we’d expect the system to respond much more quickly” to any curbs on mercury emissions. Research in the Florida Everglades also suggests that reducing air emissions could rapidly decrease mercury concentrations in fish and wading birds—much more quickly than researchers thought ecosystems would respond to reduced loading—according to Tom Atkeson, a scientist with the Florida Department of Environmental Protection. “We started out thinking of this as an aquatic problem, but we learned that it was really driven by atmospheric processes,” he says. Atmospheric deposition of mercury dropped significantly in the late 1980s because of regulations on emissions from municipal solid waste incinerators and voluntary actions to remove mercury from household batteries. Mercury levels in fish and wildlife from the Everglades continued to rise, peaking in the mid 1990s. “Today, mercury concentrations are down by roughly 75% from that peak” as a result of the emission control policies, Atkeson notes. EPA officials, for their part, recognize that their mercury plan has its critics. “We’re eager to hear them,” says spokesperson John Millett. He admits that water hotspots could form in some areas as a result of a cap-and-trade program, but he maintains that monitoring should keep any problems in check. “It’s envisioned that we’re going to see some major overall improvements with the trading approach, but we’re not sure where. It may also be that some areas won’t improve, and again, we’re not sure where,” Millett notes. But right now, “We want to cut mercury as much as possible, and then with the monitoring information developed through the cap-and-trade program, we’ll be able to refine the approaches and reduce mercury in any problem areas that arise.” For more information on EPA’s mercury proposals, go to www.epa.gov/mercury. —KRIS CHRISTEN
News Briefs Gold industry targeted The production of a single 18-karat gold ring weighing less than an ounce generates at least 20 tons of mine waste, according to leaflets distributed in major U.S. cities in February. Two nonprofit groups, Earthworks/Mineral Policy Center and Oxfam America, handed out the literature as part of a campaign to raise awareness about the toll that gold mining takes on humans and the environment. The groups have also released a report, Dirty Metals: Mining, Communities, and the Environment, which points out that metals mining employs less than 0.1% of the global workforce but uses 7–10% of the world’s energy. For more information, go to www.nodirtygold.org.
Site licenses vs subscriptions Are library site licenses for accessing scientific journals a good deal for the academic community? Not necessarily, according to a recent report (Proc. Natl. Acad. U.S.A. 2004, 101, 897–902). “Whereas electronic distribution can dramatically reduce the costs of producing and disseminating scholarly work, it is not clear that the scientific community will reap any of the benefits,” wrote a duo of biology and economics professors. They used microeconomics and elementary statistical theory to analyze the costs and advantages of electronic access to journals among six disciplines, including ecology, atmospheric science, and physics. Institutional site licenses from professional societies and university presses are cost-effective, but universities would be better off choosing individual print subscriptions offered by for-profit publishing groups instead of their highly priceinflated site licenses, according to the professors’ findings.
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Environmental groups, too, worry about hotspots. “Certain areas may not be cleaned up at all, or cleaned up very little, because some utilities would be able to buy emission credits as opposed to making actual cleanups,” says Frank O’Donnell, executive director of the Clean Air Trust. Representatives of electric power industry groups, for their part, voice cautious support of EPA’s cap-and-trade approach for bringing mercury emissions down. However, many state environmental officials had been banking on a MACT approach. In fact, both of EPA’s proposed approaches fall short of a goal adopted in August 2003 by state air, water, and solid waste management directors that advocated the “greatest reductions possible within the shortest timeframe,” says Marcia Willhite, chief of the Illinois EPA’s Bureau of Water. Scientific findings also make the case for quick action. Preliminary results from mercury pathway experiments in northeast Ontario in Canada suggest that mercury recently deposited from the atmosphere is more bioavailable than existing mercury. In the study, known as the Mercury Experiment To Assess Atmospheric Loading in Canada and the United States, or METAALICUS, researchers are trying to determine what happens to fish mercury concentrations when changes occur in the amount of atmospheric mercury deposition (Environ. Sci. Technol. 2001, 35, 229A–230A). By dosing a watershed with stable mercury isotopes, “We’re finding that the mercury we add to the lake surface is much more prone to become methylated in sediments than relic mercury,” says David Krabbenhoft, a research scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey who is involved with the study. “This is important because if the pools of mercury that exist in upland and wetland soils were very active, we could be in for a long delay in terms of how long a recovery might take. If it’s only the mercury that falls directly on the lake,
