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September 13, 2007
| Disappearing Boys | Environment |
The Arctic is a sink for a lot of air- and water-borne pollution. The effects of that pollution are profound. The Independent:
Twice as many girls as boys are being born in remote communities north of the Arctic Circle. Across much of the northern hemisphere, particularly in the US and Japan, the gender ratio has skewed towards girls for the first time.Now scientists working with Inuit villages in Arctic Russia and Greenland have found the first direct evidence that this trend is linked to widespread chemical pollutants. Despite the Arctic's pristine environment, the area functions as a pollution sink for much of the industrialised world. Winds and rivers deliver a toxic tide from the northern hemisphere into the polar food chain.
Scientists have traced flame-retardant chemicals used in everything from industrial products to furniture, phones and laptops to the food chain, finding high levels of these pollutants in seabirds, seals and polar bears. The Inuit have traditionally relied on a hunter- gatherer's diet almost exclusively made up of marine animals, making them especially vulnerable to toxic pollutants.
Historically in large populations, it is considered normal for the number of baby boys slightly to outnumber girls in a trend believed to compensate naturally for greater male mortality rates.
But a peer-reviewed US study found an unexpected drop in the proportion of boys born in much of the northern hemisphere. The missing boys would number more than 250,000 in the US and Japan, using the gender ratio at the levels recorded up until 1970.
The researchers suspected that this linked widespread exposure among pregnant women to hormone-mimicking pollutants. But Danish scientists examined 480 families in the Russian Arctic and found high levels of the hormone-mimicking pollutants in the blood of pregnant women, and twice as many girls being born as boys.
They are now studying similar communities in Greenland and Canada and although full results will be published next year, their initial findings exactly match those in Russia.
Lars Otto Riersen, a marine biologist, pollution expert and an executive with the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (Amap), says: "When you see such things happening in the Arctic, it may happen here first, in the same way as climate change did." [...]
Dr Jens Hansen, leader of Amap research, said they were finding incredibly high levels of banned PCBs among a cocktail of other hormone-mimicking chemicals in pre-natal mothers. Pregnant mothers, he said were ingesting these hormone-mimicking chemicals in their diet and passing them through the placenta where they influenced the gender of the foetus or killed male foetuses. [...]
Aqqaluk Lynge, head of the Inuit Circumpolar Council, said they were trying to raise the alarm internationally but nobody was listening. "People don't want to talk about such a critical question. We are talking about our people's survival which is very alarming."
Greenland, the world's largest island and still a dependency of Denmark, now has the highest proportion of women in the world. [Emphasis added]
The modern world's a runaway train. So few people take the long view anymore. Gotta make that buck, gotta do it today — tomorrow be damned. Maybe it's because, deep down, we've lost confidence that we've got a lot of tomorrows left.
Posted by Jonathan at September 13, 2007 05:30 PM
Comments
Jonathan, I think you landed a punch right on the money. Deep down we've lost confidence that we've got a lot of tomorrows left. Whether this is scientifically true or not (Winston Churchill once said "The world is a very heavy thing to blow up"), in any case it's true that Americans disbelieve that the future will be better for their children. Sad fact. You're a brave guy to name it, tell it like it is. Keep going. Always great to read you.
W.
Posted by: Wolf DeVoon at September 16, 2007 11:09 AM
Jon, sadly you're exactly right. We are headed in the wrong direction on so many fronts. One example: locally, American Transmission Company wants to string a 345,000 volt line across Dane Coujnty to "keep the lights on" 10 or so years from now. Never mind simple conservation efforts or new technology or the added carbon dioxide such an increase in electerical capacity will add (via more coal-powered electricity production) to globbal warming. ATC makes money by building transmission lines. That's what counts.
Posted by: Jacqueline Kelley at September 18, 2007 08:28 PM