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Here is how the three-part series by Dina Cappiello in the Times Union of Albany, N.Y. begins:

For more than four decades, the invisible menace of acid rain has been breaking apart the bonds that sustain life in the once-pristine lakes of the Adirondack park.

Already, 500 of the roughly 2,800 lakes scattered throughout the state's 6 million-acre park have flat-lined, showing little sign of animal or plant life. And unless conditions change—mainly by diminishing air pollution generated by power plants hundreds of miles south and west of the mountains—half of the Adirondack lakes will be dead 40 years from now.

"The acid rain problem is worse in the Adirondacks than in any other place in the country," said Charles Driscoll, a professor of environmental engineering at Syracuse University, who has studied acid rain throughout the Northwest since the 1970s.

And the outlook isn't bright.

"At current emission levels the recovery process will be very slow. There will be minimal improvement to no improvement in water quality," said Greg Lawrence, a research scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey.

But three decades after acid rain was first identified by scientists, New York state has actually cut funding to measure acid rain's destruction. The state Department of Environmental Conservation, charged with carrying out the policies of Gov. George Pataki—who proudly boasts of his record on the environment—lacks a coordinated strategy to cope with the crisis.

To be sure, New York has taken major strides to clean up the air in recent years—fighting in courts, in the state Legislature and in Congress to force polluting plants to reduce the pollutants they belch into the air. But even as the state is gearing up to take on polluting industries and the lawmakers who represent them, critics say its fight is hobbled: By spending so few state dollars to study lake water quality—$550,000 over the last three years—New York doesn't have the evidence it needs to win the political battles.

That wasn't always so. In the mid-1980s, the state and the utility industry joined to create the Adirondack Lakes Survey Corp., which analyzed the impact of acid rain on 1,469 Adirondack lakes. The definitive study was a wake up call for many who had believed the Adirondacks were immune from pollution's reach: It found that almost one-fourth of the lakes were critically acidified.

But the study was only a snapshot. Since then, the state has not funded a comprehensive lake study in the Adirondacks, and the DEC has cut both money and manpower for long-term water quality monitoring. The situation is made more dire by a reduction in federal funding.

"If it was up to the state Department of Environmental Conservation, we would not be involved in any monitoring work," said James Sutherland, a research scientist with the DEC's Division of Water, who is studying the Adirondack lakes with $1.4 million in aid from the federal government. "The miniscule amount of public funding available statewide for analysis would give anyone on the outside the impression that the agency has no interest in water quality monitoring in lakes and ponds."

But the DEC contends that the 52 lakes it has focused its efforts on since 1992 are enough to gather the information it needs on acid rain's impact on the Adirondacks, and the money and personnel it had in the mid-1980s are no longer needed to get the results.

"At one time, there were more bodies. We hired a lot of people to do the baseline (study)," said Carl Johnson, deputy commissioner of the DEC's Air and Waste Management Division. "But the study of 52 lakes is still the largest study of its kind in the country. Sampling more lakes is only going to tell us more of what we already know."

Scientists have unearthed a lot about acid rain's causes and effects since it was first described in a scientific journal in 1972. Over time, lakes fill with millions of tiny raindrops loaded with acid generated when air pollution and water mix in clouds. The small creatures that spend their life afloat in the water or submerged in the mud die first, unable to withstand the acidic conditions. The death spreads upwards to the predators of the lake—the fish.

"Anything that impacts the bottom of the food chain echoes to everything else," said Larry Eichler, a research scientist with RPE's Darin Fresh Water Institute, who has worked since 1992 on 30 Adirondack lakes as part of the federally funded Adirondack Effects Assessment Program.

But now scientists are seeing acid rain's spell taking over the soil and forest, where it has killed trees and stripped the soil of the limited calcium and other elements that naturally buffer acid's onslaught.

Only in the last eight years have scientists begun to piece together acid rain's myriad impacts on the environment, a game of catch-up that even has the state's own scientists disheartened.

"There was more state money involved directly in the program in the past," said Walt Kretser, director of the Adirondack Lakes Survey, which continues to monitor 52 lakes on the $500,000 that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and in-state power companies provided this year.

Environmentalists studying the data collected by Kretser and others say that while it is valuable, more data collected over time is desperately needed to chart policy changes and back up the state's push for a solution.

"The objective of the state should be to reverse the damage of acid rain. Without the research, we will not be in the position to ask for additional controls," said David Wooley, counsel to the Clean Air Task Force, a foundation-funded advocacy group that assists citizens in cleaning up power plant pollution.

For a while, policymakers hoped that the Clean Air Act amendments of 1990, which reined in the amount of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides being released into the air, would go a long way toward remedying the acid rain problem. That idea was shattered in March, when a report from the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, showed that despite reductions in the air pollution that forms acid rain, the lakes of the Adirondacks weren't responding.

Kretser's analysis of water chemistry in the 52 lakes, which was the foundation of the GAO report, found proof that acids—particularly the sulfuric acid and nitric acid from acid rain—were still getting into the water. While 92 percent of Adirondack lakes surveyed showed decreased levels of sulfates from sulfuric acid, the GAO report revealed that 48 percent had increased in nitrates—a component of nitric acid.

The reason is that over time the Adirondacks have become overloaded with nitrogen, a nutrient absorbed by plants. As more nitrogen is added to the forests and soil by acid rain, plants take up less of the nutrient and a greater percentage ends up in lakes.

