bodyburden
How much should major polluters pay? A case against DuPont provides a model.
A biologist traced mercury from a company spill to contamination in songbirds, and devised a new way to hold polluters financially accountable.
Science
How Much Should Major Polluters Pay? A Case Against DuPont Provides a Model
A biologist traced mercury from a company spill to contamination in songbirds, and devised a new way to hold polluters financially accountable.
By Paul Greenberg
August 16, 2017
Birds in This Story
Carolina Wren
Thryothorus ludovicianus
song #1
Blue-gray Gnatcatcher
Polioptila caerulea
calls #1
Red-eyed Vireo
Vireo olivaceus
song #1
Popular Stories
Birdist Rule #4: Avoid Making These Boneheaded Birding Mistakes
What Are You Looking At? Eleven In-Your-Face Bird Photos
Why You Should Keep Your Birdbath Clean
How to Tell a Raven From a Crow
How to Make Hummingbird Nectar
Crippling Conservation Cuts Threaten Birds
Tell Congress to oppose these cuts, and instead fully support the conservation programs needed to protect birds and the places they need.
Take Action
It was just another sweltering summer afternoon gathering blood samples from Shenandoah Valley birds when the news came in. The ornithologist Dan Cristol had been conducting a preliminary assessment funded by DuPont to determine to what degree the company’s pollution of the watershed might have affected the avian community. DuPont was facing potential legal action and had cautiously agreed to one summer of funding for a small team to gauge just how expensive fixing the damages might be. True to his nature, Cristol hadn’t been tentative in his research. He and his students had skulked into stream-bank kingfisher nests, cornered screech owls near bridges, and mist-netted dozens of species of songbirds. Using tiny needles, they’d extracted drops of bird blood before gently releasing their subjects back into the wild. Then they’d shipped their samples to a toxicology lab at Texas A&M;, and watched as their funding dribbled away at a rate of $55 per analyzed sample.
Now as the sun blazed over the South River, a major tributary of the mighty Shenandoah, and waves of heat rose up from the newly mown hayfields, Cristol opened an email from the lab and read the first test results.
“Holy fucking shit,” one of the students cried out.
“I rechecked the numbers about five times to make sure,” Cristol recalls. “We were being funded by the responsible party, so I figured DuPont would look at what we’d found and say, ‘OK, thanks but no thanks, we’ve seen enough.’ I was worried that after this tantalizing glimpse we would not get to learn what was really going on. But to their credit, everyone just kept moving forward and letting us propose to answer each new question that arose.”
Cristol and his students had discovered that the DuPont mercury spill had penetrated much further into the avian food web than anyone had previously expected. Not only was mercury found in fish-eating raptors like osprey and eagles, but it was present in bluebirds that flitted far away from the contaminated South River; it was in surprisingly high levels in the feathers of the distinctly non-riverine Red-eyed Vireo whose song tells you to look-up way-up tree-top to find it; it was in scrappy Carolina Wrens, whirling Tree Swallows, and reclusive thrushes. Even in the diminutive Blue-gray Gnatcatcher that weighs in at a miniscule third of an ounce.
More importantly, the work had laid the foundation for a novel way to restore North American songbird populations that are declining throughout the country. For Cristol’s research has ultimately perfected a way of holding major polluters accountable for something as profound as it has long been intangible: a means to calculate and seek reparations for bird years lost.
Mercury in Cristol's lab. Photo: Greg Kahn
“You couldn’t have a better site to test the effects of methylmercury,” Cristol told me as we stood on a bridge over the South River in the City of Waynesboro and stared southeast at a 177-acre chemical plant. For roughly 50 years this gray smudge of a facility, built into the green hillsides by DuPont in 1928, manufactured something called acetate fibers—which used mercury as a catalyst for the first 20 years of its operation.
DuPont to its credit has never strongly contested that it put significant amounts of mercury into the South River. Ever since mercury was detected in river sediment and floodplain soil around the plant in the 1970s, the corporation has been trying to figure out a way to put its pollution legacy behind it. For years DuPont funded a vaguely missioned “South River Science Team” where state officials and academics monitored mercury levels in fish, with the hope that concentrations would eventually go down. No such decrease was observed. Sampling continued to show levels in some fish higher than 4 parts per million—nearly four times that found in swordfish, which the FDA urges consumers to avoid because of high mercury levels. Nevertheless, officials representing the State of Virginia (technically the key plaintiff in these early proceedings) seemed at a loss as to what to do next.
“They had been completely bamboozled,” says Nancy Marks, a senior attorney for the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council’s litigation team. Under Marks’s direction NRDC filed an intention to sue DuPont in the early 2000s to move the issue forward from monitoring to mitigation. “[DuPont’s] remedy was to have a hundred year monitoring program. But we knew the mercury in the river was sky high. And DuPont was the only obvious source.” Unlike other American watersheds that have been host to numerous polluters, the Waynesboro DuPont plant is all the mercury-discharging industry the South River basin ever had. The bulk of the mercury in the ecosystem and any harm it may have caused birds is undeniably DuPont’s fault.
A single drop of blood collected from a Tree Swallow in Shenandoah Valley. Such samples helped make the case that mercury in the water was making its way into songbird species. Photo: Greg Kahn
“For us it was a no-brainer,” Marks recalls. “It was a very strong case.” The case was made even stronger by the fact that NRDC had just won a big legal victory in a suit in Maine under the same legal theory. The Maine suit had gone to trial, and the mercury polluter, a company called Mallinckrodt, Inc., if ordered by the court to pay for remediation, will likely owe hundreds of millions of dollars (this in addition to many millions of dollars spent on legal fees). While DuPont declined to comment about this aspect of the case, it seems likely that the prospect of a Maine-sized case going to trial gave corporate officers pause. Soon after the NRDC action, the company entered into a consent decree with the river’s trustees, the State of Virginia, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
But by trying to reach a settlement over the South River, DuPont started unraveling another knot when it agreed to finance the research that would determine the value of its liability. That’s where Dan Cristol entered the picture. If the company was really ready to pay to restore the birds of the South River drainage, how would that cost be calculated? It was obvious that immediate and quantifiable harm had been done to, say, sport fish and the people who had lost the opportunity to catch and eat them. But when the bird blood results revealed methylmercury present throughout the avian community, even in songbirds that lived far away from the river, Cristol realized they had a chance to build a much more expansive case.
First they had to figure out how birds that had nothing to do with the river were getting so much mercury into their systems.
“There’s nothing like getting paid to get up early and catch birds on a beautiful spring morning,” Cristol told me as we cruised down Route 340 to check in at 10 of the 50 sampling sites he established during the seven years of his mercury field study. “But by eleven o’clock at night when you’re going out to catch screech owls with your students, hoping local drug dealers aren’t hanging out under the bridge, you’re saying, ‘This is beyond tedious. This is horrible.’” The Salvadoran street gang MS-13 is active in the Shenandoah Valley and several murders have occurred in the area, including at least one along the river’s banks.
Nevertheless Cristol set about designing and implementing a largely undergraduate-staffed research regimen up and down the length of the South River. “We knew the mercury must be coming through what the birds ate. And the only way we could figure out exactly what they were eating was to catch them in the act.” Realizing it was more or less impossible to reliably catch adult birds eating, Cristol found he could measure diet through the next best thing: what adults fed their babies.
Using a method perfected by ecologists in the early 1990s, Cristol and his students sneaked into nest boxes while adult birds were hunting and put tiny plastic zip ties or “ligatures” around the nestlings’ necks. “We had to be really careful,” Cristol recalls. “Too tight and the babies would suffocate. Too loose and the food goes down and you lose your sample. Just right and you get the perfect bug to measure.” It’s a testament to Cristol’s care and sensitivity that not a single bird was harmed by ligature during the years of field sampling. This task was performed hundreds of times in multiple locations. There were all sorts of things in those bird craws. Grasshoppers and grubs. Gnats and houseflies. But there was one unexpected prey item that was causing most of the problems.
Dan Cristol, a biology professor at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, spearheaded the research that led to the discovery of how mercury pollution affected songbirds in the Shenandoah Valley. Photo: Greg Kahn
“Thirty percent of their diet was big spiders,” Cristol says. “And those spiders were bringing in 70 percent of their mercury.” Spiders are alpha predators of the insect world. They eat big bugs that have in turn eaten smaller bugs, which had rooted in the mercury-laden river sediment. Just as swordfish and sharks end up as storehouses for all the mercury their prey contains, as well as all the mercury all the prey of their prey contained, so too do spiders end up “biomagnifying” mercury in the environment and concentrating it in their flesh. And they were then dumping this immense toxic load onto songbirds.
