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Matthew Coon-Come, Grand Chief of the James Bay Cree of northern Quebec,
will be in Amsterdam next week. He will be testifying against plans by Hydro-Quebec,
the electricity company owned by the Quebec government, to expand the James
Bay project, already one of the world’s largest hydroelectric power schemes
and sited in the traditional homeland of the Cree and Inuit. Coon-Come will
present his case before a jury provided by the International Water Tribunal
Foundation to hear arguments for and against the proposal, one of 10 from
the developing world to be addressed during the week.

‘We were very pleased that (the foundation) agreed to hear our case,
even though the Cree live in North America,’ said Andrew Orkin, an attorney
representing the Cree. ‘Once (the foundation) understood the economic and
political relationships between the Cree and the governments of Quebec and
Canada, they realised that this is a typical North-South situation, even
if the geographical directions are reversed.’ The foundation, which is funded
primarily by the Dutch government, was established in 1981 to provide a
forum for debating issues related to water. It has no legal powers. The
jury will comprise eight or nine academics from around the globe, advised
by a committee of experts that will include environmentalists and industrialists.
As Â鶹´«Ã½ went to press, Hydro-Quebec had still not announced whether
it will present a defence at the tribunal.

Hydro-Quebec is the second largest provider of electricity in Canada,
with a generating capacity of 25 000 megawatts. All but five per cent of
that capacity is hydroelectric, and 40 per cent, or 10 000 megawatts (the
equivalent of 10 large nuclear power stations), comes from the La Grande
project in the heart of the James Bay region. Commonly known as ‘James Bay
I’, this vast project, begun in 1973 and reckoned to have cost more than
C $16 billion ( £7.8 billion), involved the diversion of three great
rivers – the Eastmain, Opinaca and Caniapiscau – into the La Grande River.
This extended the La Grande’s watershed to a region twice the size of Ireland,
nearly doubled its mean annual flow and increased its mean winter flow by
a factor of eight. Reservoirs for the project’s three power stations, which
came on line between 1979 and 1984, flooded nearly 10 000 square kilometres
of land.

The Cree, who have occupied the territory for around 5000 years, were
not consulted before the project began, and in 1973 they went to court to
try to stop it. After a six-month trial, they won an injunction blocking
construction, only to see it overturned a week later by the Quebec Court
of Appeal. They saw no alternative but to negotiate. The result was the
James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement, a 450-page treaty signed in 1975
by Canada, Quebec, the Cree and the Inuit. For all practical purposes, the
treaty is the constitution governing northern Quebec.

The La Grande project is still being expanded. Four new power stations
under construction and three planned will increase the project’s total output
to more than 15 000 megawatts. The Cree have agreed to all of these new
stations, saying that, since the river is already dead, Hydro-Quebec may
as well get as much power as possible from it. But that is where they draw
the line. The region’s nine Cree communities, representing about 12 000
people, unanimously oppose Hydro-Quebec’s future plans for the territory.
These include two major projects, known collectively as ‘James Bay II’.

The first, the Great Whale River project, is designed to produce about
3060 megawatts from reservoirs covering 3395 square kilometres, at a cost
of C $13.1 billion. The second, known as NBR (for the Nottaway, Broadback
and Rupert rivers), is designed to produce 8400 megawatts, from 6500 square
kilometres of reservoirs. Hydro-Quebec has not published a cost estimate
for NBR, but the utility has said that it intends to spend about $62 billion
in its construction programme before the year 2000. Hydro-Quebec planned
to start building roads and airports for the Great Whale project in 1990,
but a combination of legal and political obstacles – mostly set in motion
by the Cree – have set that date back by at least three years.

When power from the La Grande project began to come on line in the early
1980s, Hydro-Quebec found itself with an embarrassment of riches – more
power than it had markets for. So it began to look for new clients. The
percentage of Quebec homes heated by electricity, instead of oil and gas,
almost doubled between 1979 and 1990 and is still rising. The amount of
Hydro-Quebec’s electricity used for aluminium and magnesium smelting tripled;
these industries now account for 20 per cent of Quebec’s electricity consumption.
As other nations strove to conserve energy, the province’s demand for electricity
grew by 60 per cent from 1979 to 1990. Also, the company launched an aggressive
campaign to export power to the US.