Reps. John Sweeney, R-Clifton Park, and Sherwood Boehlert, R-New Hartford, and Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan are lead sponsors of legislation to require power plants to reduce nitrogen emissions to a level 50 percent lower than that mandated under the 1990 Clean Air Act.

Such cutbacks are needed to allow time for the forests, and then the lakes, to heal, according to Neil Woodworth, deputy director of the Adirondack Mountain Club.

"If we do clean up our act, the lakes should recover within a couple generations," he said.

The bill, which has been bottled up in both houses for the past two legislative sessions, is now stalled by a cost-benefit analysis that was completed by the EPA in March but has yet to be released by the Office of Management and Budget. The analysis is thought to bolster the bill's chances of passing this year.

While the legislation that could save Adirondack lakes is stalled in Congress, New York state has failed to marshal the evidence that might help push it through.

Outside of "in-kind" services—such as office space, the use of state helicopters to reach remote lakes, and chemical tests—actual dollars from the DEC are largely absent from the long-term water quality research that provided the foundation for the GAO report, although the agency did increase its support slightly in 1998. From 1990 through 1997 it provided $1.4 million dollars worth of services to the ALSC, and since 1998 it has contributed $550,000 to the study efforts. That's about 0.0001 percent of its budget each year.

And there are no plans to repeat the landmark study of 1,469 of Adirondack lakes, according to the DEC.

Absent that, scientists must extrapolate on the basis of limited data, from which the EPA has concluded, in a soon-to-be-published paper, that 41 percent of Adirondacks lakes are affected by acid rain to some degree.

The Adirondack Lakes Survey plans to release its own report in November on the 52 Adirondack lakes it has been studying. Much like the GAO document, sources say, the data will show that the waters of the Adirondacks aren't recovering from acid rain.

"The feeling here is that (this) long-term monitoring is sufficient," said DEC spokesman Jennifer Post.

But even the study of 52 could end as soon as next year, when the Public Service Commission decides the future of "systems benefits charge"—a fee that has funded a large portion of Kretset's program since the electric industry's deregulation in the 1990s. "If you lose the long-term database you lose everything. It's critical that this work continues in some way and be funded in some fashion," said John Holsapple, who started the Adirondack Lakes Survey along with Kretser in the mid-1980s and now works for the Environmental Energy Alliance of New York, an organization funded by electric companies.

Even as critics complain about reduced state funding, federal money for lake monitoring has also dried up since the early 1990s. The annual funding for the EPA program that studies lakes and streams throughout the Adirondacks and Appalachians has been cut by more than 62 percent since 1992. Federal financial constraints almost led to the closure of the acid rain monitoring station atop Whiteface Mountain—one of three locations in the country—but opposition from the Pataki administration induced the federal government to reverse the decision.

"The state needs to be aggressive," said Gene Likens, director of the Institute for Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, Dutchess County. "It's one thing to try and reduce emissions. But the bottom line is, what is the effect on lakes and streams and forests?"

There is some hope on the horizon, according to Kretser, who said that he has struggled year after year to keep the Adirondack Lakes Survey afloat.

Beginning in 2001, the DEC plans to move the survey into its Division of Air, which has a larger portion of the agency's $1.2 billion annual budget. Through more stable long-term monitoring, the agency believes, the state will not only be able to chart how changes in federal air legislation affect New York, but also measure the impact of its own policy changes. The federal Clean Lakes bill, which was drafted by Sweeney and would provide $250 million in funding for lake monitoring to the states, passed the House this year. It has yet to pass the Senate.

"We're committed to maintaining the program because we need long-term data to make policy decisions," said Johnson, a DEC deputy commissioner. "We have a staff looking into how to monitor the governor's initiatives."

Last October, Pataki announced an initiative to rein-in emissions from New York's 32 power plants. And in May, the governor signed acid rain legislation that fines in-state power plants for selling pollution credits—that is, the right to emit more pollution than the Clean Air Act would allow—to power plants that waft the pollution back onto the Adirondacks.

In the meantime, the federal government, lake associations, private foundations, universities, activists and independent scientists have taken up some of the slack—amid little coordination.

That disorganization, advocates worry, could provide ammunition for the out-of-state power industry when the time comes for the Clean Air Act to be reauthorized next year. Power plants in the Midwest, which the state blames for 80 percent of the pollution that results in acid rain in the Adirondacks, contend that not enough time has passed to adequately measure the effects of the Clean Air Act. The first phase of air emission reductions was made in 1995, and more power plants came on board only in 2000.

"It's too early to see much change. People say there's a need for further reductions, but there is no basis for that," said John McManus, manager of environmental strategy for Ohio based American Electric Power, which owns 16 power plants in the South and Midwest. "A long-term monitoring program is definitely in the interest of everyone on this issue."

DEC scientist Sutherland says he fields ongoing requests for analysis from people who live on the lakes and know looks can be deceiving: A lake rendered lifeless by acid rain can be a beautiful Caribbean blue.

"Unfortunately, acid rain has some aspects to it that can only be understood through science," said C.V. "Major" Bowes, who has lived on Big Moose Lake for half a century. But, he added, "It's hard to take it to Congress and prove it to them. The only hope is that acid rain is spreading all over the country. That might be the thing that will do it."