It was a revolutionary discovery. “It was just a one pager in Science, but it was a game changer. [Dan] moved the needle on [understanding] how mercury behaves in the environment,” Fish and Wildlife’s John Schmerfeld told me. Henceforth, when mercury contamination cases are considered (and there are dozens pending) litigators will be more likely to look beyond the immediate contamination site and consider the wildlife populations in the wider surrounding environment. It’s a difference that could change the nature of mercury settlements in many cases around the country.
Now that they knew how waterborne mercury was making its way into terrestrial bird blood, the next step was to establish just how many birds mercury had harmed and how badly. This number—the dollar amount needed to restore bird numbers to their pre-DuPont levels—would inform the price tag of the settlement. Again, a disciplined, time-consuming regime was part of the solution, as was some pretty heated negotiation for access to private land. “People we asked for access came in two flavors,” Cristol remembers. “One worried we might be jackbooted government thugs coming to take away their property rights. The other thought we were working for DuPont and trying to poison them.” They needed permission to put up row after row of birdhouses along the polluted river, as well as in nearby uncontaminated tributaries, in order to establish reference populations of Tree Swallows.
By comparing swallows in mercury-contaminated stretches and unaffected areas, Cristol and his students were able to show that reproduction was indeed being affected. Overall they found a 20-percent decline in offspring in high mercury areas. In other more sensitive species, like Carolina Wrens, they observed that as mercury levels increased to three parts per million the birds were more likely to abandon their nests altogether.
The research team was also able to understand how wide a swath methylmercury had cut through the South River drainage. “With river contamination, length is easy,” Cristol would tell me. “Width is more difficult.” That mercury was in the river sediment was obvious. But because they had proof of terrestrial insects with high mercury levels they could begin to fan out into the floodplain to look for effect. Mercury becomes methylated (and thus can permeate cell membranes) by interaction with anaerobic bacteria in areas that are frequently moistened. The flat fields that flooded regularly on either side of the South River turned out to be methylation factories. In many cases mercury concentrations in the birds and bugs were found to be worse many miles downstream than right next door to the polluting facility. In the end with his nest boxes and insect collections Cristol was able to determine that mercury had affected more than 11,000 acres, a much wider swath than had previously been thought. Two more years and 900 bird surveys later, he knew the densities of every species of songbird in the Shenandoah Valley.
With that kind of data in hand, parties to the DuPont settlement could then plug numbers—including bird density and range, contamination levels, and reproductive success—into a model developed in the early 2000s. The original model evaluated the damage a barge company had inflicted on a coral reef in Florida. But the model’s basic math can be applied to a range of different damaging agents and ecosystems. “Once you have an idea of what the injury is you can put that into the model and then on the back end, eventually the theoretical equivalent in money is coughed out,” says Schmerfeld.
But there was one more piece of the puzzle that had to be solved in order for the data to stand up in court. Correlation is not causation as is so frequently said in scientific circles. To establish causation, a different kind of experiment had to be initiated. An experiment that, for a passionate bird lover like Cristol, would prove to be the most painful of all.
The epidemiology around methylmercury is still evolving, but the pollutant, at the concentrations found in the contaminated stretches of the South River, has the diabolical tendency to profoundly interfere with life’s processes rather than kill outright. It is formed when anaerobic bacteria bind a “methyl group” of carbon and hydrogen atoms to a mercury atom. The methylation process transforms relatively inert inorganic mercury into something that is more easily assimilated and can even pass the “blood barrier” to the brain. Methylmercury’s tendency to bind to sulfur-containing proteins that are central to the nervous and metabolic systems can cause multiple malfunctions. Birds can lose efficiency in capturing prey as well as something behavioral scientists called “nesting tenacity.” It can alter immune response, spur autoimmune disorder, change expression of reproductive hormones, and limit an animal’s ability to respond to stress.
But while the health effects of mercury poisoning on vertebrates are clear it is extremely difficult to pin the loss of birds on a single mercury pollution event. Mercury was probably causing nesting failures in Dan Cristol’s field research subjects but other confounding factors such as an uptick in invasive predators or some other unknown pollutant could also have played a role. To strengthen the case for actual causation Cristol had to conduct a laboratory-based phase where captive animals were intentionally subjected to the isolated and punishing effects of a high mercury diet. It was clear that Cristol had found this aspect of his research the most troubling. “I could not ethically justify it,” he told me as he opened the door to a repurposed cattle barn on the campus of William and Mary, “if I didn’t think that their imprisonment in cages was going to save a lot of birds in the wild.”
A juvenile wolf spider. These arachnids accounted for 70 percent of the mercury found in birds in the Shenandoah Valley. Photo: Greg Kahn
Inside the lab hundreds of Zebra Finches peeped and fluttered and pecked away at piles of rainbow-colored birdseed that the lab techs have taken to calling “fruity pebbles.” A black or orange mark on a birdcage label indicated whether the subjects inside were controls eating clean fruity pebbles, or experimentals given food dosed with methylmercury to the same concentration as a swordfish steak. Cristol and his students pursued this line of research for six years with an equal amount of rigor as their field studies. They repeated the nesting trials they’d done along the South River. They tested the birds’ memories by hiding food in one of 10 feeders and then examining the birds’ efficiency at re-finding the food an hour later. They probed the finches’ stress-regulation abilities as indicated by the levels of the hormone corticosterone. They even examined their songs and compared them with the lower-pitched song distortions they’d observed in the field. In truth they tested so many different vectors, including heredity and song learning across multiple generations, that it’s beyond the scope of this article to list them all.
The meticulous approach comes back to Cristol’s central passion: to preserve the lives of birds. “This is the weight of evidence,” he told me, closing the door to the chirping and peeping in the lab. “After all the tearing apart the lawyers will do, a judge will say it’s clear there has been a strong effect. Birds were lost year after year.”
The lab experiments bore out what Cristol was witnessing in the wild. Methylmercury was seriously messing with the minds of birds, particularly their spatial memory. Birds that in the wild needed all their faculties to navigate thousands of miles from Virginia to South America.
The lab and field studies were eventually assembled into a compelling dossier and delivered to the parties of the consent agreement. DuPont, having paid for all of this research and having watched as increasingly damning evidence accumulated, has come rather peacefully to the table.
In late July a federal judge approved the settlement for DuPont’s mercury-related damages. “DuPont will move forward with its commitment to provide $42.3 million in support of restoration projects in the South River and South Fork Shenandoah watersheds,” says Mike Liberati, South River project director for the DuPont Corporate Remediation Group. “We are committed to working with all Waynesboro-area stakeholders on these projects.”
Some $2.5 million will go toward avian conservation, and a further $19.5 million will be designated for “land protection, property acquisition, and recreational and wildlife enhancements”—enhancements that could directly benefit songbirds.
Those close to the case emphasize that it was the rigor of Cristol’s research that proved critical in the final judgment. “We really use birds to represent the whole terrestrial injury,” says Anne Condon, a former student of Cristol’s who oversaw the natural resource damage case for the FWS. “I don’t know what we would have done if we hadn’t had Dan’s data.”
It seems fitting that the South River DuPont settlement concluded just as Dan Cristol began a sabbatical year. While he is deeply involved with the lives of his students and incorporated undergraduates into nearly every phase of the mercury research, it is birds he loves most. His teenage daughters Indigo and Lazuli are named for two species of bunting and the first trip of his sabbatical year was to North Dakota to help his equally bird-obsessed father bag a Baird’s Sparrow or a Sprague’s Pipit to add to the pater familias’s life list. Cristol seemed practically skipping with the joy of impending freedom as we did some casual birding around a forested swath of campus a week after graduation. “This is the only week of the year,” he told me smiling as he peered through his binoculars, “that there are more Blackpoll Warblers on campus than students.”
But while Cristol is heading off on sabbatical a much more difficult phase is ramping up. “Now the work begins,” FWS’s Schmerfeld says. “We worked how many years to reach a settlement? Now people need to put the money on the ground in smart ways. That’s always tough. When there’s a big check written, public interest is heightened.”
Indeed how money will be spent on the ground will probably be the most contentious phase of restoring lost bird years—in large part because it’s not really possible to remove mercury from all 11,000 acres affected by the Waynesboro plant. True, mercury-laden riverbanks can be stabilized. But to get rid of the mercury altogether, vast amounts of soil would have to be removed and stored in a toxic waste facility. Numerous side settlements would have to be reached with scores of different landowners along more than 100 miles of river. All parties to the settlement realize that new bird years will have to be created outside of the contaminated portion of the South River to make up for the bird years lost.
How those bird years can be recovered can be widely interpreted. Because the federal government manages migratory birds, which includes almost all songbirds, $2.5 million of the settlement could be spent to protect habitat anywhere along the birds’ migratory pathways. Buying land outside of the United States could end up being the most cost effective way to make that remediation. “We started finding out early on that you can restore habitat in the Shenandoah all you want,” says Schmerfeld, “but it might not move the needle as much as protecting overwintering habitat.” Cristol agrees. “For the same dollars you could get 10 times the number of bird years in Belize than here. It’s the same birds you’re protecting, just in their winter habitat.”