As a result, Hydro-Quebec succeeded in selling off its surplus capacity
and began to plan new generating facilities. ‘More than one-third of the
50 000 megawatts of undeveloped hydroelectric capacity in Quebec is economically
viable under present conditions,’ says Serge Dube, vice-president of Hydro-Quebec.
The company plans to exploit this capacity by ‘developing’ 13 major river
systems over the next 15 years. ‘Of course,’ Dube continues, ‘as economic
conditions change over the next 20 to 30 years, it is very likely that those
projects which are not now economically viable will eventually become so.’

The debate over the Great Whale project and the rest of Hydro-Quebec’s
development plan is highly politicised. Hydro-Quebec counts among its allies
most of the Quebec political establishment, as well as the business lobby
and many labour leaders, all of whom see these projects as the only way
out of a crushing recession. The position of the federal government, however,
is more ambiguous, because the project is intimately wrapped up in Canada’s
constitutional crisis. The Canadian government has made every effort to
avoid getting involved for fear of feeding the growing separatist sentiment
in Quebec. But last September, in response to a suit brought by the Cree,
the Federal Court of Canada instructed the federal government that, under
the terms of the 1975 James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement, it had no
choice but to carry out an environmental review. This study is now expected
to be finished by 1993.

Though Cree opposition to the project has been remarkably effective
in court, the main battle – over whether or not the agreement they signed
in 1975 gives Hydro-Quebec the ‘right to develop’ without Cree approval
– is yet to come. Meanwhile, the response of the Quebec public has been
mixed – traditional confidence in Hydro-Quebec has been shaken, but not
broken. Nevertheless, doubts about the wisdom of the projects – and the
massive, publicly guaranteed debt that they entail – are growing. In the
US, on the other hand, the issue has been enthusiastically adopted by the
most influential sectors of the environmental movement, such as Greenpeace,
the Sierra Club and the National Audubon Society.

Will the James Bay projects be an environmental catastrophe, as the
Cree will claim before next week’s tribunal in the Netherlands, or will
they provide a benign source of clean, renewable energy, as Hydro-Quebec
maintains?

An important part of that answer could be found by studying what has
already happened at the La Grande. Hydro-Quebec has carried out hundreds
of studies, but an exhaustive audit of the impact of the La Grande development
as a whole has never been done, though the Cree have been demanding one
for more than five years. Such an audit would be a enormous undertaking,
given the size of the territory involved and the many ecosystems and disciplines
involved. And, because nobody did a study of the environmental impact before
the project was begun in 1971, there is little data with which to compare
it.

But even if there had been such a study, it would not have revealed
what was to become the most serious human health issue connected to the
dams: mercury contamination. For it was not until 1978, as the La Grande
reservoirs were filling, that scientists noticed that mercury levels in
fish from the Southern Indian Lake reservoir in northern Manitoba were rising
steadily. The following year, Robert Hecky, a researcher at the Freshwater
Institute in Winnipeg, for the first time linked mercury to flooding for
hydroelectric development. ‘By 1982, it was demonstrated quite conclusively
that organic material added by flooding stimulated the formation of methyl-mercury
and its accumulation in fish,’ says Hecky. Bacteria from decomposing vegetation
submerged when reservoirs are flooded turn the insoluble mercury present
in the area’s rocks into soluble methyl-mercury. This compound is ten times
as toxic as elemental mercury, and it accumulates in muscle and nerve tissue.
As a result, it can reach concentrations in fish up to 100 million times
as great as that in the surrounding water.

Mercury was already a serious public health concern for the James Bay
Cree, because of high background levels in the region, probably caused in
part by atmospheric pollution from the pulp and paper industry. Alan Penn,
today an environmental adviser for the Cree Regional Authority, had been
running fishery and neurological surveys for mercury since the mid-1970s.
‘We already knew that most Crees had mercury burdens higher than the WHO
mercury standard of 6 milligrams per kilogram in hair,’ he says, ‘with some
levels up to 60 milligrams per kilogram. People were very concerned, and
many prominent scientists were saying that the Cree might all have incipient
Minimata disease.’ At 60 milligrams per kilogram, some signs of subacute
methylmercury poisoning are expected, he says, and ‘there is still uncertainty
about the effects of chronic exposure’. Neurologists have commented on a
wide range of neurological defects seen in the older segment of the population,
he added, but it is not yet clear if they are mercury related.

