A Million Little Pieces

Today's most interesting conference topic: Plastic. We love it. In 1950, global plastic demand was about 1.7 million tons a year. By 2014, that number was up to 311 million tons. It's super useful - bags, packaging, medical equipment, outdoor gear. You'd be hard pressed to look around you right now and not see any plastic.

And while we find it pretty handy to just throw away that empty plastic water bottle or dried up old pen, that stuff ends up everywhere, slowly breaking down into tinier and tinier pieces but not actually going away. This is proving to be an especially big problem in the ocean, where 13 million tons of plastic made its way in 2010.

Here's a short list of the problems it can cause. Some of these are nothing new - animals caught in soda can rings and or eating plastic bags, for instance - but there are a few that I found surprising:

• Entanglement - the aforementioned soda can rings are an example
• Ingestion - ditto the aforementioned plastic bags
• Vectors for dispersing organisms - because plastic lasts so long and drifts, organisms can attach to it and be carried to new areas.
• Toxins that affect animal health - the same crap that's bad for us in plastic (sometimes referred to as Persistent Organic Pollutants - POPs) can also be bad for animals. 
• Plastic debris on the seafloor - may change the local chemistry and release toxic chemicals

Microplastics - plastic bits less than 5mm in size - are the latest point of concern. These come from the breakdown of plastics or certain fibers (like rayon) into smaller and smaller pieces, and from products like exfoliants and toothpastes that contain microbeads (the US actually just banned these - the new law goes into effect in July 2017). 

Microplastics are often mistaken for food by all kinds of aquatic life, from tiny zooplankton to turtles. Sometimes the bits pass through them (I watched a video showing a copepod slurping up dozens of microplastics, and then pooping them out) but the animals can still absorb POPs or have inflammatory responses. Sometimes the particles get lodged in animals' guts, causing health issues, including starvation.

Interestingly, climate change and melting sea ice have an effect on plastic in Arctic waters. As the region warms and becomes more accessible, humans have a bigger footprint - more fishing, more tourists ships making ports of call to places like Longyearbyen, Svalbard - and the currents carry more plastics long-distance from Northern Europe. In fact, the amount of plastic found by Arctic researchers raises the possibility of a sixth garbage patch forming in the Barents Sea, just north of Norway and Russia.

Who Owns The Arctic?

A follow-up on Monday's topic. The question of who owns the Arctic, of who should be involved in its stewardship, has come up repeatedly during this conference. And, as one of today's speakers pointed out, there’s no real consensus on a) where the Arctic is geographically, or b) who exactly has a stake in the Arctic. That makes answering questions about stewardship even harder to answer, especially as the Arctic has resources serving people and places that are nowhere near it. 

So, on the most basic level, is the Arctic more global - a public good? Or is it more local - meant for a specified few?

At the big end of the scale, it's a place that helps meet global resource needs, a venue for new shipping lanes and a laboratory for international science. It serves as a point of both international tension and cooperation between multiple nations. It's an indicator of climate change. It's home to local cultures that are part of a bigger human narrative, as to lose the traditions and cultures found here would be to lose something of significance to our history. 

But it's also the homeland for indigenous peoples, whose lives are intertwined with the Arctic's future, and a part of many countries' national identity. It's a specific ecosystem upon which a tremendous number of Arctic species are dependent. And it's a site for national investment and development, an opportunity for economic growth in those nations that border it. 

Our speaker didn't take one side or the other but much of the discussion I've heard at the conference revolves around how the Arctic is perceived - global or local? 

As has been well-documented here, there's a lot of money to be made in economic and natural resource development. Those countries who border the Arctic stand to make big gains and are well into decades-old negotiations and treaties on how to carve up this area. But, further afield, countries like India and China no doubt expect to benefit from the opening of new shipping routes - India is already in the process of building an icebreaker in anticipation.

From a climate change perspective, not only is the Arctic an indicator of what's happening as the planet warms, but what happens in the Arctic could have global implications, from rising seas to changes in weather patterns to permanently altered marine ecosystems. Cities, crop yields, fish stocks - these are just a few of the issues that may be affected. 

There are no answers, but there are a lot of people, nations and multinational corporations jockeying for position. A complex area of the world already, answering the question of who owns the Arctic is only going to get more complicated.

A Seat at the Table

Aili Keskitalo came out swinging. The President of the Sami Parliament (the Sami are an indigenous people of Scandanavia) had some pretty strong feelings about how not only her people but indigenous peoples all over the Arctic have been treated in the race for resources. Of all the places affected by climate change, the Arctic has experienced some of the fastest and most dramatic shifts. And, as Keskitalo pointed out, no one is more vulnerable than Arctic indigenous communities.

I'm at the 2016 Arctic Frontiers conference in Tromsø, Norway, a university town of about 70 thousand people on Norway's northwestern coast. Keskitalo was one of the opening speakers for this week's conference and her speech made me think there'd be something beyond the overly cautious (and often tedious) diplo-speak that's so common at conferences like these.

She said things like, "Colonization and pillaging and the oppression of indigenous people takes place all over the world in the continuous hunt for resources. But we have stories to tell of historical blunders carried out in name of development." 

She asked that governments and businesses stop romanticizing all the industrial possibilities and pay more attention to the environment, "to what the land, sea and sky are telling us." She pointed out that, at the UN Climate Change talks in Paris, researchers from the University of Tromsø concluded that we can not take advantage of all economic resources in the Arctic, as it would be irresponsible in terms of both the environment and human rights.

She called for businesses and politicians to behave responsibly. And while she acknowledged that development of resources in the Arctic will continue, she demanded the Sami people have a role in any decisions made about that development. "We've heard repeatedly that we must adjust to changing times and we’ve done that. Now the government and business sectors need to do the same. We expect an equal participation in industrial and economic development." 

That seems fair. Development is most certainly going to move ahead and, as long as there's money to made, I'm not sure it's going to slow down. Indigenous peoples like the Sami have a right to be at the table, given that their livelihoods, their economic future, their homes are at stake. But based on what I heard during the rest of the morning, I'm not sure it will happen. I was particularly underwhelmed by statements from Admiral Robert J. Papp, the U.S. Special Representative for the Arctic. He took a very paternalistic standpoint, talking about the need to help with suicide and health issues in these communities, and take advantage of local knowledge of the environment, but didn't make it seem like indigenous people were even minority partners (so to speak).

Other speakers barely acknowledged them, mentioning them as a bullet point on a list of many things to think about when it comes to Arctic strategy. At least they're not being overlooked entirely? But I don't see them getting a fair shake, either. Nevertheless, Aili Keskitalo shouldn't pull her punches.