Dosing captive Zebra Finches, like this male, with mercury showed how the toxin would affect birds in the wild. Photo: Greg Kahn
That habitat acquisition and all other restoration will begin just as Cristol starts to contemplate bigger sabbatical-sized questions. Most troubling of all the questions he will consider is whether he did indeed correctly calculate the totality of the harm done to birds. In the background lurks the possibility that what he measured was just a faint echo of the actual damage. Many other birds may have been so severely poisoned that they didn’t have the wherewithal to pick up a twig, let alone compete with others to build a nest in one of the test birdhouses. Those lost birds would never have been picked up by the study. “How many birds died that we never saw?” Cristol now wonders. “Twenty percent is the number we’re saying were lost each time they nested. But then I’m like, ‘This whole thing is playing into the hands of industry.’ We’re not even considering all those many other birds that weren’t around anymore to be studied.”
To anyone outside of academic science the South River mercury work would appear to be exactly the kind of patient evidence-building the world needs in this era of fake news and alternative facts—not to mention an approach that may be even more important moving forward, if efforts by the Trump administration to roll back mercury air pollution standards are successful. Nature, it would seem, has no better defense than good research. But for Dan Cristol, a man who has organized his life around wild birds, the pace of science now feels painfully slow. Not a year goes by when he doesn’t note the disappearance of a warbler from his home woods or the waning of swallows on the wing crossing his local meadows.
“When I first started out I thought I should add to the body of knowledge. I thought I should be a scientist.” Today he shakes his head and considers all the bird years lost around the world while he diligently hoed his narrow row. “Now that way of thinking seems like a luxury. Now it seems selfish to just be a scientist. In the end,” he tells me as we bid goodbye, “I should have been an activist.”
***
Audubon is a nonprofit, and stories like this are made possible by readers like you. To support our journalism, please make a donation today.
Keep reading...Show less
‘You’re not just getting a coal plant, you’re getting a toxic waste site.’
Hydro One’s $6.7-billion purchase of an American utility company comes with the costly responsibility of helping to clean up an 800-acre “toxic soup” waste site in the United States, the Sierra Club says.
Hydro One’s $6.7-billion purchase of an American utility company comes with the costly responsibility of helping to clean up an 800-acre “toxic soup” waste site in the United States, the Sierra Club says.
Doug Howell, senior campaign organizer for the U.S. Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign, said Avista Corp. owns 15% of two units of the Colstrip coal plant, located in eastern Montana.
Hydro One is in the process of purchasing Avista, and Ontarians own 40% of Hydro One.
“One thing I think you all really need to understand is that you’re not just getting a coal plant, you’re getting a toxic waste site and all the liabilities that go with it,” Howell told Postmedia. “It’s probably a good guess that Avista might be on the hook for $100 million of cleanup. Where’s that coming from? Well, thank you Hydro One for helping pay for our cleanup. We appreciate that.”
He added the entire cost of the cleanup would be $1 billion or more, with Avista’s share accounting for 10%.
Asked by the Postmedia about the potential liability, Hydro One spokesman Tiziana Baccega insisted the risk remains with the company where it resides, suggesting that Avista ratepayers are on the hook.
“In this instance, the risk would remain with Avista,” Baccega said in an e-mail Tuesday.
The plant has a unique way of dealing with its waste, Howell said.
While most coal plants clean up their discharge as much as they can and dump it into an existing body of water, in dry Montana that’s not possible, he said.
“They have a wet slurry that comes out of the smoke stack — so you get all your mercury and your arsenic and all these other toxic things that come out of smoke stacks, then they combine it with all of the waste that comes out of the boilers — your heavy metals, your boron, more arsenic ... — and they put it into coal ash ponds,” he said. “And they have about 800 acres now of toxic soup.”
Sierra Club spokesman Caleb Heeringa said he is not aware of Avista putting aside any funds for the cleanup of the polluted site.
Water needs to be piped in from a nearby river because the aquifer is “poisoned,” Heeringa said.
“And none of that is accounted for in any of Avista’s planning or rate structure,” he said. “And so it’s really unclear whether ratepayers here in Washington or shareholders potentially in Canada are going to be paying for that.”
PC MPP Todd Smith said in a statement Tuesday that the Avista buy is a “bad deal” for Ontarians, quoting Avista CEO Scott Morris saying the sale means “we can spread out costs over a larger customer base.”
Hydro One has assured its ratepayers that their costs won’t go up as a result of the purchase.
COAL HERE TO STAY?
Ontario’s back in the coal business with no end game in sight.
The Kathleen Wynne government outlawed coal-fired electricity generation in the province after shuttering its own coal plants.
But her government has sold off 60% of Hydro One, which had been wholly owned by Ontarians.
The newly-privatized company’s first major act was to purchase the American-owned Avista Corp, a U.S. electricity utility company, for $6.7 billion in cash.
Doug Howell, a Sierra Club national staffer, said his organization is hopeful that Hydro One will put pressure on Avista to get out of the coal business, because the company’s business plan includes energy from the Colstrip coal plant until at least 2037 with no official end date.
“If there’s a strong voice coming out of Toronto saying, ‘Hell no,’ you guys can be the game changer,” he said.
Colstrip is one of the larger emitters of greenhouse gases in the United States.
In a statement to Postmedia, Hydro One did not reveal any eagerness to end Avista’s strong attachment to coal.
“Avista is ranked among the cleanest power producers in the United States for CO2 emissions, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council,” Hydro One said in a statement. “Most of Avista’s electricity generation derives from renewable resources, including hydro power, wind and biomass energy. Avista owns 15% of two units at the Colstrip Steam Electric Station in Montana, making up just 9% of its overall supply mix.”
Sierra Club went to court to force the shut down of two units of Colstrip, which are not owned by Avista.
Keep reading...Show less
Steve Lopez: California's environmental crusaders helped save our state. Now, they face down Trump.
It did not begin well for Alicia Rivera, who carried a stack of fliers as she made her way around the parking lot of a Wilmington shopping center.
California's environmental crusaders helped save our state. Now, they face down Trump
Steve Lopez/Apr 8, 2017
Flip this into…
2 likes
2 comments
Share on
It did not begin well for Alicia Rivera, who carried a stack of fliers as she made her way around the parking lot of a Wilmington shopping center.
The first person she approached brushed past her, uninterested in her spiel about polluted air in the harbor area’s smokestack neighborhoods.
The next guy shook his head; he didn’t want the flier calling residents to an April 29 climate change march protesting the planned expansion of the nearby Tesoro refinery.
If that wasn’t discouraging enough, these are dark times for someone in the environmental protection movement. President Trump has surrounded himself with climate change doubters and fossil fuel champions, and he has already begun dismantling the Environmental Protection Agency.
But this is California, which has always traveled a higher road, and will continue to do so regardless of what happens in Washington.
Sure, Rivera said, she gets depressed about the pollution pouring out of Washington these days, and worries about Trump trying to scale back higher vehicle emission standards. But as an organizer with Communities for a Better Environment, she’s always acted with a sense of urgency, and maybe she’ll just have to step it up even more.
She scanned the parking lot for another target.
“Not everyone responds the same way,” she told me. “You have to keep trying.”
She did, and it paid off as she connected with a man who wanted to hear all about the April 29 march.
Not everyone responds the same way. You have to keep trying. — Alicia Rivera
The she came upon Yolanda Flores, who was loading groceries into a car with her daughter and granddaughter. Flores said they live where Long Beach and Carson come together, and they worry about dirty air quality around schools and playgrounds. Not only were they interested in attending the march, but they called a friend who runs a community group focused on community health, then handed the phone to Rivera so she could add to her army of crusaders.
“This march is going to be huge,” Rivera promised.
Rivera has been doing this kind of work for eight years, and she follows in a long line of Californians who have fought to safeguard the environment, as if there were no greater cause.
And I do mean a long line.
In 1868, a Scottish-born world traveler sailed up the coast of California, landed in San Francisco and made his way to the Sierra range, where he was humbled and inspired by the majesty of what lay before him. It was “the most divinely beautiful of all the mountain chains I have ever seen,” wrote John Muir, who would become one of the founders of the Sierra Club and one of the fathers of the national park system.
A little more than 100 years after Muir’s arrival, another Californian had become president and helped launch the modern environmental movement after an oil platform catastrophe six miles off the coast.
“Richard Nixon came to Santa Barbara and saw firsthand the result of the 1969 blowout. Up and down the coast, for miles, there were dead animals,” said Ocean Foundation senior fellow Richard Charter, who recalled Californians using straw and kitty litter to try to sop up the expanding oil slick that fouled spectacular beaches.