Unfortunately, the results showing rising mercury levels in fish in
northern Manitoba emerged during the chaotic period when responsibility
for health in the Cree communities was being transferred from the federal
to the provincial governments, under the 1975 agreement. It was not until
1986 that a joint programme was set up by the Cree Board of Health and Hydro-Quebec
to monitor mercury assimilation among the Cree and to try to control it.
The head of the programme, Charles Dumont, is proud of its success at limiting
exposure, but he makes no effort to downplay the social costs. Dumont is
acutely aware of the damaging effects being felt by Cree society from an
increasingly sedentary lifestyle over the past 15 years and the dietary
changes (the substitution of processed food for ‘country food’) that has
accompanied it. Obesity, cardiovascular disease and diabetes, previously
practically unknown, have become significant problems, and Dumont has no
doubt that the efforts to ‘manage’ mercury exposure by persuading people
to eat less fish have played an important role in these changes. Nevertheless,
fish and fishing remain intergral parts of the Cree’s traditional lifestyle.

Meanwhile, Hydro-Quebec’s view, expressed repeatedly in its documents
and public statements, is that the mercury problem is short-term and manageable,
and that naturally occurring mercury levels in the James Bay area are already
quite high. However, that is all the more reason to protect them against
any additional exposure, say the Cree.

In 1985, Hydro-Quebec announced that methylmercury accumulation had
peaked, but it was forced to revise that view several times , as mercury
levels in pike and whitefish in the La Grande reservoirs continued to rise.
In May 1990, Hydro-Quebec once again stated that mercury levels were at
their peak and would soon decline. Using a model based on data from other
reservoirs in Canada and abroad, this new report projects that it will take
between 20 and 30 years for the mercury levels in fish to return to the
levels before flooding.

Hecky, however, is far less optimistic. Writing in Advances in Mercury
Toxicology, to be published this month by New York’s Plenum Press, he points
out that ‘Canada has a greater number and area of reservoirs than any country
in the world, with the exception of the Soviet Union . . . (and) the next
10 years of reservoir construction could double that total. That aggregate
lake would be one of the most mercury-polluted water bodies in the world,
and it will remain so for a long time.’ He predicts that mecury pollution
will continue to be a significant problem for between 80 and 100 years.

To better understand the mercury cycle in natural lakes and in reservoirs,
the Freshwater Institute last year launched a five-year multidisciplinary
study in their Experimental Lakes Area, a 400-square-kilometres region in
northwestern Ontario. The study, which involves 15 researchers from Canada
(including Hydro-Quebec) and the US, will look at mercury and methylmercury
levels in sediments, water and fish in two wetlands. After two years of
baseline studies, one will be flooded to simulate reservoir construction,
while the other will be left untouched to control for interannual variation.
The study is also expected to provide answers to some disturbing questions
regarding the production of greenhouse gases by reservoirs. John Rudd, a
researcher at the institute, suggests that greenhouse gases emitted by some
hydroelectric reservoirs may be as great as those from fossil fuel plants.

Mercury is not the only issue where independent researchers see Hydro-Quebec’s
predictions as excessively optimistic. Louise Filion is the head of the
Centre d’Etudes Nordiques, a research centre at the Universite Laval in
Quebec City, which has operated a research station in Great Whale for more
than 30 years. Filion highlights the divide that separates engineers from
scientists, and developers from researchers. And she is highly critical
of Hydro-Quebec’s approach to environmental assessment. ‘The main environmental
effect is the one they try to make you forget,’ she says. ‘That is to make
the river disappear, either by flooding it or by drying it up. And the river
is the heart of what is really a very rich region.’ Even some at Hydro-Quebec
agree. Gilles Saulnier, a spokesman at the La Grande complex, is highly
critical of the company’s publicity machine. ‘They say that the environmental
effects will be minor because only a few per cent of the land will be flooded,
but the banks of the river are the heart of the territory. A river bank
is full of micro-climates, but a reservoir is like a cornfield – there is
no diversity.’

