COLUMN ONE : Nature or Power for Quebec? : A huge hydroelectric project is viewed as a ticket to freedom from ‘English Canada.’ Others see a rape of one of the last corners of virgin wilderness in the Northern Hemisphere.

Forty-five stories beneath the frozen lakes and black-spruce scrub of northern Quebec, in chambers blasted out of 3-billion-year-old granite, the “emancipation” of Canada’s Francophone province is under way.

There are no secessionist cries ringing in the dank air down here, no banners borne aloft, no clamoring throngs--just a lot of French-speaking hard hats making their way up and down metal stairways, in command of welding torches and cranes.

Here, in the gloom, they are building a Quebec nationalist’s dream--and, some say, an environmentalist’s nightmare.

This is the La Grande 2-A underground powerhouse, part of a network of hundreds of dams and dikes, massive generating stations and spreading reservoirs, together known as the James Bay hydroelectric project. It has been called the largest single industrial development in North American history, and, indeed, works on a mind-boggling scale have already been undertaken here.

The James Bay project isn’t finished--that will take years. But already, it has diverted substantial westerly rivers to the north, rerouted one northbound river west and flooded more than 4,000 square miles of sub-arctic forest. The first three great dams alone required the excavation of enough earth and rock to reconstruct the Great Pyramid of Cheops 80 times. If all the dams now on the drawing boards are built, the total flooded area will be as big as Lake Ontario.

To the political leadership in Quebec, James Bay represents the best possible hope for an underdog people yearning to breathe free of “English Canada.” All the dams taken together will generate 26,400 megawatts, enough to light and power the homes and industry of a city of 13 million. (Quebec’s population is only 6.5 million.) Over the years, the power will bring Quebec billions of dollars in revenues and export earnings, income enough to set the province on a solid economic footing, if attempts at federal reconciliation fail and the Francophones opt for independence by mid-decade.

To environmentalists, however, James Bay means the rape of one of the last corners of virgin wilderness in the Northern Hemisphere. They claim that, merely for the sake of Quebec’s vanity, the project may upset the delicate aquatic balance of the James and Hudson bays, huge inland seas where whales winter and millions of migratory birds stuff themselves before flapping off for the pampas of Argentina.

The environmentalists have lately aroused the concern of American utilities, which have contracted to import billions of dollars of James Bay power to fulfill local demand without building controversial nuclear or coal-fired generators.

In April, the New York Power Authority stated that it expects Quebec to fulfill its contracts without breaking any Canadian environmental laws. And in Vermont, the Public Service board has ruled that utilities in that state can buy James Bay power only under certain narrow conditions.

In Canada, central to the development-vs.-environment debate have been the natives in the territory--the Cree and the Eskimos, known here as Inuit. They say that the flooding has poisoned the fish they eat and threatens to disrupt their entire way of life. Militants among them are even threatening to shoot down the helicopters of the engineering teams.

The Cree are certainly right about the fish. But their other assertion has been, in Quebec anyway, inextricably mired in predictable, value-laden arguments about whether indigenous traditions are better than modern comforts, or whether a few thousand northern natives should have the power to stop a project ostensibly of great benefit to millions of people to the south.

3 Great Basins

Only lately has the nature of the argument begun to change.

The James Bay project began in 1971 and will ultimately involve three great river basins. Work on the first, the La Grande River, is nearly complete. Preliminary work on the second, the Great Whale, is to begin later this year; damming on the third, the combined basins of the Broadback, Nottaway and Rupert rivers, is years off.

When construction began 20 years ago, Canada didn’t even require environmental-impact studies for big dams. But that didn’t bother many people. It was a time of rising political assertiveness in French-speaking Canada, and Quebecers seemed more interested in hydropower’s potential to liberate them from their Anglophone overlords than in its ability to deform vast, uncharted ecosystems.

Up until the 1960s, after all, most business in Quebec had been conducted by an English-speaking elite, and Francophones were growing increasingly indignant--and eager--to get a piece of the economic action.

In 1963, a reform-minded provincial government nationalized 13 Anglo-owned private utilities (and one Francophone one) and created Hydro-Quebec, a huge, state-owned and proudly Francophone electric utility. Hydro-Quebec, officials promised, would be a leading Francophone-business development tool, helping to make French-speakers “masters in our own house.”

And it would do so by building dams. Today, even without a completed James Bay project on line, Quebec gets 95% of its electricity by harnessing once-wild rivers. Provincial officials tout dam-building as the cheapest, cleanest way to produce electricity. Ordinary Quebecers are said to have accepted the proposition almost as an article of faith.

To a large degree, Quebec’s dam-building spree has lived up to its economic promises. Since the utility nationalization, a number of Francophone engineering firms, building contractors and other businesses have sprung up and flourished on Hydro-Quebec contracts. Their success has helped fill the ranks of a new, Francophone business class, which in turn has instilled a widespread confidence around the province that Quebec today has the economic muscle to take its leave of Canada and make it on its own.

