Walking Gichigami - Governing Transboundary Waters: Canada, the United States, and Indigenous Communities - page 150

Figure 8.2 Schematic of global atmospheric transport of ASEPs.
Source: Schematic prepared by Tanvir Khan (Michigan Tech) reprinted and adapted from Wania and
Mackay (1996). Copyright (1996) American Chemical Society.
water systems of Lake Superior and are impacting the health of those that rely on
its bounty for sustenance (Visser, 2007). Acclaimed environmental historian, Dr.
Nancy Langston, also describes the “body burden” of these toxins through her
eye-opening - and chilling - book Toxic bodies (Langston, 2010a).
It is now known that the waters of what was once considered to be one of the
most pristine bodies of water on earth are, in fact, not immune from the impacts
of global pollution. In a complicated interchange between land, air, and water,
pollutants known as “atmosphere-surface exchangeable pollutants”, or ASEPs, are
released in one site and end up great distances from the original release site (Perlinger
et al. , 2014). Northern latitudes and higher elevations are particularly vulnerable
to the accumulation of these pollutants, through processes known as the “grass-
hopper effect” (see Figure 8.2). Complicating matters, the pollutants tend to con-
centrate (and amplify) in cold water systems, making the consumption of cold-water
fish particularly risky. Lastly, the pollutants stick around for a long time. Depending
on the chemical, the pollutant can take hundreds, if not thousands, of years to
break down. Known as legacy chemicals, or persistent organic pollutants (POPs),
they are caught in a vicious cycle of atmospheric-hydrologic and sediment exchange
(Perlinger, 2005; Lohmann et al. , 2007). So even if everyone across the globe