By Howard Schneider
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, September 21, 1996; Page A15

Each summer in the fields of the American South, pesticide residue heats under the sun, rises and drifts north, swirling toward the top of the world.

There, a molecular trickle of toxaphene, chlordane and other compounds condenses, falls to Earth and works through the food chain from fish, to seals and whales, to the Inuit and other Arctic-dwelling people who rely on the sea for most of their diet.

When they found PCBs in polar bears and mercury in the umbilical cords of Inuit newborns, it was, officials from the world's most northern countries said here this week, time to look seriously at protecting the Arctic from the effects of industrialization thousands of miles away.

The "ice curtain" clearly had fallen.

"The Arctic is more than myth and dreams. . . . The fish and whales carry scary amounts of contaminants," Canadian Environment Minister Sergio Marchi told representatives of the eight "circumpolar" nations gathered here to begin a joint initiative on Arctic issues. "The Arctic is an early warning system for our planet. . . . There is a link from the rice fields to the ice fields."

The need to understand those connections, and the potential threat to Arctic people if they are ignored, prompted representatives of Canada, the United States, Russia, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Iceland and Denmark to assemble here Thursday and sign an agreement creating the Arctic Council. The group will have no formal power over its member nations. And while cooperative research on some environmental issues has been conducted for years under a separate pact, there is no definite sense among members of the new council about how the information will be used.

Scientifically, for example, health officials say they are hesitant to tell the Inuit and other native people not to eat seal and whale meat, because the other benefits of their fish-based diet still seem to outweigh the risk of ingesting Arctic species whose fat cells accumulate reservoirs of pollutants.

Politically, the issues become even more delicate, involving questions of how industry or consumers in North America, or throughout Europe, should react to pollution drifting from their cars and factories into a still largely uninhabited part of the Earth. The group will not even meet again until 1998, after completion of environmental studies.

But by uniting the countries' efforts on issues of economic development and cultural protection as well as on environmental concerns, officials say they hope the new international panel will give some political punch to an area that, while harsh and isolated, is home to some of the world's most ancient cultures.

The group will not, for example, be able to tell the United States whether to develop its most northern Alaskan oil reserves, or counsel Russia about how aggressively to mine for minerals in Siberia. But it may recommend methods for minimizing the effect of such projects and spreading the work and benefits among native communities.

"There is an image of this barren land that is very pristine and hardly anybody lives there, but in many ways it is not that," said Mary Simon, Canada's ambassador for circumpolar affairs. "You are talking about a much more severe climate, but it does not stop people from being concerned about the environment, about their livelihoods . . . their cultural identity, their language."

The area is massive, more than 2.3 million square miles in Canada's portion alone, which the country defines generally as anyplace north of 60 degrees latitude. Other countries set the boundary farther north, but the council's work will still encompass most of Alaska, much of Iceland and Greenland (a self-governing possession of Denmark), the northernmost parts of Sweden, Finland and Norway, and a swath of Russia stretching around the globe to the Chukchi Sea.

It is home to perhaps only 10 million people. Some live in cities like Murmansk in Russia. Others, in the hundreds of thousands, are clustered in small villages, settlements where the hunting and cultural customs date back thousands of years, and where reliable television service arrived only recently with satellite dishes.

Groups representing the Arctic's native people regard the council's creation as something of a political breakthrough for them.

Although the idea of an Arctic organization has been around for years, it was only with the end of the Cold War that it has become politically feasible. Security concerns have lessened in a region where the U.S. and Russia nearly touch at the Bering Strait. Likewise, the breakup of the Soviet Union has made Russia more willing to discuss issues like atomic or mining-related pollution of its northern lands.

For the native peoples, there is more complete representation than what they say is typical of international bodies. Three main groups -- the Inuit Circumpolar Conference, the Saami Council for the Nordic areas and an organization representing northern Russians -- will have permanent, though non-voting seats on the council.

The value of that was shown Thursday, when the Russian representative made a plea for international help.

"The peoples of the Arctic of Russia are at the edge of an abyss, physical disappearance," said Yeremei Danilovich, president of an association representing the more than two dozen native groups in Russia's Arctic. "The reforms have mercilessly hit the people of the North. The oil and gas companies, the logging companies, the gold and silver companies, have given nothing to the indigenous people. . . . I hope the world understands how important this entire area is."