Filion is also deeply concerned about the region’s ability to recover
from the gigantic earthworks that dam construction requires. Hydro-Quebec
points proudly to its reforestation programmes around the dams of the La
Grande project, but Filion doubts that such schemes could succeed in the
Great Whale region. ‘Even though we are only 150 miles north of the La Grande,
the differences are enormous,’ she says. ‘The Great Whale river basin marks
the beginning of the transition to tundra, and regeneration here is very
slow.’ In fact, she says, it sometimes doesn’t occur at all. The combination
of cold, wind and loss of snow cover following deforestation in this subarctic
region often leads to the formation of permafrost, permanently inhibiting
reforestation.

As for the coastal ecosystem, the unusual design of the main reservoir
for the Great Whale project virtually guarantees that the impacts will be
substantial. Unlike most dams, where the ‘turbined’ water is fed back into
its original channel and exits to the sea via the original estuary, the
entire outflow from the project’s main reservoir will be dumped directly
offshore. This massive alteration in the watercourse cannot help but have
major impacts, both where the water is being taken away and where it is
added. Below the dam, the Great Whale River will be reduced to a trickle,
15 per cent of its current flow. The estuary and the lower reaches of the
river, now used for drinking water, fishing and transportation by the Cree
and Inuit villagers of Great Whale, are likely to become brackish.

Meanwhile, more than 1000 cubic metres per second of fresh water will
be introduced into the offshore environment – not into Hudson Bay itself,
but into the Manitounuk Sound, which is just 3 kilometres wide. Danielle
Messier, a biologist with the Societe d’Energie de la Baie James, Hydro-Quebec’s
construction arm, insists that there will be no drastic effects on the sound’s
salinity. ‘The sound is over 100 metres deep,’ she says. ‘It is an enormous
mass of water that can easily absorb that amount of fresh water.’

However, a marine biologist who knows the area intimately, but who asked
not to be identified, is not so sure. He agreed that the sound is very deep
at its mouth, but becomes quite shallow at the other end. And his rough
calculations show that the volume of fresh water entering the sound during
a year would be enough to fill it several times over. ‘There will undoubtedly
be significant changes in salinity, especially of surface waters,’ he said,
‘but it is very difficult to estimate what the biological effects of those
changes will be.’

As for the changes in the Great Whale estuary, Messier suggested that
they would be similar to those seen in the Eastmain, which was cut off in
1979. Writing in Canadian Inland Seas (edited by I. P. Martini, in the Elsevier
Oceanography series, 1986), she documented the profound hydrological changes
seen in this estuary, including a lowered water level, a sixfold increase
in turbidity, and substantial increases in salinity and organic content.
Meanwhile, the winter freshwater plume of the La Grande (the roughly semicircular
intrusion of river water into the marine bay) has tripled in size, and the
consequent dilution in the James Bay surface waters can be detected as far
away as the entrance to Hudson Bay, 100 kilometres north. This effect can
only increase when the new La Grande turbines come on line next year, increasing
the river’s flow by almost 50 per cent.

These questions of salinity and their effect on ice cover are of more
than academic interest. Arctic scientists agree that much of the arctic
food chain depends on the spring blooms of ice algae and phytoplankton,
and these spring blooms are in turn related to complex and finely timed
interactions of fresh and saltwater. The La Grande project has already massively
disturbed these seasonal interactions, and the Great Whale project will
disturb them even more, with unpredictable consequences for the region’s
aquatic ecology.

Simon Prinsenberg, a leading Canadian oceanographer, has analysed the
effects of proposed hydro developments on salinity and ice cover in James
Bay and Hudson Bay. He found that total winter runoff into James Bay would
double, reducing salinity, lengthening the ice season and doubling the currents,
both in surface and deeper waters. Near shore, he cautions that the increase
in the size of the winter freshwater plumes would decrease the areas favourable
to ecologically vital spring blooms of ice algae, or at least push them
farther downstream. In some cases the fresh water might spread so far under
the ice that the plume from one dammed river would merge with the next,
creating serious changes to the near-shore environment over large areas.

Prinsenberg’s paper is one of the first in an unusual series of peer-reviewed
papers on some 50 issues concerning the James Bay developments, published
privately as the James Bay Publication Series by North Wind Information
Services, Montreal. ‘It hasn’t been easy to find independent scientists
to write publicly on these issues,’ says Carol Karamessines, the editor
of the series. ‘Just about everyone in the field either is working for government
or is under contract – or hoping to be – with Hydro-Quebec or one of the
other parties, and not all of them have felt free to participate.’ Furthermore,
while Hydro-Quebec has conducted hundreds of environmental studies (most
of which are not peer-reviewed), independent scientists say that access
to their raw data and even to the reports themselves is limited.

