Walking Gichigami - Governing Transboundary Waters: Canada, the United States, and Indigenous Communities - page 151

stopped releasing these pollutants into the environment today, we would still be
dealing with the pollutants for generations to come.
Dr. Judith Perlinger, a professor of environmental engineering who has spent
her career studying these pollutants, defines the three distinct characteristics of
ASEPs - semivolatility and re-emissions, resistance to rapid degradation, and a
tendency to accumulate in cold water - that cause unintended, negative conse-
quences for human and ecosystem health, and are separated both in time and space
(Perlinger et al. , 2014). When you see the elevated levels of these pollutants in
organisms feeding in remote waters not subject to direct emissions - such as the
trout and sturgeon in the Great Lakes (Perlinger, 2005; Perlinger et al. , 2005) and
the whales and seals in the northern waters (AMAP, 2011; El-Hayek, 2007)- the
global nature of this issue truly becomes apparent (Wania et al. , 1998). For example,
as Henrik Selin reports in his book, Global governance of hazardous chemicals , an average
9-year-old male beluga whale found in the St. Lawrence estuary has enough PCBs
to be treated as hazardous waste under Canadian legislation (Selin, 2010). These
PCBs are not released near the St. Lawrence estuary. Rather, they “grasshopped”
there, accumulating in the cold waters, and intensifying as they progress through
the food chain (Perlinger et al. , 2014).
Although thousands of chemicals hold similar characteristics - and many more
are developed every year - there is a list of what the Stockholm Convention refers
to as “the dirty dozen” (see Table 8.1). Some gains have been made in banning
these chemicals, such as DDT and aldrin, but new chemicals are being developed
yearly, many with similar damaging properties.
Equally troubling is the increasing amount of mercury (Hg) being released into
the environment. Although naturally occurring, mercury is being released in
processes and concentrations that are causing severe damage to both humans and
ecosystems. The cycle of mercury deposition is very complex. It is released into
the atmosphere either naturally through release of soils or sediments or through
anthropogenic (human-induced) causes such as fossil-fuel burning - mostly coal -
and incineration of municipal wastes (Nater and Gribal, 1992). It also transforms
into multiple mediums (such as methyl-mercury), some forms of which are toxic
and some are inert. Modeling studies indicate that present-day secondary emissions
of mercury exceed those from pre-industrial times by a factor of two to four (Selin
et al. , 2008; Obrist, 2012).
A spike in the release of mercury into the environment is largely linked to the
recent gold rush in Central and South America. The increased price of gold in the
global markets has contributed to a substantial increase in small-scale gold-mining
operations in the Peruvian Amazon. In these operations, a common practice to
separate the gold from the silt is to use mercury - a substance that is both cheap
and readily available. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) estim-
ates that small-scale miners use approximately 1,350 tons of mercury each year -
making it the single largest contributor of mercury pollution worldwide. The release
of mercury has regional and global environmental and health concerns. Through
a process of biomagnification, the fish found in regional markets near the site of
gold extraction exceed the World Health Organization's standards seven-fold.