The Bering Sea: Working with Native Communities to Study Toxic Pollution
The four native Eskimo communities (Yup'ik and Chu'pik cultures) that live within 15 miles of the Air Force's Cape Romanzof (Alaska) Long-Range Radar Site -- which has a long history of dumping, spilling, and releasing a wide variety of chemicals into Kokechik Bay -- have repeatedly voiced their concerns about the health of the Bay's wildlife, fish and plants that are staples in their subsistence diet.
World Wildlife Fund partnered with these native peoples to study the contaminants at the site and provide training to community members so that they could collect all the samples needed for the study. The research program is run entirely by the people of the four villages, who selected the species and the sites for collection and took the lead in collecting all the samples and shipping them to analytical laboratories. When the results are returned from the labs, WWF will assist the communities in interpreting the data with special attention to potential threats to wildlife and human health.
