America must reclaim the mantle of environmental leadershipAn alarm bell of environmental degradation ought to bring nations together. The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that coal-burning plants in China are sending mercury as far away as the Great Lakes.

Chinese power plants are equipped to scrub soot out of emissions, but they do not have “sophisticated and costly antipollution equipment” that would stop “nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide and a gaseous form of mercury.”

Terming it a “transcontinental conveyor belt of bad air,” the WSJ reported that tracking by satellites and other means has awakened scientists to global “plumes of soot, ozone, sulfates and mercury.” A Harvard scientist “traced a plume of dirty air from Asia to a point over New England, where samples revealed that chemicals in it had come from China.”

Are we comfortable with mercury build-up in our water supplies and our food chain? Like it or not, that is what this new research reveals.

There is a hardy environmental movement in China, linked to the rest of the world by the Internet. Within China, however, it is hampered by tight control of information and by that nation’s totalitarian government. We cannot expect China’s despotic rulers to accept the need for more expensive and sophisticated air scrubbers on coal plants.

Like global warming, the Chinese export of mercury emissions is a perfect example of why America must become an environmental leader, not a hold-out as it was at last week’s international gathering in Buenos Aires.

Because of Rachel Carson, America has been a leader. Carson raised the consciousness of a generation with her 1962 book Silent Spring. It created the modern environmental movement as well as the Environmental Protection Agency.

Forty years later, America is in the midst of a perverse era of willful ignorance in which science is disregarded and the environment is being auctioned to the highest campaign contributor.

Like the soaring federal deficit, which our nation’s leaders are bequeathing to our grandchildren, this legacy of poisons in our air and water will haunt generations to come.

Sooner or later, America must reclaim the mantle of global leadership on the environment.