A Killing Rain: The Global Threat of Acid Precipitation

Merritt Clifton was an environmental journalist and lived in Brigham, Quebec.

Acid rain is still a developing crisis. Thus, no matter what one writes about it, the writing will be outdated and will seem like understatement very quickly. Thomas Pawlick’s A Killing Rain is perhaps the farthest-reaching, most frightening synopsis for laymen yet, an excellent piece of investigative writing prepared only months before this review is written. But already it too is outdated and the situation even worse than Pawlick prophesied. Specifically, Pawlick hoped publication of A Killing Rain simultaneously in the United States and Canada would focus public pressure behind a compromise piece of anti-acid rain legislation that stood a good chance of passage through all levels of the United States government before the 1984 elections. It didn’t happen. The United States still has no effective legal weapons against acid rain, no concerted program to reduce sulphuric and nitric emissions, while Canada has even more trees dying than either federal or provincial governments thought possible a bare six months ago. The United States has re-elected a president who once remarked that “If you’ve seen one tree, you’ve seen them all,” whose administration believes that acid rain doesn’t yet warrant major corrective action. The new Canadian government, meanwhile, has slashed the Environment Canada budget and is stressing better relations with the United States rather than pushing the acid rain issue.

If A Killing Rain is depressing reading, reading the newspapers afterward is still more depressing. Pawlick succinctly summarizes everything known about acid rain, from sources to long-distance transport to how it leaches toxic metals from the soil, annihilating lakes and forests. He explores the economic and political problems surrounding acid rain control in depth. He takes a hard look at how acid rain threatens to wipe out the maple syrup industry, in both Canada and the United States. He points out that neither smokestack scrubbers nor liming offers more than expensive partial solutions. He illustrates that acid rain isn’t just our problem, it’s global; and that means that we won’t have any replacement forests if we let all our own go. Every forest in the northern hemisphere is endangered, while the southern hemisphere rain forests are already rapidly vanishing as Latin America and central Africa move in on the pulp-and-paper trade.

To date, A Killing Rain is the sourcebook to have on acid rain. Written as a grim warning, today it’s reality; and by the time this review appears, it could well be the “good old days.”