 our effort with the North American Megadam resistance alliance, also known as NAMRA, for a few years. We have been doing work to try to persuade the Northeast Governors and Eastern Canadian Premiers to at least listen to our message and did so that again yesterday, over the last three years, we have gone to their meetings either yesterday by Zoom or by outside the meeting hall we have not been invited in, though we have requested to do that many times. So we're trying to, you know, get information out to everyone about why we are opposing the this CMP transmission line and why particularly Canadian hydro is not the answer to climate. So we have a roster of speakers tonight, Meg Sheehan, who is the coordinator of NAMRA, and then we will be hearing from Amy Gould and we will be hearing from Steve Brooks, who's a registered main guide. Amy Gould is an Inuk member, community member from Labrador, and so I'm just happy to have all three of them and thank them very much. They will be introduced by Meg Sheehan. As a matter of protocol, we will take questions in the chat box and so please put them in the chat box as you're going along. There will be time for questions and answers in the end. Thank you so much for joining us and let me introduce you to Meg Sheehan. Meg is a coordinator of, as it says here, she's a coordinator of North American Megadam Resistance Alliance and a NICAC corridor and the corridor moderator for tonight. Thank you so much, Meg, and let me turn it over to you. Thanks, Becky, and thank you, everyone, for the opportunity to speak tonight about Hydro Quebec and the dams in Eastern Canada and where this electricity is coming from and the impacts on people and the environment in Canada. So NAMRA is an ad hoc alliance of groups and individuals. Our mission is to protect rivers and their communities by resisting Megadams and their transmission corridors. So I'll be talking about Canadian hydropower focusing on Eastern Canada, but the story is pretty much the same across the country. Over the last 100 years, Canadian hydropower has destroyed hundreds of thousands of square miles of land and river systems. Destroying river ecology, biodiversity, water quality, altering natural river flows, causing erosion and flooding that continues to this day as a result of the operation of the dams. There are massive artificial reservoirs behind the dams that operate like storage batteries, holding back water and causing its temperature to rise until distant metropolitan areas need to turn on the lights. The dams trap sediment that would otherwise flow to the ocean, thereby negatively impacting fisheries and undermining the ocean's ability to store carbon. Dams are a safety hazard to those living downstream. The flooding and flow alterations of the river systems makes it impossible for Indigenous communities and people who have followed traditional fishing, hunting, and gathering livelihoods and trapping over millennia. It prevents them from being able to do this and causes food insecurity, as you will hear from Amy Norman. Canadian mega dams poison the environment and wild foods with methylmercury. Ironically, Canada is one of the most water-rich countries in the world, but many of the Indigenous communities living near these dams have no clean water due to the degraded nature of the river systems. The hydroelectricity that Hydro-Quebec and Nalcor Energy, its sister corporation in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador, embody Canada's legacy of colonialism, state-sponsored violence against people and nature, racism, and discrimination. Under these policies, most of Hydro-Quebec's vast hydropower empire has been built on the ancestral lands of Aboriginal people without the consent of the people who use those lands for millennia. They were built without environmental impact statements and the largest dams that were built back then in the 1970s are still in use today and part of the export supply that Hydro-Quebec is trying to sell as clean, green, and renewable. It is anything but it's a climate and humanitarian disaster. Next slide please. Just to give you a sense of the scale of what we're talking about, the vast areas that I'm talking about are in sub-artic regions of northeast Canada. You can see the distances on the left-hand side. You can see James Bay, that's one of Hydro-Quebec's largest dams, is located that was built in the 1970s. These transmission corridors go 1200 miles down to Boston and New York. Over to the right, further east, you can see the Church Hill Falls dam that was built also in the 1970s. That is a massive dam that has a reservoir that's the size of the country of Ireland. Next slide. Hydro-Quebec operates a system of 63 mega dams located throughout the country. One of them is not shown on this map, but it's located on the border of Quebec and Labrador. That's again the upper Church Hill dam and that's relevant because I'll be talking about that in a few minutes. Tonight I want to focus on what has been happening the last few months with regard to Aboriginal resistance to the dams that are being used as an export supply for Hydro-Quebec. This is the electricity that's being called clean and green and renewable. Several of our prior webinars have focused on why this is dirty energy, why it is not a climate solution, how two of Hydro-Quebec's largest dams that are still in use today, 40 years later, have greenhouse gas emissions on power with fossil fuels. I won't go into that, but I really wanted to focus on what is happening with some of the smaller communities whose lands were stolen for this hydroelectricity. I'll be talking about Aboriginal people that includes First Nations, which are not all Indigenous people in Canada are part of a First Nation. Some are sovereign nations. There are also Metis or mixed, Canadian and or settler and Indigenous people and Inuit. These people are speaking out against the exports of hydropower stolen from their lands by Hydro-Quebec. Report after report describes the environmental racism connected with the hydropower development across