It’s a sweet story for Quebec nationalists, who have never forgotten that their ancestors were conquered by the English 232 years ago, then left to languish near the bottom of Canada’s socioeconomic ladder.

But the age of hydropower has been bittersweet for the 10,000 Cree in the James Bay territory, who have made out well financially from the development but who, until now, have borne the environmental and social costs almost single-handedly.

The Cree village of Chisasibi stands, 2,800 strong, near the mouth of the La Grande River, downstream from eight massive reservoirs and river diversions. The village’s existence is the direct result of damming. Before Hydro-Quebec moved into the north, the Cree lived in isolation and poverty on a nearby island. They were moved in 1979 to make way for rising waters.

Anthropologists say the Cree have lived in what is now northern Quebec for 5,000 years, migrating back and forth across the harsh, chilly landscape, hunting the far-flung caribou.

Traditional Ways

Though the fur trade’s arrival about 300 years ago pulled them into the cash economy, and though the Canadian government began in the 1950s to urge them to live in villages and send their children to school, the Cree have never fully embraced the white man’s settled ways.

Even now, most northern Cree keep a canoe beached outside the back door. Many still build back yard tepees for traditional cooking; about half still vanish into the bush for months at a stretch to hunt, trap, fish and otherwise follow the simple, ancient economies of life on an inhospitable land.

Samuel Cox, a Chisasibi father of five, once made a living trapping beaver, otter, mink and fox on his family’s ancestral hunting ground, known in northern Canada as a trap line. He sold pelts to fur traders and rounded out his family’s diet by hunting and fishing.

Cox--who now spends his days in Chisasibi, running a native-owned travel agency that tries to coax white hunters into the bush for Cree-style fish-and-game expeditions--was out on his trap line when the waters started to rise: “I was trying to trap beaver, but they were all under water. I didn’t like it. Nobody liked it.”

Recently, after a few years, he returned to his hunting area: “The game was a lot scarcer than before. . . . They didn’t tell us how much damage there was going to be until we saw it.”

The Crees’ recent history isn’t one of all-out victimization, however. They saw what was coming back in 1971, tried to block the dams, lost their battle in the courts and finally negotiated a buyout.

They ended up in 1975 with the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement, a massive compact that has brought the 10,000 Cree, and a smaller number of Inuit, hundreds of millions of dollars in land-use compensation payments, trapping subsidies, financing for newly formed indigenous governments, mineral-rights royalties, housing, sewage systems, electricity, hospitals and even snowmobile-trail networks.

While the agreement permitted damming to proceed on the La Grande River without a full-blown environmental-impact assessment, it directed that future work on the Great Whale and other rivers would be fully scrutinized.

Ambiguous Results

Chisasibi itself was paid for out of James Bay funds from the ground up. It reveals the ambiguous effects of development on the Cree. It has a spacious school, a hospital with handsome staff quarters, an indoor hockey rink, a shopping mall and office complex--even a community center decorated with a four-story, stylized tepee, built to house a swimming pool, bowling alley and day-care center.

At the mall, the parking lot gives the impression that tiny, remote Chisasibi must have one of the highest per capita rates of GM Suburban ownership on earth. Most houses are ample, some seemingly big enough for two or three families.

Hydro-Quebec officials look on these benefits with pride. Before the dams, they say, Quebec’s northern Cree numbered 6,000; the improved housing, sanitation and health care have helped the population nearly double. “When they say (dam-building) is cultural genocide, we say, ‘No it’s not,’ ” says Robert Brunette, Hydro-Quebec’s vice president for Indian and Inuit affairs.

Still, for every sign of material well-being in Chisasibi, there seems to be an offsetting sign of social distress. The school’s few windows get vandals’ constant attention. Trash blows in the streets. The community center was never opened and stands boarded up, a forlorn facade. Alcoholism rates have climbed so high that villagers have set up a roadblock on the town’s edge to watch for bootleggers.

In the shopping mall, older men and women, once resourceful and flinty enough to fend for themselves in tents over the course of a 40-below winter, now while away afternoons, snacking on junk food. Meanwhile, at the school, children learn their people’s ancestral survival skills not at an elder’s knee, but in a sterile, rote-driven “Cree culture class.”

“I suppose when you look at it from the point of view of non-native society, we should be thankful that we have all these facilities,” says Chisasibi chief Violet Pachanos. “I guess from a non-native perspective, living in a tent or in a tepee is only for those who like to camp out. But our culture, our customs and our language--everything is derived from living on the land, with the animals.”

And with the dams, and the population boom, living on the land is much harder.

“Not everybody is easily adaptable,” says Pachanos. “Especially those who never went to live in a town or city--or who never even saw a town or city. This is where we have turmoil.”

Harmful Mercury

Social scientists will probably argue for years whether Cree society has, overall, been damaged or advanced by the rapid, contradictory pressures of development.

But no one can argue with public-health physicians, who have found harmful buildups of mercury in the Cree body tissues almost from the time the first dams were built.

