Monday, March 15, 2004
- The Stockholm Convention, otherwise known as the POPs
treaty, will be implemented in May. This is great news for
individuals, families and communities all over the
world--shamefully less significant than it would be if the
United States were on board, but better than if we
pretended to be on board.
This global treaty will "virtually eliminate"
12 persistent organic pollutants and has built-in
mechanisms to add "new" chemicals to the list as
their risks become apparent. POPs, including many
pesticides, PCBs, and dioxin, are well-known carcinogens
and also tend to impair the development of reproductive,
neurological and immunological systems in young and unborn
people and wildlife. Arctic food webs are especially prone
to the accumulation of POPs for a variety of reasons.
The Stockholm Convention was crafted by an
international negotiating committee and signed by over 150
nations in 2001. It will be implemented in May now that 50
nations have formally adopted it.
The United States, despite the Bush administration's
signing and publicly endorsing the treaty back in 2001,
has stalled and stumbled on attempts to legislate the
changes to federal law that would be necessary to adopt
the Stockholm Convention. Alaska Sens. Ted Stevens and
Lisa Murkowski have endorsed the treaty but have not made
strong statements regarding the actual language that
should be used.
The argument boils down to one over precaution--whether
or not toxic substances that persist in the environment,
bioaccumulate, and travel long distance should be
regulated even if we don't know the exact effect they will
have on individuals and communities where they accumulate.
The people of the far north, and governments all over the
world, have agreed to this "precautionary
approach" and designed a process to make it possible
to add chemicals to the list of 12 initial targets so that
regulation of new problem chemicals would take years
instead of decades.
Tactics to undermine the groundbreaking international
agreement have changed from an argument to gut the
language of the convention itself to one calling for
adoption of the treaty but with federal laws so convoluted
as to deeply hinder the addition of new chemicals.
The bureaucratic snares being proposed by industrially
motivated legislators will not protect future generations
of the arctic and the world. I encourage Alaskans to write
to our senators about this. Ask them to support
legislation that would truly enable the Stockholm
Convention's spirit of precaution, but let them know that
unencumbered adoption by the United States is so important
that they should shelve legislation to amend the Toxic
Substances Control Act and the Federal Insecticide,
Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act unless it allows for prompt
and effective regulation of "new" chemicals
(many of which, such as brominated flame retardants,
Scotchgard, Lindane, etc., are already accumulating in
arctic breast milk).
Environmental protection tends to cost money instead of
making it (especially in profit margins), but long-term
healthcare savings make pre-emptive action well worth the
effort. Likewise, our senators need to be encouraged to
support Sen. Frank Lautenberg's amendment (to the omnibus
spending bill) that would reinstate the polluter-pays
stipulations regarding Superfund sites. It is bad enough
that Americans suffer the effects of toxic waste sites on
our health; we should not also be expected to clean up
after corporate negligence with our tax dollars.
Anna Godduhn is a doctoral student at the University of
Alaska Fairbanks