Dozens of Words for Snow, None for Pollution

[bloom]

...Despite living amid pristine ice and glacier-carved bedrock, people like Mamarut, Tukummeq, and Gedion are more vulnerable to pollution than anyone else on earth. Mercury concentrations in Qaanaaq mothers are the highest ever recorded, 12 times greater than the level that poses neurological risks to fetuses, according to U.S. government standards. A separate study has linked PCBs with slight effects on the intelligence of children in Qaanaaq. Although most of the village's people never leave their hunting grounds, the world travels to them, riding upon wintry winds.


THE ARCTIC has been transformed into the planet's chemical trash can, the final destination for toxic waste that originates thousands of miles away. Atmospheric and oceanic currents conspire to send industrial chemicals, pesticides, and power-plant emissions on a journey to the Far North. Many airborne chemicals tend to migrate to, and precipitate in, cold climates, where they then endure for decades, perhaps centuries, slow to break down in the frigid temperatures and low sunlight. The Arctic Ocean is a deep-freeze archive, holding the memories of the world's past and present mistakes. Its wildlife, too, are archives, as poisonous chemicals accumulate in the fat that Arctic animals need to survive. Polar bears denning in Norway and Russia near the North Pole carry some of the highest levels of toxic compounds ever found in living animals.

<snip>

The first evidence of alarming levels of toxic substances in the bodies of Arctic peoples came from the Canadian Inuit. In 1987, Dr. Eric Dewailly, an epidemiologist at Laval University in Quebec, was surveying contaminants in the breast milk of mothers near the industrialized, heavily polluted Gulf of St. Lawrence, when he met a midwife from Nunavik, the Inuit area of Arctic Quebec. (Across the Hudson Bay, the Inuit also have their own self-governing territory, Nunavut, or "our land.") She asked whether he wanted milk samples from Nunavik women. Dewailly reluctantly agreed, thinking they might be useful as "blanks," samples with nondetectable pollution levels.


A few months later, glass vials holding half a cup of milk from each of 24 Nunavik women arrived. Dewailly soon got a phone call from his lab director. Something was wrong with the Arctic milk. The chemical concentrations were off the charts. The peaks overloaded the lab's equipment, running off the page. The technician thought the samples must have been tainted in transit. <more>

http://www.mercuryexposure.org/index.php?article_id=383

http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2005/01/12_402.html

by Marla Cone

Marla Cone's book, Silent Snow: The Slow Poisoning of the Arctic, is now available at online stores. It hits regular bookstores in May.

[jeff30997]

1. Truly scary.

And I don't live really far from them.

[bloom]

2. It's weird to think - there is no "getting away"...

"Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, an organization that represents the Canadian Inuit, launched a project in the mid-1990s to gauge the success of authorities' efforts to inform nine Arctic communities about contaminants. The researchers found the communication so poorly handled that it caused extreme psychological distress among the Inuit. Fear, they concluded, is as dangerous a threat as the contaminants themselves.

"In every instance, there was a pervasive unease and anxiety about contaminants," the organization wrote in its 1995 report. "Whether or not individuals are exposed to…contaminants, the threat alone leads to anxiety, loss of familiar and staple food, loss of employment or activity, loss of confidence in the basic food source and the environment, and more generally a loss of control over one's destiny and well-being."