Prinsenberg also raises concerns about the effects farther downstream,
on the Labrador and Newfoundland coasts. These are some of the world’s richest
fishing regions, and it is believed that runoff from Hudson Bay affects
both salinity and nutrient balance there. But many scientists working for
Hydro-Quebec, which as the project promoter has sole responsibility for
preparing environmental impact assessments, show a clear lack of interest
in addressing such potential long-term and long-distance effects. ‘How far
away are we supposed to look for impacts,’ asked one Hydro-Quebec scientist
at a symposium on Great Whale held in Quebec City in December. ‘In Hudson
Bay? In the North Atlantic? Where is the limit?’

These big questions are the hardest to answer, but also the most important.
Will the projected damming of every major river emptying into these bays,
not only in Quebec, but also in Ontario and Manitoba, affect the economically
vital North Atlantic fisheries? Will the ecosystems adapt easily to the
changed rhythms of freshwater discharge? How significant is the loss of
riverside habitat to the animal and bird populations in the area? Will the
methylmercury burden be dissipated in the vast water masses of James Bay
and Hudson Bay, or will it continue to concentrate in offshore marine mammals
and fish?

Unfortunately, there is little prospect of seeing these big questions
answered in a scientifically rigorous way. Even though the directives are
only now being written, the review is unlikely to address global and cumulative
impacts of the many projects being planned for this bioregion. ‘In the past,
Hydro-Quebec’s procedure has been to commission its own studies and, when
the directives are issued, to write a defence of the studies it has already
carried,’ says Penn. ‘The short timetables (with authorisations expected
in 1993) almost preclude the possibility of the committees requiring any
new field work, even if the existing studies are not satisfactory.’

Hydro-Quebec doesn’t deny that its projects will have an impact on the
envi-ronment, but it insists that environmental assessments now underway
will ensure that the effects are adequately mitigated. Daphna Castel of
the Quebec energy watchdog group Mouvement au Courant, could not disagree
more. ‘Under these procedures, the ‘no build’ alternative is never considered,’
she says. ‘Environmental assessment in Quebec starts from the premise that
the project will be built. The key issue – justification of the project
versus its economic, environmental and human costs – is left out of the
±è°ù´Ç³¦±ð²õ²õ.’

Just how much energy does Quebec really need? Hydro-Quebec now predicts
annual growth of 2.2 per cent for the next 15 years (a far cry from the
7 per cent annual growth predicted just a few years ago), but critics argue
that, if Quebec would take energy efficiency more seriously and cease its
efforts to find ‘new markets’ for its hydro power, annual growth could be
kept to well under 1 per cent. Even New York State, Hydro-Quebec’s biggest
export customer, has just downgraded its growth estimates to 0.6 per cent
per year from about 2 per cent in 1988, and may decide not to buy power
from Hydro-Quebec at all.

But even if the American contracts fall through, Quebec’s advocates
of energy exports have another card up their sleeve: hydrogen. Touted in
many circles as the fuel of the future because it burns without releasing
carbon or sulphur gases, hydrogen can be produced by a variety of solar-based
technologies that are attracting widespread interest.

Quebec is interested in hydrogen, but not in solar technologies. Hydropower
combined with the tried-and-tested process of electrolysis – using electricity
to split water into hydrogen and oxygen – will provide Quebec with its ace
in the hole, says Saulnier. ‘The Americans know we have nowhere else to
sell our surplus energy, which gives them great bargaining power. But as
hydrogen, we can sell it to the Europeans if the Americans won’t pay our
±è°ù¾±³¦±ð.’

How do the people of Great Whale feel about their river being sacrificed
to help Europe solve its environmental problems? ‘I don’t think our people
are ready to consent to a massive destruction of their environment so others
can live in comfort,’ says Robbie Dick, chief of the Great Whale Cree. ‘So
much has been taken away from native peoples further south, and now it is
happening here. Once altered, it will never be the same.’

Philip Raphals is a freelance writer based in Montreal, specialising
in the biological sciences and in the politics of Quebec and Canada. He
is a member of the Quebec Coalition for a Public Debate on Energy.