502 



STATEMENT OF TOM ALBERT, DEPARTMENT OF WILDLIFE 

 MANAGEMENT, NORTH SLOPE BOROUGH 



Mr, Albert. Thank you, Senator. My name's Tom Albert. I work 

 with the Department of Wildlife Management, North Slope Bor- 

 ough. And before I say anything, I wanted to thank you. Senator 

 Murkowski, for bringing this group to Alaska and for having the 

 interest that you do in Arctic peoples and in Arctic research. Also 

 I want to thank Secretary Bohlen and Director Gates for taking the 

 time to come here. They're very busy, just as you are, and it was 

 nice of them to come here and do this. 



Mayor Jeslie Kaleak, Mayor of the North Slope Borough, asked 

 that I put together a few comments concerning pollution and some 

 views. As most of you know, the North Slope Borough is a county- 

 like municipality in northern Alaska and occupies about the north- 

 em sixth of the state. Most of the people who live there are Eskimo 

 people and they depend upon the animals and birds and so on of 

 the land and of the sea. So obviously, they^re very concerned about 

 pollution. And when it comes to environmental pollutants, from 

 having lived there many years and talked to people up and down 

 the coast and inland and so on, there seems to be two major con- 

 cerns that people have regarding environmental pollutants, and I 

 don't think these are very surprisingly. 



The first is they're worried about the effects of pollutants, envi- 

 ronmental pollutants, on the people themselves, and secondly, the 

 impacts to the wildlife, the whales, seals and so on, that these peo- 

 ple depend upon. And if one were to go around and talk to most 

 of these folks, you would find out that there are five forms of pollu- 

 tion that folks seem to talk about over and over again. The first 

 two maybe are not appropriate here but I should mention them 

 anyway, and that is spilled oil, and noise in the marine environ- 

 ment from offshore industrial activity. The third, which is relevant 

 for this group, is atmospheric pollution of one kind or another, par- 

 ticularly Arctic haze and other forms of atmospheric pollutants that 

 may affect global warming, and Dr. Shaw already mentioned some 

 of that. But the average person up there is interested in atmos- 

 pheric pollution, and we all know that when global warming rears 

 its head even higher, the people that live in the north will be re- 

 cipients of the problems. The fourth pollution type that people are 

 very concerned about, and once again it's probably not a surprise, 

 is radioactive pollutants, and people are well aware that these can 

 arrive through the air or through the water and reach the people 

 obviously through the food chain. The fifth type of pollutant con- 

 cerns heavy metals and various other chemicals. And without much 

 doubt, people particularly are concerned about cadmium and mer- 

 cury. And folks are already aware of the levels of some of these 

 heavy metals in the marine mammals of the Bering Sea upon 

 which many of these people depend for food. 



In light of all this, I think it's fair to ask you folks to consider 

 the following four requests, or maybe these could be four rec- 

 ommendations to your group, and once again, I don't think there 

 are too great of surprises. The first is could possibly be a little bit 

 of a surprise, and that is to review and to provide for the wide dis- 

 tribution to Arctic residents of health implications of heavy metal 

 contamination already known to exist in Bering Sea marine mam- 



