The Inuit's Struggle with Dioxins and Other Organic Pollutants

To environmental toxicologists, the Arctic by the 1990s was becoming known as the final destination for a number of manufactured poisons, including, most notably, dioxins and polyvinyl biphenyls (PCBs), which accumulate in the body fat of large aquatic and land mammals (including human beings), sometimes reaching levels that imperil their survival. Thus the Arctic, which seems so clean on the surface, has become one of the most contaminated places on Earth—a place where Inuit mothers think twice before breast-feeding their babies because high levels of dioxins and other industrial chemicals are being detected in their breast milk and where a traditional diet of "country food" has become dangerous to the Inuit's health. The toxicological due bills for modern industry at the lower latitudes are being left on the Inuit's table in Nunavut. Native people whose diets consist largely of sea animals (whales, polar bears, fish, and seals) have been consuming a concentrated, toxic chemical cocktail.

Most of the chemicals that now afflict the Inuit are synthetic compounds of chlorine, and some of them are incredibly toxic. For example, one millionth of a gram of dioxin will kill a guinea pig. ¹ To a tourist with no interest in environmental toxicology, the Inuit's Arctic homeland may seem as pristine as ever during its long, snow-swept winters. Many Inuit still guide dogsleds onto the packed ice surrounding their Arctic-island homelands to hunt polar bears and seals. Such a scene may seem pristine, until one realizes that the polar bears' and seals' body fats are laced with dioxins and PCBs.

"As we put our babies to our breasts we are feeding them a noxious, toxic cocktail," said Sheila Watt-Cloutier, a grandmother who also serves as president of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference ICC. "When women have to think twice about breast-feeding their babies, surely that must be a wake-up call to the world." ²

Watt-Cloutier was raised in an Inuit community in remote northern Quebec. Unknown to her at the time, toxic chemicals were being absorbed by her body and those of other Inuit in the Arctic. As an adult Watt-Cloutier ranged between her home in Iqaluit (pronounced "Eehalooeet," capital of the new semisovereign Nunavut Territory) to Montreal, New York City, and other southern points, doing her best to alert the world to toxic poisoning and other perils faced by her people. The ICC represents the interests of roughly 140,000 Inuit living around the North Pole from Nunavut (which means "our home" in the Inuktitut language) to Alaska and Russia. Nunavut itself, a territory four times the size of France, has a population of roughly 25,000, 85 percent of whom are Inuit. Some elders and hunters in Iqaluit have reported physical abnormalities afflicting the seals they catch, including some seals without hair "and seals and walruses with burn-like holes in their skin[s]." ³

Persistent organic pollutants (POPs) have been linked to cancer, birth defects, and other neurological, reproductive, and immune system damage in people and animals. At high levels, these chemicals also damage the central nervous system. Many of them also act as endocrine disrupters, causing deformities in sex organs as well as long-term dysfunction of reproductive systems. POPs also can interfere with the function of the brain and endocrine system by penetrating the placental barrier and scrambling the instructions of naturally produced chemical messengers. The latter tell a fetus how to develop in the womb and postnatally through puberty; should interference occur, immune, nervous, and reproductive systems may not develop as programmed by the genes inherited by the embryo.

Pesticide residues in the Arctic today may include some pesticides used decades ago in the southern United States. The Arctic's cold climate slows the natural decomposition of these toxins, so they persist in the Arctic environment longer than at lower latitudes. The...