Since the middle of the last century, the chemical industry has brought us tens of thousands of chemicals and the promised Better Things for Better Living. Every aspect of modern life and leisure has been enhanced through chemicals. Indeed, even life itself has been extended through the miracles of curative medicine and enjoyed through relief of our aches and pains.

Three groups of chemicals CFCs, persistent organic pesticides, and PCBs developed during the mid century heyday of chemistry proved to be highly detrimental to life on our beloved planet. The CFCs, those chlorinated fluorinated carbons, found use in our air conditioning and refrigeration systems and as propellants for everything from spray paint to deodorant, stayed in the air, did not degrade, went around the world, and diffused into the stratosphere where they destroyed our life protecting layer of ozone. A global banning effort, the Montreal Protocol, has kept this problem in check. Effective substitutes have been developed and used.

PCBs were widely used to cool electrical equipment, extend plastics, carry inks, lubricate compressors, and hundreds of miscellaneous uses requiring an innocuous non-flammable liquid. With time, PCBs were found to have devastating effects upon wildlife and suspected of causing cancer. When found in our food baskets and bodies, they were banned in North America and Europe and replaced with effective substitutes.

Persistent organic pesticides such as DDT, toxaphene, chlordane, Endrin, Aldrin, Dieldrin and Lindane flourished after World War II. One by one they were found to cause wildlife damage or suspected of causing human cancer, banned, and replaced with effective substitutes.

When the PCBs and persistent pesticides, collectively referred to as persistent organic pollutants (POPs,) were banned, they were thought to be regional pollutants incapable of moving around the world in the air. When, in the 1980s, Inuit women living above the Arctic Circle were found to have toxic milk, researchers found that POPs do travel through the air and move poleward as they circle the globe. Once deposited in a marine environment, they bioaccumulate up the food chain to the extent that Arctic narwhal and beluga whale fat would be classified as hazardous waste.

Instead of undergoing a global banning such as the Montreal Protocol, our POPs technology was embraced by the developing world. As their industry and agriculture grew, the global use of the chemicals we had banned stayed constant or increased. Our Arctic and northern waters remain dangerously contaminated and that contamination level is maintained by use in Russia, Asia, Africa and all other northern hemisphere areas not banning POPs.

The route of transport of POPs is through the air. On a nice summer day in mid America, a deep breath of air contains hundreds of millions of POP molecules, most of which originate from recent uses half way around the world.

Our government seems to be incapable of understanding this source of pollution and uninterested in pressing a remedy. I believe that if enough people understand this unnecessary waste of a planet we may get action and once again our cold, clear waters will support sustainable life and produce edible fish…

That is the purpose of Cold, Clear and Deadly, the web log and the book.