Survival

"Just the smell," he said. "That is the only evidence."

Considering the current state of environmental regulation in the former Soviet Union -- and especially in Russia's Far East -- tracking down the source of any dangerous contaminant in gray whales that feed off the bottom in coastal waters could be like tracking down the source of tarnished coins in a wishing well.

"The situation is quite severe," says Dr. Vladimir Orlov, the Russian Federation's Minister of Natural Resources. "This is the region [Siberia and the Far East] where our industrial development is the heaviest. Sixty-nine percent of Russian oil exploration is being conducted in this region, along with 78 percent of natural gas exploration, and 90 percent of our natural gas extraction efforts. There is also heavy mining, timber and other chemical waste producing activities. Unfortunately, there are no special sites for hazardous chemical storage in this region that are well-equipped. The very few that are being used may not be assessed as satisfactory."

The seeds for environmental catastrophe have been planted between the cracks of a failed system. They have been dutifully watered with a witch's brew of industrial poisons. And they are now beginning to bear their venomous fruit.

"You look at the level of chemicals in most of our rivers in Siberia, and it can seem there are more toxins in the rivers than water," says Mikhail Krykhitin of the Amur Inland Basin Laboratory, an affiliate of the Russian Federation's Pacific Fishery and Oceanography Institute. "Most of the rivers [in the Russian Far East] that we are testing now carry so much phenol they cannot naturally rid themselves of the toxin, so it is just building up and up."

Krykhitin and a group of scientists from the Siberian Fish Research and Development Institute recently tested for industrial waste contamination in fish from four different rivers in eastern Siberia. They found that the levels of phenol in the fish ranged between 16 and 70 times the maximum allowable level set by the Russian Federation's Department of Public Health.

None of those rivers empties directly into the Bering Strait, where the gray whales hunted by the natives of Chukotka come to feed every summer, though one, the Amur, flows into the Tatar Strait.

"How could contaminants be reaching the marine life in the Bering Strait? How many ways can you think of? That is how many ways," says Yuri Shiokov, director of Siberia-ISAR (Institute for Social Action and Renewal), the Far East branch of the leading environmental organization in the former Soviet Union. "Hundreds of rivers flow through the Chukotka peninsula that have never been tested. There are many rivers we know are badly contaminated that empty into the seas on the north coast of Siberia, where the currents hug the coast and funnel directly into the Bering Strait. And we are sure there is massive dumping off of boats, directly into the oceans, including the Bering Sea. We have photographs, but nothing is done. When a nation's economy is in so much trouble as in Russia, the environment is no priority at all compared to industry. This is simple to understand, but we must not accept it."

"It appears many of the final observations of environmental tragedies in Siberia regions will be recorded in the 'living laboratory' of its people and its ecosystems," continues Shiokov. "They are being used as the unfortunate subjects in uncontrolled experiments."

In all animals, phenol and other forms of industrial toxic waste routinely dumped in the rivers and seas of Siberia -- including PCBs, long ago banned in this country -- act as endocrine disrupters, meaning they unleash chaos in hormone systems, greatly decreasing rates of reproduction.

Marine scientists have several years of data showing that the calf count for gray whales is down sharply. Absent research it is impossible to identify a single contaminant or the links between a variety of factors -- including a decrease in food supply -- that might have caused the drop-off. But the numbers are not ambiguous.

In 1997, researchers counted 1,431 gray whale calves in the birthing grounds of the Eastern North Pacific Stock of gray whales. Last year they counted only 279. This year, according to the most recent numbers, presented to the IWC in July, the final count is expected to be about 250 -- meaning the gray whale birth rate has evidently plummeted 83 percent in five years.

The human birth rate in Chukotka has entered a parallel free fall, down more than 60 percent in the last decade. During the same period, birth defects increased by half, according to Dr. Lubov Otrokova, the only Eskimo surgeon in the Russian Federation. In 1997, Dr. Otrokova began documenting cancer cases in Chukotka. She has found that the rate of stomach cancer among villagers in the region has more than tripled in the last 20 years -- the last time anyone checked. "In Chukotka cancer is typically not diagnosed until the late stages, when it is too late," she says. "Among the native people of such an isolated region, you can look at these warning signs and see that clearly, something bad is happening to these people that wasn't a problem for them 50 or 100 years ago. Sadly, no one is studying the causes."