Back then, said Charter, protecting California’s natural treasures was not a partisan issue, nor was it a partisan issue under Republican governors Ronald Reagan and Pete Wilson. President Nixon, horrified by the Santa Barbara disaster, was instrumental in the creation of the Clean Water Act and the Environmental Protection Agency that is now in the sites of another Republican president, nearly half a century after the launch of the modern environmental movement.
The Virgin Mary in Rivera's office has a mask painted over her mouth. (Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times)
Charter, whose passion for coastal protection began in the 1950s with abalone-hunting forays along the Sonoma coast, fears Trump and Congress could relax offshore drilling restrictions, with oil companies eager to bore into the ocean floor between La Jolla and Malibu.
Charter said California — with its blessing of natural gifts too magnificent to sacrifice — has to continue to be a national model on climate change, clean energy and conservation.
Tom Steyer, the San Francisco philanthropist and environmental activist who’s been mentioned as a possible candidate for governor, said that if U.S. leaders ignore science and surrender their international leadership on environmental protection, there will be ramifications from Timbuktu to Los Angeles. He worries, too, about the possible depletion of funding for research and development of alternative energies.
But California will fight fiercely to protect its standards, Steyer predicted, and he noted that our ideals have spread to other states in waves. Clean energy has moral, environmental and economic advantages, said Steyer, and the country has an obligation to create new jobs for those displaced by the demise of fossil fuel industries.
“Trump can say whatever he wants, like King Canute turning back the tides. But he can’t. We’re not going back,” said Steyer.
“He has this image in his head that’s completely false, that we’re going to go back to digging coal with picks and shovels. … As much as Republicans are paid off to support fossil fuels, technology will beat them at every turn, and all Trump can do is try to delay that by turning the lights out on research and innovation.”
In Alicia Rivera’s Wilmington office, a painting of the Virgin of Guadalupe has an interesting detail. A mask is painted over her mouth.
“The Virgin is also suffering from air pollution,” said Rivera, who has spent eight years devoted to what she calls environmental justice. I’ve seen her in action before, racing around the area to photograph smokestack flaring and calling the CUT-SMOG hotline.
Tesoro officials have argued that new technology will make the air cleaner, but Rivera’s colleague, senior scientist Julia May, disputes that. May told me that among other issues, the planned refinery expansion would increase emissions of volatile organic compounds, which could add to high rates of asthma in a region where there are already concerns about rates of lung disease, cancer and low birth weights.
“This is a company town,” said Rivera, and that makes her job harder. Lots of residents are employed by the refineries, and the oil industry makes donations to community groups. Sometimes it’s hard to get permission to hand out fliers.
But she conducts classes in her office and speaks to various groups in the harbor towns, educating people about what’s in the air they breathe and the advantages of renewable energy. Rivera targets students, and on the day I visited, Long Beach State University student Blanca Cordova was working with her as a volunteer intern.
Cordova said she heard Rivera speak about environmental protection, and, in the California tradition, was drawn to the cause.
Keep reading...Show less
Beyond the headlines.
Peter Dykstra and host Steve Curwood discuss the fossil fuel industry ties of Oklahoma AG Scott Pruitt, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for EPA Administrator, and new evidence that polluted rivers date back to the Stone Age.
Beyond the Headlines
Air Date: Week of December 9, 2016
stream/download this segment as an MP3 file
Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt is President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for EPA Administrator (Photo: Gage Skidmore, Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0)
Peter Dykstra and host Steve Curwood discuss the fossil fuel industry ties of Oklahoma AG Scott Pruitt, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for EPA Administrator, and new evidence that polluted rivers date back to the Stone Age.
Transcript
CURWOOD: It’s Living on Earth, I’m Steve Curwood. Time to catch up with Peter Dykstra of DailyClimate.org and Environmental Health News, that's EHN.org. Peter joins us from Conyers, Georgia. Hi, Peter, I guess you have lots to tell us, including what’s going on with Donald Trump and his cabinet choices.
DYKSTRA: Hi, Steve. Yeah, you bet I do. Let’s first put this into perspective. Back up to just over a month ago. Most environmental advocates not only expected a Hillary Clinton presidency, but held out hope that her party could reach a majority in the Senate and make that body a lot greener.
CURWOOD: And of course we know neither of those things happened, huh.
DYKSTRA: So let’s look at the start of the past week. A shocker, with former Vice President Al Gore visiting Trump Tower on Monday and ending up talking climate change with the President-elect who at one point called it all a hoax, but more recently told the New York Times he has an open mind about climate.
CURWOOD: Raising new hopes among many of the same environmental activists.
DYKSTRA: Al Gore got a meeting, and good for him for trying. But 24 hours later, ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson visited Trump for an audition for Secretary of State.
CURWOOD: Huh, that’s interesting. He’s the man who runs a company that’s under fire for allegedly misleading investors and the public about Exxon’s own research on climate change.
DYKSTRA: But wait, there’s more. On Wednesday, Scott Pruitt, Attorney General of Oklahoma, who’s leading some major lawsuits against the Environmental Protection Agency, including the Obama Clean Power Plan, is nominated to run EPA.
CURWOOD: So if confirmed, he’d be expected to turn the EPA around 180 degrees.
DYKSTRA: Or I think his critics might say, asking Scott Pruitt to lead the EPA is kind of like hiring a tornado to run your storm shelter.
CURWOOD: Well, give us some examples, then.
DYKSTRA: Much has been reported, not just in the past few days, but over Pruitt’s six years as AG in Oklahoma about his loyalty to the oil and gas industry, and the industry’s financial support for Pruitt. Not only is he regarded as a main architect behind the assault by state attorneys general on EPA’s Clean Power Plan, he’s also sued the agency he’s now expected to lead over air pollution and fracking rules, among other things. He has also issued flame-throwing statements about EPA usurping states’ rights in protecting the environment while he preaches climate denial. I found another obscure item from Pruitt’s career.
CURWOOD: Like what?
DYKSTRA: His predecessor as Oklahoma AG, Drew Edmondson, had sued the state’s poultry industry for water pollution in 2005. There was no resolution in the case by 2010, when Pruitt was elected with financial support from Big Chicken. And 11 years after the case was filed, the federal judge hasn’t budged, and Mr. Pruitt, now the Plaintiff, hasn’t pressed the case. The bottom line is that there’s outrage among environmental activists and Senators like Bernie Sanders and Tim Kaine, who promise a stormy and question-filled confirmation hearing, even though they almost certainly can’t muster enough votes to block his confirmation.
CURWOOD: Now, Peter, you usually flip back through the history calendar. What you got for us today?
A view of Ma’an, Jordan, near where scientists discovered riverbed pollutants from humans nearly 7,000 years ago. (Photo: Cliff Hellis, Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
DYKSTRA: Well, over the past couple of centuries we’ve gotten pretty good at putting bad stuff in rivers. Great rivers like the Thames were open sewers dating back to medieval times. More recently, oil, industrial waste, toxic algae, and more in recent years, making India’s most sacred river, the Ganges, a serious health risk. And of course, you’ve got Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River, which frequently caught fire and burned in the '50s and '60s. But new research says we may have been ruining rivers since at least the end of the Stone Age, 7,000 years ago.
CURWOOD: I knew we were good at messing up rivers, but I had no idea we were that experienced at it.
DYKSTRA: Apparently we are. Researchers at the University of Waterloo in Canada tested a riverbed in southern Jordan, where the locals made copper by a primitive method of smelting, heating and burning copper ore. The waste they left behind contained heavy metals including copper residues, lead, zinc, cadmium, arsenic and mercury. This likely created some whopping health problems for the earliest people of the Bronze Age, but the contamination that can still be measured in this now-dry riverbed suggest it pretty much killed off a river as well.
CURWOOD: Wow, 7,000 years ago. Peter Dykstra is with Environmental Health News, that’s EHN.org and DailyClimate.org. Thanks Peter, we’ll talk to you soon.
DYKSTRA: Thanks, Steve. Talk to you soon.
CURWOOD: And there’s more on these stories at our website, LOE.org.
Keep reading...Show less
The Arctic suicides: it's not the dark that kills you.
The first death was on the night of Jan. 9. It was a Saturday. Pele Kristiansen spent the morning at home, drinking beers and hanging out with his older brother, which wasn't so unusual. There wasn't a lot of work in town. A lot of people drank. In the afternoon, they heard someone banging on their door, yelling.
The first death was on the night of Jan. 9.
It was a Saturday. Pele Kristiansen spent the morning at home, drinking beers and hanging out with his older brother, which wasn't so unusual. There wasn't a lot of work in town. A lot of people drank. In the afternoon, they heard someone banging on their door, yelling.
"Polar bear! It's a polar bear!"
On the frozen fjord a couple of miles away, they could see the bear. Hunting in the Arctic — bears and reindeer and seals and birds — is at the core of Inuit life, even today.