Canada the last 100 years. Recent letters and submittals from Indigenous community members to U.S. officials calls this systemic racism, discrimination and cultural genocide. I want to point out that I'm not trying to speak this evening for Indigenous communities about the ones that I'm going to talk about briefly. Those folks were invited to participate in this conversation, but most of them do not speak English as a first language, nor do they speak French. They speak their Indigenous languages. They live in remote areas, mostly along the North Shore of the St. Lawrence River, which you can see here where the STEM cluster is northeast of Montreal. First of all, we have the Innu Nation of Labrador in Maine. They submitted comments to the Maine Department of Environmental Protection. They are the groups that are impacted by the Upper Church Health Falls Dam. It's the 10th largest hydroelectric generating facility in the world. That's the one that has a reservoir the size of Ireland. Amy Norman, our speaker here tonight lives downstream where the second dam has been built, Musgrat Falls. The Innu of Labrador have submitted a declaration from their tribal chief describing the fact that one-sixth of hydro-cobex electricity supply that it's exporting to the U.S. today is clean and green, is unlawfully located on their lands. The Penobscot tribe of Maine joined them in July in requesting that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers require an environmental impact statement for the New England Clean Energy Connect Corridor, citing two reasons. First, was the impact on the Maine environment, which harms Penobscot lands and fisheries, but also because of the second reason being the significant impacts on the Innu Nation in Labrador. This declaration and the supporting information from the Innu Nation is in our resource folder associated with this webinar, and it's quite devastating. There are photographs there that describe the manner in which the hydro dam operations continue to erode cultural sites of the Innu Nation, including washing away the ancestral graves of people. The second significant development, the verge here, but I want to acknowledge also the Cree and the Inuit. This is a book that I would highly recommend reading, Strangers Devour the Land by Boyce Richardson, if you would like to get a sense of what this vast primeval land looked like before hydro come back began its hydropower development in the 1950s. It talks about how people were living off the land and actually had no idea that this was going to be happening, and these are some of the people today who are trying to have their voices heard. The book is primarily focused on the Cree of the more western part of Quebec Province. The folks I'm talking about tonight are located more to the east as I said on the north shore. So next slide. Three First Nations from Quebec in August of 2020 wrote to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers that would be the Wayne Motashi of Akademeck First Nation, the Wayne Motashi, whoops the Innu First Nation of Pesame and the Anishinaabeck First Nation of Picojons. So these folks are located, as I mentioned, on the north shore of the St. Lawrence River. They're all based in Quebec. They have urgently requested that the Army Corps deny the New England Clean Energy Connect application for the Clean Water Act permit. They talk in their submittals about how the communities were dispossessed of the lands by the government of Quebec and hydro Quebec with the consent of the government of Canada. And they outline how there are 21 production structures, some 10,000 kilometers or 3,800 square miles of reservoirs, tens of thousands of kilometers of transmission and distribution lines and new roads that were illegally installed on their traditional territories. These infrastructures are still operated by hydro Quebec in violation of rights recognized by the Constitutional Act of 1982 and the 1996 ruling of the Supreme Court of Canada. So they are saying that they will not stand by in silence while hydro Quebec financially benefits from their heritage. And 33 of the 63 production facilities of hydro Quebec are built on their traditional lands without consultation and without compensation. In other words, hydro Quebec is trying to sell to the United States stolen goods. The scale of the profits that are going directly to hydro Quebec is astounding when these communities, as they describe it, they live in impoverished conditions with some of the lowest standards of living in the world. So hydro Quebec makes $2 billion a year of profits that are funneled directly to the province of Quebec to support the central government of the province. That's because, as you may know, hydro Quebec is a crown corporation. It basically is the government of Quebec. It doles out benefits to Indigenous people. In other words, reaping these profits off of the stolen land and then turning around and giving out token benefits to the communities. As far as the profits that will stem from the New England Clean Energy Connect, hydro Quebec will make nearly $500 million in the first year, send it selling electricity. Via the CMP in Maine, it will make $12.4 billion over 20 years. There's a similar corridor going through New York, and so you could double that number. A van grid, the parent of CMP, will make $60 million a year in profits over 20 years for a total of $2.9 billion to operate CMP. So that's the social and economic injustice that NAMRA is concerned about, and that is why for the last two years, as Becky mentioned, we tried to bring these frontline voices to the Conference of Northeast Governors and Eastern Canadian Premiers because hydro Quebec is there promoting its electricity as clean and green, and trying to win political support for these two transmission corridors that are now currently active and proposed. The CMP through Maine and the New York corridor, and we firmly believe that you can go ahead and flip through the slides while I'm talking, but firmly believe that this electricity has no place in a