Review of Silent Snow by Marla Cone

As someone who currently lives in the Arctic, I was very impressed with this book. Several years ago when I was pregnant with my first child, I saw a poster at my OB's office warning pregnant and nursing women to limit or restrict their intake of wild-caught seafood due to toxins. It didn't make sense to me in an area that is mostly wild and unpopulated that pollution would be such a problem. I live in Alaska and occasionally eat salmon and other seafood, so I have been interested in finding out more about why our food has higher concentrations of persistent organic pollutants than more urban areas and what these pollutants do to people and animals. The author, Marla Cone, is an environmental reporter who worked for the L.A. Times for 15 years and also taught at Berkeley. What I was expecting from the book was perhaps to simply distill some information from various science and medical journals on this topic, perhaps include a few interviews. Instead, I was amazed that this California woman had spent years researching this book in large part by traveling to isolated native populations and experiencing the Arctic (through funds from a Pew Fellow Program). I know it's a shock to people from warm climates when they visit even Southeast Alaska where I live. I always laugh in summer when I'm wearing short sleeves and I see tourists dressed in coats, gloves and stocking caps. She didn't just stop in for a visit either, she went out on the ice with native fishermen, whalers, hunters and ate with them, participated in how they lived. She interviewed both native people who eat traditional foods like seal and whale as well as people in the scientific or medical communities in places all throughout the Arctic. Northern Canada, Iceland, Greenland, Norway, Faroe Islands, Barrow, Aleutian Islands: One thing they all have in common is remote populations dependent on the land for food as part of their culture and way of life, and what they get from the land is more than meets the eye. Mercury, PCP, DDT and dozens of other persistent organic chemicals that are starting to get very concentrated in Arctic animals and people through the food chain. I appreciated the author's ability to take a lot of heavy scientific information and present it in a way that is comprehensible to most people. There is no way I'm going to be delving into all those studies from journals on neurotoxicology, pediatrics, environmental science, etc. but I was grateful for the chance to learn from someone who has.