Only two counties in Washington get an A for clean air from the American Lung Association. Clallam is one of them. Visit www.stateoftheair.org/2010/states/washington.

We often overlook the value of our clean air to our young people, the frail or the elderly, to the health of our watersheds and harbor, our farms and forests and parks. To visitors and tourists. To fish and shellfish and all those invisible critters that keep our ecosystem in balance.

It's hard to quantify the value of health - and healthy air.

But once that clean air is gone, there's no assurance we can get it back.



Industry standards

Proponents say that the proposed biomass burner will "burn cleaner" and cite an admirable reduction in CO2. But carbon dioxide is only one of the byproducts of commercial incinerators.

What is overlooked is that the intense heat of commercial incinerators creates thousands of dangerous compounds - like dioxins - that are released into the air. Only a small fraction of these chemicals have been identified, much less examined for their impact on human, plant and animal health.

When I asked Paul Perlwitz, Nippon environmental manager, about these compounds after Nippon's recent Port Angeles Regional Chamber of Commerce presentation, he assured me that the incinerator would be "built to industry standards."

That is hardly reassuring. Remember: The drilling rig that failed so spectacularly in the Gulf of Mexico also was "built to industry standards."



Compounding the problem

Another problem: Pollution-control technologies for different pollutants often are incompatible. Scrubbers designed to filter particles and heavy metals will cool the exhaust gas to the ideal range for forming dioxins. Thus, decreasing the emission of one pollutant often increases the emissions of others.

And no pollution-control device completely eliminates dioxins or heavy metals.

When fragments of partially burned waste chemicals recombine within incinerators, smokestacks and/or pollution-control devices, many of the hundreds or even thousands of the new compounds created can be more toxic than the original waste.

Another health threat is the pollution from the trucks that would haul slash to the incinerator and haul away the ash to some unspecified location.

Adding a burden of pollution to the local environment, while the entire system will be in the throes of adjusting to the removal of the Elwha River dams, can't be a good thing. And there's certainly been no time to address what might happen to all forms of aquatic life.

Other incinerators are being considered in Forks, Port Townsend and Shelton. There is not enough slash to continuously feed such huge incinerators. Trying will put all our forests at risk.

No one knows the impact of removing quantities of micro-nutrients and biological activity from our forests, nor how climate change may further stress all the many components of healthy woodlands (see biomass fuels and CO2 emissions).

The forests are part of a natural ecosystem kept healthy by an intricate web of connections held in balance by a living, interactive dance, not a simple commodity.

We mess with Mother Nature's delicate systems at our peril:

Forests across the country still suffer from the impacts of our short-sighted Smokey Bear no-burn policies. In the Pacific Northwest, we're restoring the downed trees that had been removed to "improve" rivers and streams.

The alluring promise of "green energy" may be a phantom. It has yet to pencil out as a net energy gain once you calculate all the energy required to gather and transport the slash, then haul away the ash. These incinerators are 19th- century technology. They burn wood - or whatever - to create steam to run a turbine - hardly a green innovation. For this we should blight our irreplaceable waterfront?

Weigh these concerns against a bit of new construction and a few jobs harvesting trees and hauling slash.

Do we have the wisdom to recognize that we all depend on the health of our environment? That there's no healthy economy without a healthy planet?



Diana Somerville writes about creating more sustainable communities and our personal connection with the environment. A Clallam County resident, she's a member of the National Association of Science Writers and the American Society of Journalists and Authors. Reach her at www.DianaSomerville.com or e-mail columnists@sequimgazette.com.