Environment: Acid from the Skies

Corrosive rain has become an insidious menace

Just a little breeze with some smoke in its eye,

What have they done to the rain ? —Malvina Reynolds

Already it has killed off the fish in about a hundred lakes in New York's Adirondack wilderness. It has pelted the slopes of the Rockies, and has already affected Scandinavia and much of industrialized Western Europe and Japan. It is a newly recognized and increasingly harmful kind of pollution, invisible and insidious: acid rain, a corrosive precipitation that actually consists of weak solutions of sulfuric and nitric acids.

Last November 35 nations, including the U.S., gathered in Geneva...