The Arctic Paradox: Our Unintentional Lab Rats
Far away in the frozen North, we have turned the Arctic into a laboratory where people and animals are exposed to the highest chemical concentrations on Earth. And, like the fly in the pickup truck, we are all watching to see if they can survive.
I was sitting in a pickup truck in California’s Imperial Valley with the windows rolled up as tightly as possible. A crop-duster was flying low over a row of vegetables, unleashing a trail of insecticide. It was the spring of 1997 and I was researching a story about efforts by Native American tribes to outlaw aerial spraying on their reservations. I told myself that, if I happened to be exposed to a single, minute dose of a pesticide, it wasn’t going to do any harm. But at that moment, sitting alone in the truck, I was having second thoughts.
After all, I was five months pregnant. I knew that the fetus I was carrying was extremely vulnerable to harm from pesticides and other toxic chemicals. I noticed a fly buzzing against the windshield inside the truck. I decided that, if the fly suddenly died, I would start the ignition and take off. I knew that was naïve; I certainly was aware that pesticides could inflict all kinds of subtle damage. But watching that fly survive calmed me. It became my “canary in the coal mine”—a symbol of survival amidst the invisible clouds of chemicals that surround us.
There are other symbols, too. Far away in the frozen North, we have turned the Arctic into a laboratory where people and animals are exposed to the highest chemical concentrations on Earth. And, like the fly in the pickup truck, we are all watching to see if they can survive.
While looking for the most contaminated people on Earth, I thought I would find them near the Great Lakes or along the Baltic—some industrialized place. But that place turned out to be Nunavik, a remote region of the Far North, where people live the most traditional lifestyle on Earth, relying solely on the bounty of the ocean, eating the same foods their ancestors have eaten for thousands of years.
The Inuit have never used DDT, PCBs or other modern chemicals. In most cases, they’ve never even heard of them. Yet they carry extraordinary loads in their bodies simply because they eat a diet of marine mammals.
How has this happened?
There are no pesticides or coal-burning power plants in the Arctic but, because of prevailing winds and ocean currents, the pollution generated in the planet’s mid-latitudes inevitably migrates north.
When chemicals are spilled in urban centers, sprayed on farm fields, or synthesized in factories, they become hitchhikers embarking on a global voyage. Carried by winds, waves, and rivers, they move drop by drop, migrating from cities in the U.S., Europe, and Russia into the bodies of Arctic animals and people a world away.
Chemicals such as PCBs condense in the winter cold and evaporate come spring. Always looking for a cold place to settle, they hop around the world, always headed north, where the Arctic becomes their final resting place. When the snow and ice melts in springtime, the chemicals are released into the ecosystem—right at the most vulnerable time for Arctic wildlife.
The contaminants move up the oceanic food chain (which is actually a vast web, not a chain) from algae or plankton to crustaceans, to fish, to seals and—at the top of the food web—polar bears and people. Arctic people are especially vulnerable because of their place at the very top of the natural world’s dietary hierarchy. They eat 194 different species of wild animals. On a daily basis, they consume the meat or blubber of fish-eating whales, seals, and walrus.
The Inuit in remote parts of Greenland and Canada carry more industrial contaminants in their bodies than anyone else on Earth. Even before testing began in the 1980s, some Inuit women are now believed to have had such high levels of chemicals in their bodies that their breast milk technically could have been declared “hazardous waste.”
About 200 toxic pesticides and industrial compounds have been detected in the bodies of the Arctic’s Indigenous people and animals, including all of the long-lasting “Dirty Dozen” organic pollutants—PCBs, DDT, mirex, dieldrin, and chlordane. They are joined by brominated flameretardants and heavy metals like mercury, a potent neurotoxin released by coal-burning power plants.
On thin ice in the North
I arrived in the Arctic village of Qaanaaq loaded with expensive fleece and down jackets and a pair of store-bought Canadian boots that were supposed to keep you warm in temperatures 50 below zero. When I looked around, all the locals were wearing hand-made sealskin boots and jackets— thin, comfortable, warm and waterproof. No factory-engineered fleece compares with the warmth of a sealskin parka or bearskin pants. And most importantly, no imported food nourishes their bodies like the flesh they slice from the flanks of a whale or seal.
As we traveled 35 miles out from this village on the northern end of Greenland, huge icebergs jutted from the frozen sea, dwarfing us. We bumped and rumbled over the ice on a wood sledge, drawn by a team of 15 dogs, the ice so jagged it cut into their paws, leaving a bloody trail. We were headed to a fjord that led to the Arctic Ocean. It was spring and that meant it was narwhal season. I ate seal and whale and it helped me survive. Arctic people say it warms you from within, like a lantern, and I found that to be true. Hunting is their history, their art, their storytelling, their religion, everything. Without it, they would vanish. It’s not just food on a plate: it’s a way of life.
The Arctic and its inhabitants— people, polar bears, Arctic foxes, seabirds—all seem incredibly robust and invincible but they are, in fact, fragile. They are victims of what I have come to call the “Arctic Paradox.” What was once the most pristine region on the planet has now become a deep-freeze archive that stores memories of the industrial world’s past and present pollution. Arctic residents are the world’s unintentional lab rats. Perhaps we will never know what damage the world has inflicted on them, and ourselves as well.
There is no happy ending for the people of the North—only a lot of uncertainty about their health and their future fate. But one thing is certain: Frozen in time, slow to heal, the Arctic will be haunted by its toxic legacy for countless generations to come.
Cone is author of Silent Snow: The Slow Poisoning of the Arctic, published by Grove/Atlantic
