Polluting Our National Parks

In this country, we refuse to make the corporations stop their polluting. The bottom line has become more important than the environment or the health of our citizens, so we continue to allow them to pollute our soil, our water, and our air. And now the Republicans want to defund the Environmental Protection Agency to further inhibit it from making these corporations (especially energy, gas, and oil companies) follow the law and clean up their act.

This has been a problem in too many of our cities for quite a while, but now it is even starting to affect areas that we consider to be pristine -- like out national parks. There are at least seven of our treasured national parks that had smog and/or ozone levels that were considered by the EPA to be dangerous last year. Here are the seven parks where the pollution was the worst (ranked from worst to less bad):

1. Sequoia National Park
2. Joshua Tree National Park
3. Great Smokey Mountains National Park
4. Yosemite National Park
5. Rocky Mountain National Park
6. Big Bend National Park
7. Mojave National Preserve

NOTE -- A lot of the park pollution is due to automobiles (which goes back to the oil companies and their lobbying for carbon-based fuels).