. That may be because she never takes a taxi anywhere, except when she's with me.

Well, on the point of being perceptive abroad and blind at home, I've noticed in myself that there are whole sections of New York that have special names, like the East Village, Turtle Bay, and I'm still hazy about their confines. I discovered only a few weeks ago that for forty years I've been living on Carnegie Hill. In my busy travelling days, I used to be able to recognise a goodly number of the trees out west, like the lemony palo verde in Arizona and all the cactuses. And there was a time when I could have taken a stiff quiz on cone-bearing trees of the Pacific coast. As for California, I actually taught Californians where to look for and distinguish the manzanita from the madrone.

But I think it was not more than ten years ago that I discovered what I'll swear not one New Yorker in a thousand is aware of – that the common, the standard, tree along all the side streets of New York is the London plane tree. It apparently can weather almost any assault of the elements, including the recent sinister element of smog and noxious emissions from motorcars.

An alarming dispatch the other day from Vermont made me reflect that, perhaps, when we're all choking from pollutants or worse, the London plane tree will stand there sharing life on this planet with the only organism immune to radioactivity – the cockroach.

The Vermont story has a particular application just now because it bears on a growing problem of sustaining life on this continent – never mind the bomb – which will be 'the' burning issue President Reagan and Canada's Prime Minister Mulroney are going to have to singe their fingers on when they meet about ten days from now in Quebec. It is the nasty and appallingly widespread problem of acid rain.

First, as the TV newsmen say, the story from Vermont. It is the beginning up there of what they call the 'sugaring season' when the farmers of Vermont's most valuable crop begin to put buckets out by the sugar maple trees and tap them for the sap that becomes maple syrup, which eventually is used everywhere in America as a sauce or syrup for pancakes and the like, is burnt down into sugar and turns also into maple candy.

Last year, the Vermont maple sugar makers produced just over half a million gallons of syrup – easily more than any other state. Upstate New York produces about 300,000 gallons and between them they serve the nation. Well, suddenly, or rather it's been coming on for a year or two now, the farmers are having the unpleasant experience of one man who sets out about 1500 taps each year in a valley of northern Vermont. About one tree in five is dying, not gradually, but suddenly. This man said, 'I've had trees that one year were healthier than heck and the next year, dead.' These trees are, almost all of them, sugar maples. At higher elevations, there's an even more drastic mortality among red spruce and balsam fir.

Now the farmers are, or were, puzzled at the cause, until a botanist at the University of Vermont who's been studying a typical Vermont forest for 20 years has come to the sad conclusion that the villain is air pollution and, especially, acid rain. There are other experts, foresters, for instance, who say that there are multiple causes, that even 50 years ago the newspapers were panicking about forest decline, but they will admit that the trees in question are dying sooner and for no obvious reason.

Canada, by the way, produces over two and a half million gallons of syrup, most of it in Quebec, so they share the concern of the Vermonters, but the northern neighbour's acquaintance with acid rain goes far beyond the maple forests. Canada has been complaining for several years now and with increasing insistence about the vast, invisible – not always invisible – cloud of pollutants, of airborne emissions of sulphur and nitrogen oxide that we call acid rain that flows north with the summer winds from the great industrial areas of the United States that lie in the Midwest, just south of the Canadian border.

Through at least two American administrations, the Canadians have been pleading for a joint American-Canadian effort to try and clean up, or at least arrest, the smothering of the eastern provinces by acid rain made in America. They will admit that they manufacture their own but they claim that about half of all the acid rain that's threatening the forests, agriculture, the fisheries, and worse, the health of the people, flows in from the United States.

President Reagan has so far turned down the idea of this joint effort. He thinks that there has to be more research before we can pin the stigma, the blame, on acid rain and he has one powerful argument in his favour which could make him hold out against the pleas of the Canadian prime minister. It's the fact that the Canadians have been laggard, while the Americans have been tough, in setting him prohibitive standards for the noxious fumes, the pollutants that come from cars and vans and trucks.

The Canadian government has just announced a plan to match the American laws in the hope of reducing acid rain in the eastern provinces by 50 per cent in the next nine years.

Well, I've reported this problem in an unemotional way and maybe the Canadians, only now, know that their emission standards are slacker than the American standards, but whereas in the United States acid rain is just another headache of the 1980s, in eastern Canada, it is a bitter fruit that poisons good relations with this country. It is to Canadians an acute example of the chronic indifference, bordering on ignorance, with which Americans normally think of Canadians, when they think of them at all.

The New York Times's man, Russell Baker, put the general attitude with stinging irony this week when he wrote, 'As for acid rain, naturally, we wish it wouldn't fall on nice people. If it results from United States industrial pollution, we hope the Canadians will be good-natured about it. They have always been good-natured about not invading across the border'.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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