Bush”s Earth Day talk, trail work rained out

TOWNSEND, Tenn. – A severe thunderstorm in the Great Smoky Mountains thwarted President Bush’s plan on Friday to mark Earth Day by participating in a trail restoration project and delivering a speech on the environment.

Instead, Bush made brief remarks in an almost empty airport hangar in nearby Knoxville.

Bush had hoped to become the first sitting president to visit the Great Smoky Mountains National Park since it was dedicated by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940. But the storm did not relent, dashing Bush’s hope of paying his 22nd visit to a national park. No sitting president has made that many visits to national parks, the White House said.

Friday’s rain also dampened the heated rhetoric that has become an annual rite on Earth Day, with the Bush administration and environmental groups trading charges over the president’s record on protecting natural resources.

The Great Smoky Mountains National Park is the nation’s busiest, with more than 9 million annual visitors. But it is also polluted by emissions from power plants, pulp and paper mills, chemical factories and cement facilities in the mid-Atlantic region, which sometimes cut visibility significantly.

James Connaughton, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, acknowledged the park’s “long-standing” air pollution but said the air quality “has been improving, or at least has been remaining stable.”

In his 10-minute remarks, Bush said Earth Day was a good occasion to “recommit ourselves to being good stewards of our land. We didn’t create this Earth, but we have an obligation to protect it.”

He maintained that his so-called clear skies initiative would cut air pollution from coal-fired plants by 70 percent.

The president’s initiative was rejected by a Senate committee earlier this year, with critics saying it would grant polluters too much time to meet new emissions standards and do too little to address global warming.

The Environmental Protection Agency later enacted a broad rule aimed at tightening air quality standards. Bush has been criticized for allowing a maintenance backlog to persist at the national parks. The president said, however, that he has proposed $4.9 billion to end the maintenance backlog. “We’ll meet that initiative when Congress meets my budget request this year,” he said.