Persistent Organic Pollutants and Heavy Metals (Including Mercury) - The Changing Arctic Environment: The Arctic Messenger - page 121

8 Persistent Organic Pollutants and Heavy Metals (Including Mercury)
And another spirit is at hand,
conceived in the restless city,
growing from the rubbish yards of houses and from smoking factories,
a spirit swelling with confidence,
multi-coloured all-embracing
garish quick-nosed ever pacing.
Dáithí Ó hÓgáin, “Putting Out the Hag“ from Footsteps From Another World
This chapter tells a tragic story caused by humankind's hubris, “swelling with confidence”
in its attitude towards its environment. Here, the Arctic Messenger will tell us how a class
of chemicals called persistent organic pollutants (POPs) and some metals (especially mer-
cury) have accumulated through the Arctic ecosystem to top predators and to indigenous
peoples. At the heart of the story is the conspiracy of a number of independent properties
of these substances that target the Arctic ecosystem. What makes the tragedy so raw is that
the potential for this polar conspiracy could have been recognized long before the evidence
was stumbled on in the Arctic. As we will see, even more disturbing is the evidence that
for POPs, world governments have still only understood and acted on a small portion of the
situation described by the Arctic Messenger.
Before we begin, I have a warning. The simplest approach to this chapter would be to
describe what we know today about POPs and heavy metals in the Arctic and global envir-
onments and to end with a review of the present state of international actions to deal with
them. This would have been easy for the reader and for me. But it would have lost the his-
torical perspective of how we came to understand the environmental and human health char-
acteristics of these chemicals over the last 30 years. Therefore, I want the story to be told
as it really happened, with science and policy evolving together. When told in this way, the
Arctic Messenger's story reveals lessons on the effectiveness of interaction between science
and national and international policy. It is most effective when organisational measures are
set up to force interaction between the science and policy camps and when pathways exist