Arctic Indigenous Peoples Being Poisoned by Industry Thousands of Miles Away

If you think the pollution in New York, Los Angeles or Detroit is scary, consider this: Arctic indigenous peoples often have levels of persistent organic pollutants (POPs) in their blood and breast milk that are 10 times higher than the residents of major American cities.

Individuals living near industrial hubs expect to bioaccumulate a certain amount of toxic chemicals, but for aboriginal peoples living near the Arctic Circle, thousands of miles from the sources of these chemicals, the levels are both astonishing and disturbing.

The pollution is the result of what scientists call the “grasshopper effect”, in which transboundary pollution, dispersing at the point of origin and driven by wind, re-volatilizes (or comes down to earth and oceans) thousands of miles away in the Arctic.

“All indications are that levels of POPs are increasing very dramatically in the Arctic,” says Pamela K. Miller, the executive director of Alaska Community Action on Toxics.

“A warming planet, and certainly a warming Arctic, is only going to enhance the mobilization and transport of these chemicals into the Arctic.”

Because many chemical pollutants like POPs are volatile at higher temperatures, their production in developed nations near the equator allows them to vaporize and be transported by prevailing winds toward the cooler Arctic, where they condense on particulates or snowflakes or in raindrops, and fall to the earth. 

As global warming increases, chemicals volatize more readily into the atmosphere. Warmer surface temperatures on land and in the oceans alter prevailing winds blowing from the equator north in both hemispheres. This alteration in atmospheric circulation patterns, first documented in 2001, leads to even warmer air over the Arctic and a negative feedback loop that can only get worse as Earth’s temperature rises. As of June 1, the Arctic Ocean's sea-ice cover was again below the 1979-2000 average.

Due to consumer-driven excesses elsewhere, PBDEs are doubling in the Arctic every seven years, Marla Cone writes in Silent Snow. That’s likely true of perfluorinated chemicals as well, Miller says. She notes that DDT, though banned more than three decades ago, is still bioaccumulating in the Arctic and causing reproductive harm to birds like peregrine falcons.

In fact, perfluorinates have now been linked with infertility in another study that ACAT – a statewide organization aimed at achieving environmental health and justice – will likely use to drive home its message that global pollution is poisoning one of the last, pristine wildernesses and its people.

For example, the Canadian Inuit population was 55,700 in 2000. By 2006, it was 50,485, and the Inuit are considered one of the more stable Canadian First Nation tribes.

Other groups (First Nation Nunavut, Nunavik, Anishanaabe and Cree) are in similar or even more dramatic decline, their populations diminished by poverty and its side effects, climate change and displacement, and the persistence of chemical pollutants which in many cases exceed both national and international health standards for safe exposure. This latter category alone is responsible for many of the reproductive failures, gender imbalances, thyroid problems, immune system failures, behavioral abnormalities, diabetes, cancers and birth defects among the Arctic’s indigenous people.