Mercury, it turns out, comes not only from industrial effluents but from dams. The chemical can be found, in a harmless inorganic form, in the soil and vegetation anywhere; when land is dammed and flooded, submerged vegetation rots; the rotting stimulates bacteria to convert the mercury to a toxic, methylated form. Methylmercury can be taken in by fish and work its way up the food chain. In humans, mercury can cause palsy, convulsions, mental retardation and death.

Methylmercury is present in U.S. reservoirs, too, but it doesn’t pose great problems there because Americans don’t eat much reservoir fish. But the Cree depend on fish for 20% to 25% of their diet; after the flooding started here, some wound up with mercury levels three times the acceptable maximum.

“I felt like I’d finished off the whole thermometer,” says Cox, whose family had to take medication for a year to reduce the mercury in their bodies.

Hydro-Quebec has told him and other Cree that they will be fine if they steer clear of predatory fish, such as the pike, and report for regular testing. The utility’s estimates say that in 25-30 years, mercury levels in the reservoirs will be normal and the Cree will be able to eat whatever species they please.

But that claim is disputed by independent scientists, including limnologist Robert Hecky, who first found the mercury-methylation phenomenon at a Manitoba dam in 1977. He points out that since researchers have watched reservoir mercury levels for only 15 years, it is guesswork to say what conditions will be like in a quarter century. Besides, he adds, his own research has turned up fish that were just as potent 15 years after reservoirs were flooded, showing no sign of gradual detoxification.

Ever since the methylmercury controversy, environmentalists have been asking if a problem as dramatic as mercury contamination could catch Hydro-Quebec unawares, then shouldn’t a reasonable person expect still other unforeseen dangers to emerge as the damming continues?

Their major worry is that, as dams change the flow of the rivers running into the James and Hudson, the salinity, sediment build-ups, water currents and ice break-up patterns of the bays will also change. Play too freely with these conditions, they say, and the growth of tiny, simple plants that make up the building blocks of the northern food chain may be disrupted. And, of course, such a change could have devastating effects on fish, birds, seals, whales and other creatures.

Hydro-Quebec responds reassuringly to such scenarios. It has financed the bulk of scientific research in the James Bay territory; its findings show that, while salinity and ice patterns have changed somewhat, fish and simple aquatic plants don’t seem to be suffering.

“We’re not expecting a major ecological disaster,” says Hydro-Quebec’s vice president for environmental affairs, Gaetan Guertin. He says more research before construction begins would be desirable but is impossible from a practical standpoint: “If we wait until we have all the answers on a scientific basis, then these projects won’t be ready on the schedule we have planned.”

And, indeed, Hydro-Quebec is on a tight schedule. It has already booked sales of some James Bay electricity to U.S. utilities and is using other power to attract energy-intensive aluminum smelters. Recently, it began arguing that if it must complete a single, comprehensive environmental-impact assessment on the Great Whale River dams, it won’t be able to meet its contractual obligations.

Changing Views

Besides snarling Hydro-Quebec in court battles over environmental reports, the Cree also have waged a successful battle to make the utility reveal terms of its contracts with big aluminum smelters. And what they have uncovered has, in recent weeks, dramatically changed the way the average Quebecer views his utility-cum-development-engine.

It turned out that Hydro-Quebec has been selling the big smelters power at as much as 60% below market price--a tactic the Cree say artificially inflates demand for power and justifies new dams that might not be necessary, if Quebec instead encouraged conservation.

When word of the discount contracts got out, Quebecers, who had never much sympathized with Indians or bothered to consider what Hydro-Quebec might be doing in the north, suddenly began asking tough questions about state-led economic development through hydropower.

Quebec officials explain that the bargain-basement contracts are all part of their mission to modernize the provincial economy and create wealth for Francophones. Hydro-Quebec says that once the ore smelters are well established, the rates they pay will go up.

The Cree may or may not be able to stop the dam construction. But they have reordered the James Bay debate. No longer are questions about the project framed solely in terms of development vs. the emotional claims of a few thousand natives, Earth-First!-ers and guilt-riven white meddlers. The project’s opponents have done much to shrink the image of hydropower as a clean, progressive source of energy--and to shake Quebec’s long expectations of Francophone prosperity through dramatic reshapings of the northern landscape.

Now energy experts and economists in Quebec, sounding hard notes of bottom-line practicality, ask about rate structures, debt loads, revenue flows and export volumes.

The answers--in English, French and Cree--may prove not to be the stuff of emancipation, after all.

The James Bay Project

The network of hundreds of dams, dikes, giant generating stations and spreading reservoirs has been called the largest single industrial development in North American history. The map above shows only one of three rifer basins that is planned for harnesing. Just how massive is this project? o-It has changed the direction of several big rivers. o-It has flooded more than 4,000 square miles of land. o-Its first three great dams alone have required the excavation of enough earth and rock to reconstruct the Great Pyramid of Cheops 80 times. Some of the excavation is in 3-billion-year-old granite 45 stories into the Earth. o-If all the dams now on the drawing boards are built, the total flooded area will be as big as Lake Ontario. o-All the dams taken together will generate 26,400 megawatts, enough to light and power the homes and industry of a city of 13 million--double Quebec’s current population.