National Parks and Conservation Policy

The article reports that the Trump‑controlled Environmental Protection Agency has begun approving weaker state air‑pollution plans for national parks and wilderness areas, reversing earlier positions under the Biden administration and potentially undermining the federal regional haze rule. It details how EPA initially told West Virginia in early 2025 that its plan failed to require technology reviews at a dozen coal plants, then six months later approved essentially the same plan after adopting a new policy that accepts state plans if visibility benchmarks are projected to be met, even without those evaluations. Conservation groups including the National Parks Conservation Association, Sierra Club and Earthjustice argue this state‑by‑state approach will let coal and other polluting facilities keep operating without additional controls, threatening decades of gains in visibility and sulfur and smog reductions in more than 150 protected areas nationwide. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has also moved to roll back the underlying regional haze regulation as part of a broader effort to ease 31 environmental rules for fossil‑fuel producers, while environmental groups have sued over the West Virginia approval, setting up a court test of the agency’s new, more lenient standard. The fight has implications for public health, tourism economies around national parks, and the future direction of federal clean‑air enforcement under the Clean Air Act.