National Parks Riddled With Contaminants

Travel Blog  •  Joanna Kakissis  •  02.29.08 | 11:02 AM ET

pollutedlakePhoto by Patrick Doheny via Flickr (Creative Commons).

We recently noted that fewer Americans are spending their free time camping, hiking and fishing in our great outdoors. But while our parks are losing human crowds, they may are gaining some people-produced troubles—contaminants such as pesticides and mercury.

The online environmental magazine Grist, among others, notes that a six-year federal study on the air, water, soil, lichen, conifer needles and fish in 20 national parks and monuments revealed 70 contaminants. Among the parks hit: Alaska’s Denali, Texas’s Big Bend and California’s Yosemite. “At eight parks, fish were too full of chemicals to be safe for human consumption, and researchers also found feminized male fish in some places,” Grist writes.

Kind of puts a damper on your campfire dinners.

 

Tags: Global Village, North America, United States, News and Briefs

Joanna Kakissis's writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe and The Washington Post, among other publications. A contributor to the World Hum blog, she's currently a Ted Scripps fellow in environmental journalism at the University of Colorado in Boulder.


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