Surprises in Environmental History: Tracking Arctic Contaminants

Walrus -- cute but contaminated (NOAA -- public domain)

I've been spending time lately revising a paper on the environmental history of contaminants in the Arctic.  My goal has been to trace the flows of toxic substances, and of knowledge about them, into, around, and out of the Arctic.  It's an experiment in writing the environmental history of a globalized Arctic: telling the story of a region that is highly distinctive, but is also closely connected to the rest of the planet.

Arctic contaminants have a long history.  In the 1950s pilots observed a brown smog-like haze, and secret programs tracked radioactive fallout.  After Silent Spring scientists found DDT and other chemicals in birds and seals, and by the late 1970s they were tracking a variety of elements blowing northwards from industrial centers.  (This was the same era as the discovery of acid rain � the notion of pollutants being able to travel long distances was in the air, excuse the pun.)

By the 1980s attention had shifted to persistent organic pollutants (POPs) � everything from pesticides to PCBs � that are able to travel long distances, last forever, and accumulate in fatty tissues.  And then came the discovery that these substances are present in the food of the Inuit, especially marine mammals (seals and walruses), and in their own bodies.  This discovery received a great deal of attention, provoking research (including the Northern Contaminants Program � a nearly 20 year effort), and, eventually, the Stockholm Convention restricting POPs.  Sheila Watt-Cloutier, Chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference, helped push this agreement forward by forcefully expressing her people's dismay:

"Imagine the shock, confusion, and rage that we initially felt when evidence of high levels of persistent organic pollutants was discovered in our cord blood and nursing milk in the mid-1980s� We were being poisoned � not of our doing but from afar." 

For me, one intriguing aspect of this story has been the surprise often expressed by those involved.  Pilots in the 1950s, biologists and toxicologists in the late 1960s and early 1970s, atmospheric scientists in the mid-1970s, health scientists in the 1980s: all were surprised to find substances where they did not "belong" -- in the atmosphere, in ecosystems, or in human bodies.  These surprises puzzled scientists: they wondered, for example, why it took so long to connect the presence of contaminants in Arctic animals to the risk they may pose to Inuit who eat them.

Surprises like these, I've learned, are useful tools for the history of science and environmental history.  They are clues to unconscious and unexpressed assumptions about nature.  As such, they are hints of what Michelle Murphy has called "regimes of perceptibility": the combinations of scientific and social phenomena that determine which hazards will be visible, and which will remain invisible.  They also suggest the uneven distribution of knowledge within scientific communities, and in the wider world: demonstrating how just because some people know something does not imply that everyone does.  In this case, a big barrier to understanding has been the persistent assumption that the Arctic is remote enough to remain relatively pristine.  Contaminants often contradicted expectations that were based on this assumption.  In doing so, they forced scientists, governments, and Aboriginal peoples to reconsider how they understand the Arctic environment and its relations to the rest of the world.