Tag Archives: Hydro-Quebec

Direct Action for Climate Justice: Confronting False Solutions to Climate Change

by Anne Petermann,  Executive Director, Global Justice Ecology Project

23 August, 2012, Source: Daily Kos

Over August 9-12, fifty participants and trainers gathered in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom for a Climate Justice Direct Action Training Camp.  The camp, organized by Red Clover Climate Justice and co-sponsored by Global Justice Ecology Project provided essential direct action skills including formation of affinity groups, blockading tactics, legal rights as a protester, a history of non-violent civil disobedience, strategic planning for direct action, and the nuts and bolts of media work to ensure actions and their messages are seen as widely as possible.

Climate justice involves taking real and just action to address the root causes of the climate crisis, and transforming the system that is driving it. Direct action has a rich history of achieving the unthinkable, of changing “the impossible.” It is defined as action to directly shut down the point of production.  In the case of climate change, it would be action to shut down the point of destruction.  With the climate crisis worsening exponentially with every passing day, shutting down the point of destruction is critical.

It was with this in mind that the direct action training camp was organized.  Coincidentally, it came just two weeks after the 36th Conference of New England Governors and Eastern Canadian Premiers in Burlington, Vermont.  A major focus of that conference was energy.  Vermont, which has an image of pristine greenness, relies on dangerous and dirty energy sources.  This includes its aging Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant; hydroelectricity from massive dams on Indigenous Peoples’ lands in northern Quebec; and large-scale biomass electricity, which dumps more pollution into the air than coal.

Although these various mega-projects do not rely on fossil fuels as the main source of their energy, they are still “false solutions.”  They cause vast ecological and social destruction and can worsen the climate crisis.  Their primary function, in fact, has nothing to do with the climate.  It is to maintain business as usual.  While the climate crisis demands a radical re-think of how we live on and with the Earth, a fundamental changing of the system, “false solutions” are specifically designed to prevent real change.  They enable the Global Elite–“the 1%” –to maintain their power and profits in the face of mounting social and ecological crises.


Activists disrupt the Northeast Governors’ Conference cruise in protest of Hydro-Quebec.  Photo: Will Bennington

Hydro-Quebec plans to build a series of new mega-dams on First Nations land in northern Quebec. They will drown forests, pollute fresh water, and displace villages and release huge amounts of methane–a greenhouse gas 35 times more potent than CO2.
In response, a delegation of Innu people came to the Governors’ Conference to raise awareness about and protest these new mega-dams. When the Innu delegation tried to enter the Governors’ Conference to speak with the decision-makers, however, they were refused entry.

The Governors’ Conference was emblematic of the unjust system that must be changed if we are to successfully address the climate crisis.  A group of privileged white males sat down to make decisions that would irrevocably impact the lives of First Nations peoples in Canada, as well as rural communities throughout the region.
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Filed under Actions / Protest, Climate Change, Climate Justice, Ending the Era of Extreme Energy, Energy, Events, False Solutions to Climate Change, Indigenous Peoples, Land Grabs, Political Repression, Pollution, Rights, Resilience, and Restoration, Solutions, UNFCCC

Earth Minute audio: Hydro electric power is not clean or renewable

Today’s Earth minute examines the myth that hydroelectricity is clean, renewable energy, and discusses protests against Hydro-Quebec at the New England Governors’ Conference in Burlington, VT, that resulted in non-violent protesters being assaulted by police.

Global Justice Ecology Project partners with the Sojourner Truth show on KPFK Los Angeles for weekly Earth Minutes every Tuesday and Earth Segment interviews every Thursday.

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Filed under Climate Justice, Corporate Globalization, Ending the Era of Extreme Energy, Energy, False Solutions to Climate Change, Hydroelectric dams, Indigenous Peoples, Land Grabs, Pollution, Water

July Photo of the Month: Cree Women, Whapmagoostui Quebec 1993

First Nations Gathering, Whapmagoostui, Quebec, Canada  1993
Photo: Langelle

Eighteen years ago, in July of 1993, Anne Petermann and Orin Langelle were invited by Cree Chief Mathew Mukash to visit Cree territory to document the effects of, and resistance to, Hydro-Quebec’s damming of rivers on their traditional lands to provide electricity to Canada and the US.

In the above photograph, Cree elder women listen intently during the First Annual Whapmagoostui (Great Whale) Gathering on the banks of Hudson Bay near James Bay.  At this gathering, Cree and Inuit peoples came together to discuss their resistance to Hydro-Quebec’s plans to expand their hydro-electric projects by building a new dam on the Great Whale river.

Many stories were told during this gathering about how First Nation Peoples are enduring the plundering of their land and about their struggle to protect it.

One testimony described how the Cree who lived on their ancestral island of Fort George were relocated to flimsy houses in the prefabricated town of Chisasibi on the mainland, when Hydro-Quebec built a massive dam on the La Grande river, threatening their Fort George island home.  Since the relocation, the Cree in Chisasibi have been plagued by a high rate of alcoholism, drug abuse and suicide.  Some people in the community developed symptoms of mercury poisoning from eating fish from their traditional fishing areas, due to mercury leaching out of the flooded soil and into the new reservoirs.

“Cree culture has a lot to offer in the area of nature, which is something very much needed in the world.  In western society, everything is segregated.  That is what is ruining the world.  People have to think more holistically about their actions.  Everything comes down to ‘how much money can I make from this.’  Until this changes, all this talk of environmental protection is bullshit.”      — Cree Helen Atkinson

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Orin Langelle, GJEP’s Co-director/Strategist, is currently working on a book of four decades of his concerned photography.  From mid-June to mid-July Langelle worked on his book as an artist in residence at the Blue Mountain Center in New York’s Adirondack Mountains.

Also check out the GJEP Photo Gallery, past Photos of the Month posted on GJEP’s website, or Langelle’s photo essays posted on GJEP’s Climate Connections blog.

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Filed under Climate Change, Energy, False Solutions to Climate Change, Indigenous Peoples, Land Grabs, Photo Essays by Orin Langelle