Silent Snow: The Slow Poisoning of the Arctic

"Think about the environmental issues facing the Arctic, and one thinks about warming, not the unseen accretion of pollution in its seemingly pristine environs and its dynamic food chain. As one learns in Dumping in Dixie , industrial pollution doesn’t stay put. Human activity moves it from place to place. But depending on pollutants’ molecular structure, so can wind, water and weather patterns. Heavy metals like mercury and persistent organic pollutants, or POPs, as this class of pollutants is called, can also concentrate and move up the food chain. Silent Snow describes the invisible build-up of industrial pollution, in the circumpolar North. It explores the history and science of how we came to understand this, and to realise impossible-to-see and harder-to-sense pollution was concentrating far from factories and heavy industry. Marla Cone, a journalist, argues this may be the greatest environmental injustice on Earth. Cone makes the case for how this influx of pollution infringes on human rights and on the sovereignty of indigenous communities for whom the Arctic has been home for generations. It shows how a global environmental problem can be highly localised and uneven in its consequences. But importantly, Silent Snow is also a story of resilience, and of the leadership of indigenous communities to press these issues at the national and international level. The extraordinary efforts of, for example, The Inuit Circumpolar Council inspired the United Nations Stockholm Convention on POPs , which today identifies and moves out of production the most toxic, persistent and bioaccumualtive classes of pollutants. We all ought to know this story, since everyone of us, in one way or another and likely without realising it, has benefited from these protections. But who among us knows this history or its significance to our collective future? For a more first-person account, I’d also recommend Sheila Watt-Cloutier’s The Right to be Cold . Watt-Cloutier served on the Inuit Circumpolar Council, and was instrumental in moving the world toward the POPs Treaty, a role for which (in part) she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize."