[CPEO-MEF] Bering Sea pollution

[Lenny Siegel <lsiegel@cpeo.org>]

Pollution fears threaten a way of life
Alaska: Reports of tainted animals have the native Chevak tribe 
reconsidering their traditional and healthy subsistence diet.


By Tom Horton
Baltimore Sun
September 20, 2004

CHEVAK, Alaska - Even maps of Alaska often don't identify Kokechik Bay, 
a small inlet of the Bering Sea in the vast delta between the Yukon and 
Kuskokwim Rivers. No one lives there except for half a dozen contractors 
manning a Cold War-era radar site, still trained on the former Soviet Union.

But the bay has always been life itself to a few thousand members of 
Alaska's native tribes in three nearby subsistence villages.

"Our elders always used to tell us, in times of hardship, Kokechik Bay 
is the place you go, the place you can rely on even in bad times," 
recalls Richard Tuluq, tribal administrator of Chevak.

In recent years, however, Tuluq says, people here and members of other 
Bering coast tribes in neighboring Hooper Bay and Scammon Bay have 
virtually ceased harvesting Arctic cod, blackfish, clams and other 
traditional foods from Kokechik.

While they still fish elsewhere, Alaskan natives are increasingly 
troubled by evidence of contamination in this corner of the 
million-square mile Bering Sea - source of about half of all seafood 
caught in the United States.

Amid reports of toxic leaks from the radar station at nearby Cape 
Romanzof, and of pollutants from distant lands carried here by winds and 
ocean currents, the natives worry that there is a link to rising adult 
cancer rates among their people and sharp increases in early childhood 
illnesses such as pneumonia and chronic infections. They complain of 
increased encounters with tumors and other mysterious abnormalities in 
fish, shellfish and bird eggs in the Kokechik Bay region.

…

for the entire article, see
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/health/bal-te.ms.alaska20sep20,1,5575324.story?coll=bal-health-headlines

--
Lenny Siegel
Director, Center for Public Environmental Oversight
c/o PSC, 278-A Hope St., Mountain View, CA 94041
Voice: 650/961-8918 or 650/969-1545
Fax: 650/961-8918
http://www.cpeo.org


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