I have one request for clarification, if anyone on this conference can do so.
It regards the mercury contamination attributed to the project. More
specifically, "the rotting of flooded vegetation has contaminated the waters of
the rivers and reservoirs with unsafe levels of methyl mercury," according to
the piece's author.
I would like to know more about how the mercury was initially taken up by the
now-flooded vegetation. Is this a situation parallel to what happened to
western Ontario's English-Wabigoon river system in the 1960s, where a pulp and
paper mill operated by Dryden Chemicals dumped the mercury straight into the
river and so completely damaged the river system (with attendant devastation to
the downstream Ojibwa community of Grassy Narrows so eloquently characterized
in Anastasia Shkilnyk's "A Poison Stronger Than Love"-Yale, 1985)?
[ I attended a public forum yesterday at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts
entitled "Energy and Ideology: James Bay Hydro Project and New England's
Energy Future" sponsored by the Dept. of Civil Engineering, The Dept.
of Urban Studies, and the MIT Energy Lab. The point about rotting vege-
tation came up, and it was stated that the amount of CO2 released into
the atmosphere as a result of this process would be considerably greater
than that for competing technologies, at least for a period of time.
I don't recall hearing discussion of the mechanism of the mercury con-
tamination, though. If anyone has the time and interest to transcribe
some portion of the tape I made of this conference for the benefit of
NativeNet readers, please drop me a note. --Gary ]