Silent Snow: The Slow Poisoning of the Arctic

Silent Snow: The Slow Poisoning of the Arctic by Maria Cone Grove Press, 2005; $24.00

Flying over the Arctic, where few signs of human habitation and even fewer belching factories break the vast expanses of rock, open water, and snowy ice, one would scarcely believe that this is an environmentally wounded landscape. Yet according to Maria Cone, an environmental journalist, the Inuit residents of Qaanaaq, a village on the northwestern coast of Greenland, have the highest levels of toxic contaminants of any population on Earth. In the 1990s, Cone writes, many Greenlanders carried such high loads of mercury and PCBs that "their bodies, in technical terms, could have been declared hazardous waste."

That the contaminants are chemicals seeping northward from the temperate, industrialized nations is no surprise. Yet, paradoxically, the pollution problem in the Arctic is not the sheer level of contaminants in the air and water. Smog in the air on Baffin Island is insignificant compared to the smog in Los Angeles; the Bering Strait is, by and large, far purer than Lake Erie or the Black Sea. No, what makes matters particularly difficult in the circumpolar Arctic--Siberia, Alaska, Northern Canada, Greenland, and Lapland--is that the traditional diet of the inhabitants places them at the very top of the food chain.

Toxic chemicals, carried by wind, runoff, and ocean currents, work their way into northern oceans, where they are taken up by the zooplankton that flourish there. These minute creatures are eaten by larger fish, and those by still larger fish, which in turn become lunch for polar bears, seals, walruses, and whales. At each link in the chain, the concentration of pollutants increases. By the time native peoples eat these mammals, persistent pollutants have become so concentrated that each bite is the equivalent of drinking from a toxic spill. Sea otters from the Aleutian Islands, for instance, carry twice the load of PCBs as similar creatures on the California coast, and tests have shown high levels of toxins in beluga whales, polar bears, seabirds, seals, and sharks, to name just a few.

Cone's accounts of hunting and fishing expeditions with various peoples of the far North lend sensitivity and authenticity to their plight. They are aware that restricting the intake of particularly polluted species may be part of the solution to their problem. But no one, either native or southlander, seriously believes that Inuit hunters should abandon blubber for the blandishments of Velveeta and Wonder Bread. The ancient hunt is too much a part of native life, binding families and communities together in a way that contemporary consumerism never could.

The traditional diet, moreover, rich in omega-3 fatty acids (the kind that aid cardiovascular health), protein, and vitamins, is ideal for the rigors of the climate. Non-local foods are expensive and, by and large, harmful to both individual and social health. Imported foodstuffs, in fact, high in sugars, saturated fats, and carbohydrates, have already begun to affect the rates of obesity, heart disease, and diabetes in the Arctic. And the increased reliance on a cash economy for food, shelter, and entertainment has brought with it a familiar litany of social problems: increased levels of depression, alcoholism, and crime.

Thus the peoples of the North find themselves on the horns of a classical dilemma. On the one hand, environmental toxins threaten the health of future generations. Mercury from whale meat has already had a measurable effect in lowering the IQs of schoolchildren in Denmark's Faroe Islands; ecotoxins may even be killing off polar bears, one step down the food chain. On the other hand, abandoning the northern lifestyle seems no less damaging to a society that has, until lately, succeeded so well.

Cone's title, not incidentally, harks back to Rachel Carson's landmark Silent Spring, first published in 1962. Four decades after Carson's call to action, Silent Snow reminds us once again of the delicate interdependence of people and nature. The plight of northern peoples is, ultimately, linked with the personal and political choices everyone makes, whatever they eat, and wherever they live.

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