Excerpt from Silent Snow by Marla Cone, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

A few decades ago, the solution to pollution was dilution—scientists thought that compounds dumped into the vast waters of the oceans would be out of the way and rendered harmless. What they didn't understand was the underlying biology of the sea—that chemicals have a far greater potential to accumulate in ocean life than in land-­dwelling creatures. Author and biologist Rachel Carson, in her 1962 classic Silent Spring, warned of the "sinister" nature of chemicals that are passed from one organism to another. She knew that DDT sprayed on alfalfa wound up in the livestock that ate it, and ultimately in the people who ate the livestock. But ecosystems on land are simple—a cow eats grass, people eat the cow. In contrast, the Arctic Ocean has a long and complex food web, with so many layers that toxic compounds build up to extraordinarily high concentrations.

Every human being, no matter where on Earth, contains traces of these toxic compounds because of the chemicals' ability to persist in the environment and magnify in the foods everyone eats, particularly seafood. But Arctic people are especially vulnerable because of their place at the very top of the natural world's dietary hierarchy. They eat 194 different species of wild animals, most of them inhabiting the sea. Often on a daily basis, they consume the meat or blubber (muktuk, mattak, or maktak in Arctic languages) of fish-eating whales, seals, and walrus four or five links up marine food chains. In contrast, many urban dwellers have lifestyles that distance them from their polluted environment. Most have abandoned a hunting culture for agriculture, eating much lower on the food web with a diet of mostly land-raised vegetables, grains, beef, and poultry that contain less contaminants.

PCBs aren't the only hitchhikers determined to settle in the Arctic. Like PCBs, the chlorinated pesticide DDT was first synthesized in the 1800s, although it wasn't used as an insecticide until the 1940s, after Swiss scientist Paul Hermann Müller noticed its ability to kill pests. Müller's discovery was considered so miraculous that he later won a Nobel Prize for medicine. But DDT began building up in the environment worldwide, wiping out birds and other creatures. By the early 1970s, its use was banned in North America and Europe. Still used in some countries to fight malaria and stockpiled in others, it is still spreading globally, reaching the Arctic by the same atmospheric and oceanic pathways as PCBs.

Today, about two hundred toxic pesticides and industrial compounds have been detected in the bodies of the Arctic's indigenous people and animals, including all twelve of the "Dirty Dozen," the so-called "legacy" organic pollutants such as PCBs, DDT, mirex, dieldrin, and chlordane that are capable of inflicting the most ecological damage. They are joined by mercury, a potent neurotoxin released by coal-burning power plants and chemical factories. Mercury is on the rise in many animals of the Arctic, and so are a variety of new contaminants such as brominated flame retardants, widely applied to plastics and foam, and perfluorinated acids, formerly used in Scotchgard and still used in making Teflon. Unlike PCBs, DDT and brominated flame retardants, which accumulate in fat, mercury and perfluorinated chemicals build up in protein-based tissues such as the liver.

Because these synthetic marvels can survive virtually anything they encounter on their global voyages, they are gradually building up in the remote reaches of the far North to levels that jeopardize people, wildlife, and cultures that have survived this harsh environment for millennia. The Arctic's people and animals have been transformed into living, deep-freeze archives storing toxic memories of the industrial world's past and present. This phenomenon is so insidious that no one tapped into it for decades, until one day thirty-two years ago when scientists stumbled on silent messengers that came in the form of plump Canadian seals.

Copyright © 2005 by Marla Cone. Reprinted with permission from Grove Atlantic, Inc. All rights reserved.