The polar bear was coming toward the town.
A little drunk and really excited, Pele and his buddies fired up the motor on their fishing boat and nosed through the slushy ice in the harbor of their East Greenland village, Tiniteqilaaq, until they were as close as they could get. They got out of the boat, stood on the ice and pointed their rifles at the enormous animal.
Hunters head out to sea in a motorboat in Tiniteqilaaq, Greenland.
Victor Cerutti
Among the Inuit, hunting a polar bear is a big deal. The bears have huge territories — to actually see one around Tiniteqilaaq was rare. And because of their size and ferocity, they're not easy to kill. It's usually a group effort, so according to tradition, the first four people to shoot it share the meat and the glory.
That day, Pele shot the polar bear.
And he was so happy.
That evening, Pele went out drinking to celebrate.
The next morning he was dead. He had killed himself. He was 22.
ABOUT THIS STORY. For more than 30 years, the suicide rate in Greenland has been among the highest in the world. As the country tries to leave its colonial past behind, it is struggling to save the lives of a new generation of Inuit youth.
Read more stories in NPR's special report.
Thirteen days later, in the next town over, a 15-year-old boy named Peter Pilanat killed himself in his grandparents' home. Peter and Pele didn't know each other, at least not well, but they had friends in common. In a place with only 3,000 people, Peter most certainly knew of Pele's death.
An aerial view of Tiniteqilaaq.
Victor Cerutti
Two suicides in less than two weeks. To the people in these small towns, it felt like the beginning of something bad, something sickeningly familiar. Something that had happened too many times in too many towns in Greenland. A cluster of suicides, inexplicable and indiscriminate, tearing its way through the youngest generation in a country that has the highest known suicide rate in the world.
The Town That Disappeared
When Anda Poulsen was young, he felt lucky. He had been born in a town with great history. Kangeq, Greenland, was a place people told stories about. It was famous for its strong Inuit hunters and good location on a point at the mouth of a fjord. It was where the first Scandinavian missionaries had settled, the first Greenlandic artists had painted and some of the last traditional Inuit kayak hunters had braved the ocean.
Residents of Kangeq gather for a photo in 1920s.
Greenland National Museum
Kangeq was a place that made great men. Anda was proud.
Anda Poulsen as a young boy in the 1960s in Kangeq.
Courtesy Anda Poulsen
But Kangeq — which had survived a medieval drought and a post-medieval Little Ice Age, Vikings and missionaries — was about to meet a new and devastating foe. Anda was not going to be the hunter his grandfathers had been, and surviving into adulthood would be more difficult than he imagined.
Alyson Hurt/NPR
Greenland was a colony of Denmark (it still isn't completely independent). After World War II, building on American wartime infrastructure on the island, Denmark decided it was time to develop the local economy. Greenland was a perfect place for commercial fishing, and there was potentially a lot of money to be made on halibut and shrimp. The Danish government brought in trading companies and trawlers.
Within a few years, it was out with the kayaks and famous hunters, and in with the motorboats and fishing rights. The influx of money and new technology made some people richer, but it undercut the traditional Inuit economy in small villages, which was based on collective hunting and trading of meat and skins.
Hunters and fishermen offer the day's catch for sale outside a Nuuk supermarket.
John W. Poole/NPR
As a child, Anda played near the abandoned kayaks along the shore. "Wooden skeletons without covers," he remembers.
The new motor boats were only the beginning. Commercial fishing required fish processing factories. And those factories needed workers. Kangeq was too small for a real factory — only about 150 people lived there when times were good. Once the fish factories opened up in the capital, people started to leave Kangeq for the jobs, and for education.
A present-day view of Kangeq's old harbor.
John W. Poole/NPR
By 1974, only 50 or 60 people lived in Kangeq. And this is where things really started to fall apart for Anda's hometown. He was 14 when it happened. By that time, he was living in the capital, Nuuk, where he and the remaining kids from Kangeq went to school.
"I heard that Kangeq was closing," Anda says. "Everyone heard. Everyone knew. It was very hard."
Kangeq's old wharf and houses appear ghostlike through a late winter snowstorm.
John W. Poole/NPR
Kangeq was being erased. The Danish government was removing the village from the list of towns in Greenland. They were closing the store, shutting off the power, and reassigning the priest. From the government's point of view, it was a purely practical decision — it was difficult to provide basic services like health clinics and schools to every tiny village. It would be much easier if the Inuit people moved to larger towns where the infrastructure was already in place.
Anda's family — his mother, his sisters, his cousins — had to pack their things and say goodbye to their yellowy-orange clapboard house overlooking the sea. Their new home in Nuuk would be in a concrete apartment block, with hundreds of other families from dozens of other small villages that had also been erased.
"My mother, my sisters and I all lived in a tenement building," Anda says. It was in a working-class neighborhood near Nuuk's growing harbor.
A reindeer skull ornaments a Nuuk apartment block.
John W. Poole/NPR
The apartment blocks were symbols of progress, the authorities told them, luxurious examples of modern Greenland, with heat and power and plumbing and paved sidewalks outside. But Anda says the apartments didn't feel luxurious — they felt foreign and lonely.
The paved roads only separated them from the ocean, a barrier to the maritime hunting life they had depended on for thousands of years.
Butcher Joel Jorgensen skins reindeer heads at a roadside market in Nuuk.
John W. Poole/NPR
Some tried to ignore the new setting and live as they had before. Anda recalls men hunting seals in Nuuk harbor in the afternoons, next to the Royal Arctic Line cargo ships, and dragging the meat back to their flats on children's sleds.
"There was culture clash," says Anda. And, perhaps even worse, "there was prejudice against the people from the villages. You could feel it in their words, in the way they looked at you."
A hunter heads into the fjord that surrounds Nuuk.
John W. Poole/NPR
Anda, who is now 56, turns toward the window of his office in Nuuk. All his life, he has censored his anger and tried to focus on finding solutions. Still, the past hurts. He makes his hand into a fist, then lets it drop to the table.
"They mocked us."
For Anda, there were two choices. He could stay what he was, a village kid who spoke Greenlandic and didn't fit in, or he could change and become a Danish-speaking city kid indistinguishable from the others. At school the message was clear: Danish-speakers were better than Greenlandic-speakers; Danish stuff was cooler than Greenlandic stuff. Village kids were inferior to city kids.
"I was good at integrating into my class." He sighs. He knew he had to leave parts of his old self, his Kangeq self, behind. Or at least bury them beneath a more Danish exterior.
A snapshot of Anda Poulsen as a young man.
Courtesy Anda Poulsen
"That was how I survived." He forced himself to adjust.
But there were those who couldn't adjust.
A Lost Generation
The first death Anda heard about came shortly after Kangeq closed. The man was young — just 20. Anda knew his parents.
Shortly after that, another family Anda knew found their teenage son's body. A few years later, their other son killed himself.
From the time Anda was 14 until he finished college, at least 10 people from Kangeq killed themselves. "It was almost all the young men." He places a hand over his heart. "Very few of us survived."
The details blurred into one long, dismal memory of bodies found and parents crying and silent funerals where no one ever asked the question that everyone was wondering.
Why?
A small island sits in the middle of Kangeq's old harbor.
John W. Poole/NPR
Anda wanted to know not just why the suicides were happening, but why no one was talking about them. And why wasn't anything being done to prevent them? Who was helping the family members left behind? The only resource for people who were suicidal was a church hotline.
Anda leans back in his chair and chooses his words carefully. "For a lot of people, the priest was not who they want to talk to about their problems." The church, after all, is an arm of the Danish government.
Anda's grief turned into something more like an obsession. He finished high school, had his first child. He wanted to help, but he still didn't know how. He applied to college to study family therapy, got in and by the time he got his certificate, he was downright angry. It was unconscionable that Greenland would let an entire generation kill itself. He had to do something.
Anda Poulsen, in white jacket, poses for a portrait with his fellow 1989 graduates of Greenland's school of social work in Nuuk.
Courtesy Anda Poulsen
There was one problem: There were no clear answers to any of Anda's questions about why people were killing themselves or how to prevent it. Like native people all around the Arctic — and all over the world — Greenlanders were seeing the deadly effects of rapid modernization and unprecedented cultural interference. American Indians and Alaska Natives (many of whom share Inuit roots with Greenlanders) had already seen many of their communities buckle under the same pressures.
In Greenland, the problem was only getting worse. Between 1970 and 1980, the suicide rate there quadrupled to about seven times the U.S. rate (it's still about six times higher). The suicide rate was, and still is, so high that it's not an exaggeration to say that everyone in Greenland knows someone who has killed himself. Many people I spoke with struggled to explain what that felt like, to live in a place where suicide is so pervasive, and most of them settled uncomfortably on the same word: normal.
