The Arctic Messenger Gains a Voice - The Changing Arctic Environment: The Arctic Messenger - page 26

healthy state and a few more paragraphs to judge that it was the collective responsibility of
the eight governments of countries that surround the Arctic to do something about it. As a
first step, they proposed holding a consultative meeting in short order in Finland. Attached
totheirletterwasafour-pageworkingpaperthataddedalittle morefleshtotheirideas.For
example, the working paper explicitly noted that “effective protection of the Arctic region
requires development of intergovernmental cooperation, scientific research and monitoring
of the ecosystems of the Arctic region” - words that most probably reflected Finland's sat-
isfaction with the role of the EMEP in the CLRTAP protocols.
The paper also showed that Finland foresaw an intergovernmental process that would
lead to coordinated action to protect the Arctic environment, not just a statement of com-
mon objectives. The instrument to be used to implement such proposed actions could be a
declaration, a convention or some other form of multilateral arrangement.
At the time, I was inheriting responsibility for a fledgling Canadian environmental
monitoring programme in the Arctic from Garth. We wanted to measure the levels of
certain industrial and agricultural persistent organic pollutants (POPs), such as DDT (di-
chlorodiphenyltrichloroethane) and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), in Arctic air, water,
biota and people. We were perplexed because early results showed that some chemicals
were at much higher levels in the Arctic than in southern Canada, even though a specific
chemical may never have been used in the Arctic or in Canada. We suspected long-range
atmospheric transport from sources in mid-latitudes, but we had little data to evaluate our
hypothesis. A single scan of the letter from Finland was enough to set me dreaming of a
sparklingcircumpolar necklace ofpollutant monitoringstations. Inlessthanthe15minutes
provided by Garth, we were both in his office, drafting a supportive reply from Canada to
Finland.
It has become the norm to trace a succession of developments from Mr. Gorbachev's
speech. It is true that some interchange of ideas was crossing the Iron Curtain well before
1987, such as the setting up of the IASC, but there was nothing on the scale of intergovern-
mental commitment proposed by Mr. Gorbachev and carried forward under the leadership
of Finland three years later.