American Notes Water Cooperation,

To the uninitiated, the plan might have seemed like innocence itself: the Environmental Protection Agency, pressing ahead its nationwide survey of the effects of acid rain, wanted to dispatch helicopters to fetch water samples from some 400 lakes in wilderness areas of nine Western states. Yet when the proposal reached the U.S. Forest Service, it was as though someone had advocated lakeside shopping centers. No way, EPA, growled the official guardian of the wilderness.

The Forest Service stood sternly on the Wilderness Act of 1964, which prohibits mechanized vehicles in protected lands except in emergencies. Never mind that the helicopter sampling would require just 20 min., or that the airborne method would guarantee faster analysis. If the EPA needed some samples, the Forest Service insisted, they could be obtained on foot or horseback. There the matter simmered for about three months until a compromise seeped forth last week. The upshot: this fall the EPA will use copters to reach 50 remote wilderness lakes, while the Forest Service will collect samples by foot from all of them. If samples collected the old-fashioned way prove inaccurate, the two agencies will renegotiate. Says EPA Administrator Bernard Goldstein: "We were just seeking an appropriate balance between two competing concerns -- both of them valid."