Suicide in Greenland, I heard over and over, is normal. People don't mean it's OK, just that it's been so common for so long that the next death almost seems inevitable.
By 1985, suicide was killing more people than cancer. That year, at least 50 people killed themselves in Greenland. The total population was only 53,000. In the U.S., it would be as if in one year, the entire population of say, Lincoln, Neb. — more than 250,000 people — killed themselves. And no one acknowledged it; it didn't make the papers.
At that time, almost no one was studying suicide in Greenland. There were a few psychologists, but they were Danish, so it was impossible for Inuit people to get help in their native language. In therapy, each word matters. Plus, the stigma around suicide was intense. It was shameful. People who had lost children to suicide weren't even acknowledging that fact to each other, it was so taboo.
A portrait of one of Atsa Schmidt's grandsons sits on a dresser in her Nuuk living room.
John W. Poole/NPR
An Unspeakable Act
In the spring of 1989, Atsa Schmidt's son had been dead for nearly a decade. Ujuanseeraq had loved acting and dancing. He ran a small theater group and was in school to become a mechanic. He had a lot of friends. But there were signs. He started telling his mother he was tired all the time, that everything he did felt too hard.
Then, one day, he didn't come home for dinner. The next day they found his body in the back of the theater. He was 21.
Right after it happened, his suicide had been something Atsa discussed only with her closest family. It was a deeply private and painful part of her life. Even today, she doesn't have any photos of her son in her home.
So his death wasn't really something she expected to come up at the grocery store.
"I was shopping for food at the Brugseni market in Nuuk," she says, as if the geography of Nuuk in the '90s is common knowledge. "You know, the one that burned down." Atsa was pushing her cart down an aisle when this young guy she knew through her cousins from Kangeq came up to her.
A view of Aqqusinersuaq Road leading into the center of Nuuk.
John W. Poole/NPR
"He said, 'I'd like to talk to you for a minute.' "
It was Anda Poulsen. There among the canned goods, Anda told her his plan. He was starting a support group for parents who had lost a child to suicide. He wanted her to come to the first meeting.
"I said that's too much, I can't do it."
But Anda, young and optimistic, replied, "Of course you can! Of course you can do it. It will help you. You will see, it will help you. Come to the meeting with your husband."
"So," Atsa remembers, "I didn't really want to, but I went to the meeting."
At the first meeting, she met a handful of other parents whose sons had killed themselves.
And found it was a relief to talk to them.
Atsa Schmidt describes the old family pictures that line the walls and shelves of her house.
John W. Poole/NPR
The group met again, and then again. "It was very clear that people needed help," says Anda. "And not just parents. People who were thinking about suicide, too." Atsa started helping Anda. They hosted events together about suicide prevention, open to everyone.
Less than a year after their conversation at the grocery store, Atsa Schmidt and Anda Poulsen decided to expand even further. They opened Greenland's first national suicide hotline.
It was an unconventional idea. They didn't have the resources to hire professional counselors. Instead, they built on the resources they had — middle-aged women who were good at listening. Atsa has no education at all, let alone a degree in social work or counseling, but she signed up to take the night shift. She knew she would end up with most of the calls — people don't usually call suicide hotlines during the day. She had no idea if she would be able to handle it.
"I didn't know what would happen," she says. "We didn't know what to expect."
And yet, she felt sure that doing something had to be better than doing nothing. Atsa says her thinking back then was that a lot of people felt very alone. Just by listening, and acknowledging the pain, she hoped she could help.
Apartment blocks dominate central Nuuk. A mural commissioned by the city is a large-scale reproduction of a photograph from the early 1900s.
John W. Poole/NPR
By sheer force of will, the hotline took off. Every night, Atsa kept the hotline cellphone next to her bed. For 18 years, she woke up in the middle of the night and talked to suicidal people. "There were many people who needed help. That was clear."
Many of the people who called were young men who felt like they had no one to talk to. A lot of them had siblings or parents who had killed themselves. She would always start by telling them she wasn't an expert, and she couldn't give them medical advice.
But, she would tell them, she had felt some of the things the callers were feeling, and she was there to listen. Sometimes, she'd read a prayer into the phone.
The stress of the conversations was nearly unbearable. Her hands shook; she fainted without warning. Her son complained she was spending too much energy on strangers. Her husband worried she wasn't sleeping enough, working all day in a nursing home and answering calls all night. After a serious case of hives landed her in in the hospital, her doctor told her she shouldn't work at the hotline for three months. She took his advice, but after three months she was back answering calls.
Atsa's husband, Jan Schmidt, sits in the couples' Nuuk living room.
John W. Poole/NPR
"I've talked to thousands of people," she says. "Even today, people I don't know say thank you to me." They are people who have called the hotline anonymously and recognize her even though she can't recognize them.
Atsa answered thousands of calls during her time on the hotline, and for her, there was a clear pattern behind Greenland's suicides. Love, she says. Or, loss of it.
We're in her living room in Nuuk, surrounded by photos of her children and grandchildren. She's 72 now and losing her sight. "Some people, they are raised with a lot of love," she explains, "but some people are not. And these people who didn't get love in their childhood, when they meet a partner, they try to hold onto him like they own him. They think that this one person, they can only love him and he is the only one who will ever love them. And when they break up, the person feels like their life is over." Atsa thinks for a moment. "Maybe I am giving them a little love."
Atsa Schmidt in her living room in Nuuk.
John W. Poole/NPR
Listen to Atsa Schmidt telling part of her story in her native language, West Greenlandic.
Listen· 1:25
Her observations are in line with something psychologists and sociologists think is fundamental to the causes of suicide in Greenland. When communities are disrupted, like Kangeq was, families start to collapse. There's an increase in alcoholism, child neglect and physical abuse, all of which are risk factors for suicide. Later, people who didn't get the love and support they needed as children find it difficult to cope with the routine heartbreak of dating, and a breakup becomes the final insult in a lifetime of hurt.
"There are a lot of negative consequences to rapid modernization," says Greenlandic sociologist Steven Arnfjord. "We're still dealing with a lot of aftermath from policies of the '70s and '80s."
There's also something broader — a loss of identity that happens when a culture, in this case Inuit culture, is demonized and broken down. When a culture is largely erased over less than a generation, as it was in Greenland, a lot of young people feel cut off from the older generations, but not really part of the new one. It's especially difficult for young men, whose fathers and grandfathers were hunters, and who struggle to understand what it means to be an urban Inuit man. Without strong families and communities to help them cope, some of them are so overwhelmed and lost, they take their own lives.
Kayaks frame a bay at the south end of Nuuk.
John W. Poole/NPR
Fifty years after the suicide rate started to climb in Greenland's capital, it appears to have plateaued, although it is still five times higher than in Denmark. For young people in Nuuk, the pain of assimilation and modernization still exists but is less acute. And while mental health resources are far from adequate, there are more than there used to be.
But in the smaller towns, remote communities, the situation is as bad as ever.
A view of the East Greenlandic town of Tasiilaq.
Carl Skou
The Worst Sunday
Julius Nielsen was standing right next to Pele Kristiansen on Jan. 9, when Pele shot the polar bear.
"There was so much adrenaline," Julius says. "I didn't have a rifle, and I kept saying give me your rifle!" Julius was older than Pele and thought he'd have a better shot.
But Pele kept the gun and shot the bear.
Julius drops his head into his hands. "Pele was so happy." The two men were from the same tiny settlement of Tiniteqilaaq. Left behind by a rapidly urbanizing society, their home village retained the rhythms and traditions of an earlier time, when hunters were heroes. The polar bear was a rare enough occurrence that everyone in town celebrated well into the night on Saturday.
On Sunday Julius woke up early, around 5 a.m., feeling good. The weather looked clear enough for seal hunting. He fed his sled dogs in the morning light and went back home for a cup of coffee.
Sled dogs roughhouse in the snow in the east coast town of Tiniteqilaaq.
Victor Cerutti
Then, at 8, he got a call from Pele's brother.
"Stupid, stupid Pele," he said. "He killed himself."
"You're joking," Julius said.
"Look out the window," the brother said. When Julius looked out, he could see Pele's older brother standing next to his icebound fishing boat anchored in the tiny settlement's frozen harbor.
A lone rowboat sits icebound in a Nuuk harbor.
John W. Poole/NPR
"He was just looking at me." Julius grabbed his jacket and pulled it on as he ran down to the ice.
"We had the best Saturday, and the worst Sunday."
Julius covered his friend's body with a tarp and called the police. Tiniteqilaaq is 25 miles from the largest town in east Greenland, Tasiilaq. Although families and hunters go back and forth all the time, the route between the two places is nonetheless remote, includes a glacier crossing and can be treacherous.
