The Long and the Short of It - The Changing Arctic Environment: The Arctic Messenger - page 341

Persistent Organic Pollutants
Anticipation:
Itisunlikelythatthechronicenvironmentalandhumanhealtheffectsofpersistentorganic
pollutants (POPs) were ever anticipated.
Perception:
Awareness began in the 1950s, when biologists started to report problems in wildlife (es-
peciallybirds)thatseemedtobelinkedtotheuseofpesticides.Withthepublicationofher
famous topic Silent Spring in 1962, Rachel Carson awakened the general public overnight
to the impact that certain pesticides could have in the environment. We have already seen
that most early pesticides were members of the category of substances we now call POPs.
By the late 1960s, David Peakall measured the DDT metabolite DDE in peregrine fal-
con eggs from Alaska and showed a clear inverse relationship between DDE content and
eggshell thickness. He was able to demonstrate this relationship back to the mid-1940s in
England and California.
Reaction:
By 1970, countries began to take national regulatory actions against DDT, such as prohib-
iting its use in agriculture. However, the regulatory actions were piecemeal and directed
against individual substances. It was not until the mid- to late 1980s that it was realized
that most of these substances share properties that can cause them to be transported in
the environment far from their source regions. Here, they can aggressively biomagnify up
the food chain to top predators and people. Once the perception of POPs as a long-range
transboundary issue was brought to the attention of governments in 1989, it was not until
1998and2001,respectively,thattheCLRTAPPOPsprotocolandtheStockholmConven-
tion were signed. It was a further three years before the Stockholm Convention entered
into force. Ramon Guardans published a short paper in Atmospheric Pollution Research
in 2012 in which he estimated that it has historically taken about 20-30 years from the