This column originally appeared in the July 8, 2007 issue of the Poughkeepsie Journal.

Monitoring is a part of everyday life— we monitor our blood pressure, the stock market, the weather, and baseball statistics. Though we don't often think about it, we rely on environmental monitoring to assess the health of our natural resources and to determine if environmental regulations are working as intended. Take, for instance, the monitoring programs that measure how acid rain impacts streams and lakes.

Acid rain is a human-made problem; its occurrence is directly linked to fossil fuel combustion. When burned, fossil fuels release the pollutant gases sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide. Coal burning power plants are responsible for most of the sulfur dioxide emissions, while nitrogen oxides are emitted by both electric utilities and motor vehicles. When these pollutants enter forests, streams, and lakes, they can have a suite of negative impacts, from the death of aquatic plants and animals to reductions in forest health and productivity.

In 1990, in an effort to curb sulfur dioxide emissions, former president George H.W. Bush enacted a series of amendments to the Clean Air Act. As a result of these amendments, there has been a substantial reduction in the amount of acid rain in the Northeast.

Regionally, streams and lakes have shown decreases in acidity, although not as much as we might have hoped, and certainly not enough to restore them to their pre-acid rain conditions. Nonetheless, there has been real progress. We are able to track this progress because national environmental monitoring programs have been measuring pollution in air, rain, streams, and lakes for over 25 years.

Unfortunately, given their low-profile, monitoring programs are easy targets for bureaucrats struggling to cope with reduced budgets, or for politicians who may not want to know the answers that these data provide. Such a situation is unfolding right now.

The federal budget being proposed by the current Bush Administration threatens to undercut our nation's ability to monitor acid rain. Items on the chopping block include the complete elimination of monitoring programs that track the health of northeastern streams and lakes. Air quality monitoring programs will also suffer a 25% reduction. Losing these programs would be a tragedy; they provide a cornerstone for assessing whether or not our region's freshwater resources are improving or deteriorating.

By cutting these critical monitoring programs, the government will save less than $2 million dollars annually. This may sound like a lot of money, but it is miniscule in the context of the entire federal budget. From an economic standpoint, the $2 million expenditure on monitoring is a bargain.

Consider this— the electric power industry spends $3 billion per year to comply with acid rain legislation, and the monitoring provides our only means of determining whether this huge expense is worthwhile. As an analogy, imagine your doctor prescribed expensive drugs and a rigorous diet to lower your cholesterol, and then refused to monitor you to see if the treatment was working. A small savings would result in a large risk.

Monitoring programs are quiet efforts in good science. While they seldom make headlines, without these programs our ability to address environmental problems would be severely compromised. In addition to air and water quality, there are programs that track trends in climate, forest productivity, atmospheric carbon, and many other variables. This information provides a foundation for creating sound resource-management policies.

Concerned citizens need to recognize that, because ecosystems change slowly, long-term data are needed to observe trends, identify problems, and assess policies. The resources that we depend on, and often take for granted, are at stake.

Dr. Gary M. Lovett is an ecosystem ecologist at the Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, NY.