That particular weekend, there was already 3 feet of snow on the ground. It took the police officer, a young Danish man still new to the area, all day to travel from Tasiilaq by snowmobile. When he arrived in the evening, it was already dark and snowing again, and he found he couldn't communicate with the dead man's family, who spoke only Greenlandic. Julius had to translate.
The police officer told the family that a doctor would need to examine the body before it could be buried. There were no doctors in Tiniteqilaaq, so they'd need to bring one from Tasiilaq.
By now the snow was too deep. They'd have to wait for a helicopter.
They moved Pele's body to the health clinic, which also serves as the town meeting house, hotel, post office and church. The nurse there was Pele's aunt. She couldn't bring herself to clean the body, so Julius did it himself. He cut Pele's favorite dress shirt down the back and tucked it around his friend's stiff body, trying to make it look as neat as he could.
Pele Kristiansen was buried on Friday, Jan. 15, 2016. Dozens of people from Tasiilaq went to the funeral. All that next week, people were walking around in a daze, trying to explain the inexplicable to themselves and to their families. Julius' 13-year-old son had loved spending time with Pele. They went dog-sledding and played video games together. He kept asking his father how someone who seemed so happy could kill himself.
A sled dog team travels over a glacier outside Tiniteqilaaq.
Victor Cerutti
"It's just not possible to explain," Julius says. Pele had never mentioned suicidal thoughts, had never attempted suicide before, at least that Julius knew of. And yet there was no way his death was an accident. He had definitely killed himself. "I don't know why and I can't explain why," Julius said to his son. "I'm sorry." He told him that as much as it hurt, eventually he would learn to live with Pele's death.
A few days later, 15-year-old Peter Pilanat killed himself. That death brought with it a new fear: Was this the beginning of a suicide cluster?
Grave markers and barren shrubs buried by snow in a Nuuk cemetery.
John W. Poole/NPR
The Contagion Effect
Sometimes, suicides can start chain reactions. Psychologists call it the contagion effect or suicidal transmission — after a close family member or friend kills himself, people who are already having suicidal thoughts are at greater risk for suicide. For that reason, suicide clusters or waves are especially likely in small, isolated communities where everyone knows each other. In one study from Greenland, 60 percent of young people who killed themselves did so within four months of another suicide in the same district.
Still, it's impossible to know why this particular 15-year-old boy killed himself in Tasiilaq. But whatever the reason, after two suicides in two weeks in a place with fewer than 3,000 people, a lot of people felt as if a vicious cycle was restarting. It had happened before in Greenland. There was the wave of teenagers who killed themselves in Illulissat around 2004. A slew of deaths that swept through school dormitories in the '90s.
The disaster in Kangeq.
"To be a parent in this case, you feel very powerless, helpless," Julius says. Two of his children had gone to school with the dead boy. Privately he started to question whether he felt safe keeping his kids in school in Tasiilaq.
Despite having the highest suicide rate — more than 400 per 100,000 — of any town in Greenland, Tasiilaq does not have a psychologist. Nurses and social workers and therapists there do their best to counsel suicidal residents, as do psychologists 500 miles away in Nuuk, who can talk to patients over a video connection. But Greenland's Ministry of Health acknowledges it does not have adequate resources, and a lot of people in Tasiilaq say that when they report a suicidal friend or family member, nothing happens.
Back in the capital, the recent pair of suicides weren't even on the radar of the Ministry of Health. But the municipal government had heard about them. Kristian Rosing, the coordinator of suicide prevention for the region, started rearranging his schedule in case he had to go to Tasiilaq.
It takes a full day to travel from Nuuk to Tasiilaq, first on a small propeller plane, then on a helicopter. The flights are about as likely to depart as they are to be canceled, and in the winter there are only two flights a week. A round-trip ticket costs about $1,000. "I had planned to visit Tasiilaq in the fall," Rosing says, "but when I heard about the deaths, I thought my boss might send me sooner, to teach the kids how to cope with the suicides. Teach them how to prevent another one."
Kristian Rosing in Nuuk city hall, where he works.
John W. Poole/NPR
The first people the regional government sent in, though, were grief counselors, a social worker and a family therapist. Their job was to help families get through the next few weeks.
Espen Christiansen, a teacher at the school, remembers the first day back after the 15-year-old had killed himself. He looked out at the dead boy's classmates and he didn't know what to say. Their eyes were red from crying. "We were mostly silent. They weren't talking very much. I thought it was most respectful to just be quiet, too."
GETTING HELP
If someone you know exhibits warning signs for suicide:
Do not leave the person alone
Remove any firearms, alcohol, drugs, or sharp objects that could be used in a suicide attempt
In the United States, call the U.S. National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255
Take the person to an emergency room or seek help from a medical or mental health professional
In Greenland, contact your local police or hospital, or call Attavik 146 between 7 p.m. and 9 p.m. local time
After lunch, some of the kids wrote down their feelings in letters addressed to their dead classmate. Christiansen helped them make a shrine on Peter's desk, with candles and ribbon. "I told them they could go home if they wanted to, but they stayed," he said. "I think they didn't want to be alone."
At this point, it had been about two weeks since Peter killed himself. In Nuuk, Rosing's boss told him it was time to get to Tasiilaq — as soon as possible.
Rosing is a constitutionally honest man. He is the first to admit that he is not particularly well-qualified for his job. His original training was as a shopkeeper's assistant, and a few years ago, he took a three-month course in administration, although at that point he had already been in charge of suicide prevention in a smaller region for many years. He spends most of his time going to different schools and teaching teenagers and people who work with kids how to talk about suicide.
He was nervous about the trip. Usually, he follows a curriculum that involves speaking very bluntly about suicide, even to kids. He does exercises where students have to brainstorm reasons a person might kill himself or asks them to pretend to be a suicidal person in a role-play. He had never used the curriculum with kids who had just lost a friend.
"These kids, they are very fragile," he said. "I was worried about how they would react."
He decided to go with what he had, and hope it would help rather than hurt.
Guidance counselor Alice Pivat talks to 15-year-old girls during a suicide prevention class in Tasiilaq.
Rebecca Hersher/NPR
Teenagers On The Edge
A full month after Peter died, at 8:30 in the morning, Rosing puttered restlessly around the back of the community hall in Tasiilaq. The 10th-graders — the classmates of the boy who had killed himself — were due any minute for their first day of suicide prevention instruction.
He had bought heaps of bread and cheese and jam for breakfast for the almost 60 kids he was expecting. As they trickled in by twos and threes, he smiled silently and gestured to the table full of food.
EDITOR'S NOTE
Throughout this story, we do not include any details about the methods people used to kill themselves. Nor have we speculated about individual motives or described the act of suicide as anything but what it is. This is by design. Suicide is a public health issue, and like all public health problems, how we talk about it affects our collective ability to prevent it. Graphic description or public glorification of suicide is potentially dangerous for people who are at risk for suicide. You can read more about the media guidelines for reporting on suicide recommended by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention at the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.
Fifteen-year-old Paul-Ib Uitsatikitseq was antsy as soon as he walked in. He was still thinking about his friend's funeral, and he knew he was going to be asked to talk about suicide. He finished his bread, fumbled with his napkin, then pulled out his cellphone.
Rosing saw the phone and walked over. "Put that away, please," he said. Then, more gently, "You know this is important." He put his hand on Paul-Ib's shoulder until the boy pushed the phone down into the pocket of his jeans.
The first assignment was to get into groups to brainstorm reasons that a person might commit suicide. The other boys in Paul-Ib's group messed around with a paper football. Paul-Ib bent over the paper and, in haphazard pencil, scribbled out 10 reasons. The first one said Loneliness. Being lonely for long time. Being lonely in whole life.
Number three read simply Love.
Not every exercise went as well. In the middle of a video about suicide and child abuse, one girl simply got up and left the building. A teacher went running after her. Another boy refused to write or say anything and just sat in the back of the room staring at his hands. After the first day, about a dozen kids didn't come back.
But many more did. After a few reprimands about wearing earbuds, most of them listened to Rosing. His message was more about life than about death. He talked about how hard it can be to feel alone and sad in a small town. He urged them to talk to each other about their feelings, good ones and bad ones, and then he had them act out those conversations.
On the last day, the kids got diplomas that said Suicide Prevention Life Course Participant.
It had gone well, he thought. Or, at least it hadn't gone terribly wrong.
Eino Taunajik and Kamilla Larsen watch a music video during a break from the suicide prevention course in Tasiilaq.
Rebecca Hersher/NPR
Lonely Work
A few weeks after his trip to Tasiilaq, Rosing is hunched in his undersized desk chair. When he talks about his time there, he sounds nothing but depressed — despite his apparent success helping the kids there talk about suicide.
"I don't think I can prevent another child from dying in Tasiilaq," he says. "I know it will happen again."
