Editorial: Neighborly effort on pollution

Thursday, Oct. 5, 2000 | 10:19 a.m.

A unique partnership among federal environmental protection regulators and Indian tribes to monitor pollution is heartening. As the Sun's Mary Manning reported a week ago, Indian tribal leaders, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency officials and other technical professionals opened an air quality training center in Las Vegas that will teach 400 tribes how to sample air pollution.

As we all know, air pollution knows no boundaries. The emissions from a plant that uses coal to generate power in one state can drift into another. Yet with federal government oversight, regulators can order plants in one state to restrict their emissions so they don't harm the health of their neighbors.

A thorny problem results, though, when Indian tribes are thrown into the mix on how to deal with pollution. After all, tribal lands are sovereign, not subject to authority by federal environmental protection laws or regulations. Of additional concern is that unlike the rest of the country, which has been strictly monitoring air pollution for more than two decades now, little air pollution monitoring has occurred on Indian tribal lands.

And as Manning noted in her story, while most reservation lands are thought of as rural areas, even their lands, which were once considered pristine, have been subject to air pollution. For instance, while the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma is more than 50 miles away from Tulsa, subsequent monitoring detected ozone had drifted to Cherokee lands from the metropolitan area.

Providing tribes with pollution training is an important step, finally giving them an opportunity to know whether their air is being fouled. Absent such knowledge, there would be no way to determine whether action should be taken to ensure their health and safety from air pollution.