When asked to think of vacation hotspots, not many people choose Canada.
"Too cold," Most respond. "What’s in Canada?" Others ask. Less than 10 percent realize that the most spectacular part of Niagara Falls is actually in Ontario.
In fact, Canada is one of the most visually stunning countries in the world:
In the west, Vancouver – with its eclectic mix of heritage and modern architecture – challenges the acrophobic with snowcapped peaks that loom over the city on sun-break days.
In the center, the broad sweep of Saskatchewan’s wheat fields, grown to feed nations, runs into the oil derricks of Manitoba, which greet visitors from the lower 48 on their way to Winnipeg like a lake of bobbing duckbills feeding another hunger.
In the east, the stone and rusty-bridge ambiance of Montreal – where almost everyone speaks French with attitude and English only reluctantly – perches on both banks of the St. Lawrence River like a voyageur straddling his bateau.
Along the Atlantic seaboard, the secretive, mysterious beauty of Beulach Falls in Nova Scotia lures the mind and senses into a reverie.
The Falls might survive, but everything west of them is threatened by the renewed push for energy as America’s rapaciousness devours every remaining lovely thing, even in those places beyond its borders. Take the Rupert River, in northern Quebec province, where Hydro-Quebec’s dams and diversions (or is that damned and subverted?) are scheduled to begin delivering hydropower to the lower 48 by about 2012.
The fight to save this wilderness is over; the Cree have signed a treaty and gone back to their villages along the river with a sense that nothing the white man does can benefit Mother Earth. What did the Cree buy in exchange for their signatures?
They may receive $3.5 billion over the next 50 years, but you and I both know how Indian treaties work, right? They also get to keep almost three-quarters of their land, less the river, of course, which for the Cree has long been a source of sustenance and inspiration, and the measure of a place they call home.
This, the Rupert River, is the traditional land of the Cree – a river they have depended on for thousands of years. There are no generations living who remember a life without its majesty. For the 13,000 Cree who inhabit its shores and feed themselves from its waters, waking and sleeping to the sound of this mighty river, the loss can’t be measured in mere fish or beaver or deer, or burial grounds.
Of course, the remaining land will eventually become home to a new generation of Cree who never lived along the river, but this new home won’t have the same ecological diversity, or the same awe-inspiring majesty. As Eric Gagnon, the co-president of Rupert Reverence points out:
The loss of the Rupert river would mean the loss of pride and self respect. I think it would be really hard for anyone to look at the land in a few years and still be proud of it and what has been done. It’ll be an individual and collective shame and the generations to come will hardly forgive us for what’s been done.
Can we blame the Cree for signing? Of course not. It was either sign and get something in return, or resist and be driven off the land, as always happens when indigenous rights meet eminent domain. That the Cree will also get better housing, community centers, better health and education services, and jobs with the project seems almost secondary. It is not what is gained, but what is lost, that remains in memory the longest.
What do the Americans in New York, Detroit, Cleveland, and along the Atlantic Coast get? Low-cost, low-carbon power to run their endless, incessantly noisy computers and televisions and DVDs and DVRs and set-top boxes, and all the other amenities of a 24/7 wired civilization. Most of these Americans have never seen the Rupert.
Daniel Green, an environmental scientist with the Sierra Club in Montreal, says the rivers being dammed and diverted by Hydro-Quebec are damaging ecological niches from the beluga whale in James and Hudson Bays to river trout spawning grounds across the entire watershed.
We are doing an experiment in Quebec’s north and Hydro-Quebec is the mad scientist," Green said. "We do not know where this is going to go."
That direction is pretty clear to the Cree. "It’s going south,” My Cree friend says, his meaning purely metaphorical. The need for more energy will result, in this case, in a deal that goes very badly, not just for the Cree and the river, but for humanity – which is so proud of its ability to bend Nature to its will that it doesn’t look ahead to the consequences of doing so.
Disclosure: Hydro-Quebec is government-owned.