Last year, before the suicides happened in Tasiilaq, Rosing almost quit his job. "I had just had enough," he says, of going into school after school, town after town, hearing stories about pain and loss and desperation, and then, inevitably, hearing later that another child or young person had committed suicide. It was exhausting and frustrating and isolating.
"For me, it is very lonely work. Even though I have colleagues, I feel alone."
Graffiti covers the stairwell of an apartment block in central Nuuk.
John W. Poole/NPR
Rosing says that to fix the underlying problems in Tasiilaq — the alcoholism and joblessness and poverty and child neglect — it's going to take money and manpower. For a start, the town needs a full-time psychologist, better-educated teachers, more social workers, and a serious jobs program to employ educated young people who return home after getting their degrees elsewhere.
As does every other town in Greenland. All 100 or so of them, sprinkled around the coast of the largest island in the world.
"Twenty years," he thinks. "If we do everything we can, it will be 20 years." That long to get the suicide problem in Greenland under control. Twenty more years before what happened in Kangeq long ago stops happening in Greenland.
It's something Anda tries not to think about in his day-to-day life. Between his job as a family therapist and raising his three kids, he's always busy. "There are always more families who need help," he says. "Plus, I have my own family. My own children to take care of. It's stressful."
A few years ago, Anda Poulsenfound an unexpected outlet for his stress. More than two decades after he forced himself to assimilate, Anda rediscovered traditional Inuit drum dancing, which celebrates hunting and being near the ocean, and started a group called the Nuuk Drum Dancers. Now, at least once a week, he sings and dances with his sealskin drum. "When I feel sad or angry, I drum dance," he says.
Anda Poulsen plays the traditional Inuit drum and sings the old songs by the ocean in Nuuk.
Courtesy of Anda Poulsen
Listen to Anda Poulsen and the Nuuk Drum Dancers.
Listen· 1:30
In his search for a way forward, Anda Poulsen is reconnecting with the past.
And he hopes his children will be allowed to express their Inuit identities in a way he was not.
A bronze sculpture of the Inuit Mother of the Sea sits in Nuuk's colonial harbor in the shadow of Nuuk's oldest Danish church. According to legend, she is the source of Greenland's prosperity.
John W. Poole/NPR
"I think the future will get better and better for them."
In the summer, Anda takes his children back to Kangeq, where the colonial wharf is slowly collapsing and the old store stands empty. Sometimes, while they fish and play among the abandoned houses, he takes his drum up the hill and closes his eyes and dances.
Schoolkids play in the fading light and surf along a small Nuuk beachfront.
John W. Poole/NPR
Additional Credits
Rebecca Hersher spent 10 weeks in Greenland as NPR's Above the Fray fellow. Text and audio for this story were edited by Alison MacAdam, Marc Silver and Vikki Valentine. Visuals were edited by Ben de la Cruz, Malaka Gharib and John Poole. Additional reporting and translation by Nina-Vivi Andersen, Sara Jakobsen and Angutimmarik Josefsen. This story was made possible in part by The John Alexander Project, which supports foreign reporting in undercovered parts of the world.
Submit A Question
Do you have questions about this special report? We'd like to hear from you and provide answers in a follow-up story. Tell us in the comments or send an email to nprcrowdsource@npr.org with "Arctic suicides" in the subject line.
Keep reading...Show less
Beyond the headlines.
This week, Peter Dykstra and host Steve Curwood discuss the fact that the numbers of wild tigers are growing, that responses to replacing lead water pipes differ from city to city and look back on Aaron Burr, who proposed a municipal water system for New York City in the 18th century, but later as vice-president shot Alexander Hamilton.
This week, Peter Dykstra and host Steve Curwood discuss the fact that the numbers of wild tigers are growing, that responses to replacing lead water pipes differ from city to city and look back on Aaron Burr, who proposed a municipal water system for New York City in the 18th century, but later as vice-president shot Alexander Hamilton.
Transcript
CURWOOD: Some stories fit to print don’t make it onto the front page – and those are the ones that Peter Dykstra searches out beyond the headlines. Peter’s with Environmental Health News, that’s EHN.org and DailyClimate.org and joins us from Conyers, Georgia. Hello, Peter.
DYKSTRA: Well, hi, Steve. I’ve got some good news again this week.
CURWOOD: Uh hey, that’s two weeks in a row for you ... you feeling OK?
DYKSTRA: I’m feeling fine and I’ve got a survey from the World Wildlife Fund. Several Asian governments and conservation groups and together they report that tiger populations are on the rise in Asia after a century’s worth of decline.
CURWOOD: Now that is some good news, but tigers are hardly out of the woods, or should I say, out of the forests of the night.
DYKSTRA: Oh not at all. The count is 3,890 tigers, up from about 3,200 six years ago. But consider that in 1900 it was a hundred thousand wild tigers in Asia. And here’s a number that really shocked me: there are far more captive tigers alive today than wild ones – at least 5,000 alone in the U.S. in zoos, circuses, wildlife ranches and private menageries.
CURWOOD: That is kind of surprising. But what do you think are the reasons for the increase in the wild?
DYKSTRA: Well there’s better wildlife protection, a slowing of habitat loss, and a commitment by Asian nations including Russia, China, and India to try and double wild tiger populations. There’s another recent Google-Earth-based study has measured both the loss and the protection of tiger habitat, identifying key habit areas because even if we want tigers out of the woods, we don’t want them out of the forests.
CURWOOD: Unless they’re in zoos. Hey, what’s next?
DYKSTRA: Well here’s a tale of two cities and their respective dealings with lead contamination. Fifteen years ago, Madison, Wisconsin launched an ambitious project to eliminate lead drinking water pipes from the city. It cost just under $20 million to remove lead from 5,600 properties, with the owners footing about 20 percent of the bill.
Lead pipes call into question the safety of Philadelphia's drinking water. (Photo: Jakeline, Flickr CC BY-NC 2.0)
CURWOOD: Hey, that sounds relatively cheap.
DYKSTRA: Yeah, but the estimate for doing the same thing in Wisconsin’s biggest city, Milwaukee, is at least half a billion dollars to swap out 70,000 lead water lines. But onto another lead story from another city.
CURWOOD: OK.
DYKSTRA: As with many big cities, Philadelphia’s school system is facing enormous challenges over budgets and the infrastructure of aging schools. As early as 1993 the city knew its schools might have a lead problem and while it took a few years and some pressure from health officials, by 1999 Philadelphia’s schools started to get the lead out. They removed some lead pipes, dismantled some water fountains and painted do not drink sign over bathroom sinks.
CURWOOD: So the problems are all solved in Philly?
DYKSTRA: No but let’s call it mixed results. Things may be better, but this is hardly a shining success. The Philadelphia School Board knew, but didn’t tell anyone about the lead issues for six years at first. And when they did, one report says EPA testers were blocked from entering schools to do their jobs and find out how bad the problems are. Those “Do Not Drink” signs are still up in many schools and when the water fountains were removed, some were never replaced, leaving kids with few places to get a drink of water at school.
CURWOOD: And that shows just how hard to fix those problems can be, particularly for governments and school systems that are a bit short on cash. Hey what do you have us from the history vaults this week?
DYKSTRA: Let’s take you back to April, 1799 in New York City. A group of citizens headed by a future Vice President got together to create a financial firm and launch an ambitious project – a centralized water system for the growing city. It was called the Manhattan Company, and it was the origin of not only one of the largest drinking water systems in the world, but the financial side evolved into today’s giant J.P. Morgan Chase.
Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr’s famous duel was preceded by their financial competition. (Photo: From a painting by J. Mund. [Public domain], Wikimedia Commons)
CURWOOD: Hmm, the New York water system and JP Morgan Chase – two things that are too big to fail. Who was the Vice President?
DYKSTRA: The one and only Aaron Burr. The big financial competitor for Burr’s Manhattan Company was the Bank of New York, founded by Alexander Hamilton, who had been George Washington’s Treasury Secretary. The Bank of New York also eventually got swallowed up by JP Morgan Chase. Now of course, Burr and Hamilton didn’t like each other very much. Five years later at a spot not far from the modern day Jersey end of the Lincoln Tunnel, Burr killed Hamilton in a duel.
Hamilton today is the subject of a Broadway musical and model for the ten dollar bill; Burr finished out his term, but was a pariah best known today for being tied with Vice President Cheney as having shot the most people while in office.
CURWOOD: And I thought modern-day politics was a bloodsport! Peter Dykstra’s with Environmental Health News and the Daily Climate.org, that’s EHN.org and the DailyClimate.org. Thanks Peter, we’ll talk to you again next time.
DYKSTRA: OK, Steve. Thanks, we'll talk to you soon.
CURWOOD: And there's more on these stories on our website, LOE.org.
Keep reading...Show less
ORIGINAL REPORTING
MOST POPULAR
CLIMATE