clean new deal, and it really is not clean, green, and you will hear more about that. Here's our petition to the Governors and Premiers, and we had over 500 signatures on that petition from community members who live with the impacts of this hydropower production day to day. So thank you, and I will turn it over to Amy Norman. She will be talking to us about her experience as an Indigenous woman and community member in Labrador who's impacted by that second dam on the Churchill or Grand River. Thank you. Tilly, hi. Hi. My name is Amy Norman. I'm in a woman born and raised in Happy Valley Goose Bay Labrador, so way to the northeast. I'm going to be chatting with you a bit about what my community has been through downstream of these kind of giant mega dams and kind of what that holds for the future. So I'm in oak, so my family and I are Inuit, the Circumpolar Indigenous people. Yeah, we're from Labrador. I was born and raised here. My mom's family is from Newfoundland. My dad's side of the family is from Northwest River and named in Nunastia. I've been with a group called the Labrador Land Protectors since about 2016. That was kind of when the resistance movement to this mega dam really kind of boiled over. And the reason for that was this large study that was done in partnership between the Nunastia government, so that's our Inuit self-government, with Harvard University, their School of Public Health. And they looked at the issue of methylmercury contamination caused by this dam. So methylmercury is a harmful neurotoxin and it can cause what's also known as mini-mod disease. So it can cause all kinds of issues from numbness in your hands and feet, developmental disorders in children, memory issues, issues with hearing and speech. So it's really, really this horrific thing if you have too much methylmercury exposure. And so mercury naturally occurs in all vegetation and when the vegetation is submerged in water, that's when it converts to the harmful methylmercury form. And this is particularly harmful to us as Inuit because our traditional diet, it's very fatty, very rich in fat. And methylmercury, like as a molecule, it builds and builds and builds, so bio accumulates in fat. So you might not have very high levels in the water, but as the plankton and the tiny critters get eaten by the fish, and then the larger fish eat those fish, and the seals eat those fish, and we eat those seals, and we are getting all of that mercury from every level to the point where the levels are up to 10 million times higher in fish and marine mammals like seals than the water that they live in. So, you know, as Inuit, we're often called seal people. That's who we are. We have for millennia been hunters, gatherers, but especially on the coast of Labrador, we really rely on fuel for everything. It's, you know, not just a source of like rich, healthy food. It gets all of our vitamins and minerals, like we don't have as that much vegetation in the Arctic, but, you know, we can still get like all of our vitamin C from seal liver and stuff like that, right? And it's our clothing, we use the oil for our lamps, like it's long been, you know, this source of everything. It's essential to who we are and to have something in our backyard that, you know, but contaminating this, it's severing, you know, our ties to not only rich, healthy food, but also to who we are, the people, because it is such a spiritually important connection. So yeah, we still rely on hunting and fishing and harvesting. Here's a picture of me and one of my nephews with some pretty teeny fish, but it was a great day. We cut other ones later. And, you know, here in the North, food prices are so like astronomically ridiculously high. Like it's hard to kind of understand unless you like live it, but, you know, you can't rely on the grocery store because it's so expensive. And it's, you know, it's not as healthy. It's not a good. It's usually like prepackaged kind of stuff. It's not, it's not as good as what we can hunt and what we can find, you know, on the land. So it's really devastating to have these food webs kind of poisoned like this. But yeah, like I was saying, it's not just the nutritional side. It's really that cultural connection. Who you are, you know, as, as a people, it's your, your practices, your, your, you know, traditions, it's, it's everything. It's all, you know, interconnected. So it's all very important stuff. Before the muskrat falls down, before the reservoir was impounded, in my area of like Melville, it was already two to 2.5 times higher than the average Canadian in terms of mercury levels. This is because of decades of mercury buildup from the Churchill falls reservoir. So that was the older dab in the 70s that Meg was referencing reservoir the sides of Ireland. So even though it's 300 kilometers upstream from us, we already start with a baseline higher than, you know, the average Canadian muskrat falls is estimated to further increase our mercury levels by 1500%, 1500. It's just so absurd. But even more ridiculous is the fact that they're still, you know, trying to like push full steam ahead on this third dam on the same river. You know, this is only going to increase these levels even more. This is going to push anyway into a critically dangerous level of mercury exposure. And it's really, really scary living in the shadow of that. Like it's, I've seen elders cry, like that it's so heartbreaking. You know, with people, people you rely on, like you're, they're usually the shoulder to cry on. And then for them to be just like, it's so upsetting. It's so upsetting. When I talk a bit about the over criminalization of land and water protectors, at the height of the protests, we'll say back in 2016, you know, there was dozens and dozens of people charged and arrested. So over the past four years, I've counted over 70. Over 70. It's kind of hard to keep track, to be honest. I've personally been charged and arrested twice. We've had some of our elders sent to maximum security facilities over a thousand kilometers from home, including when they sent immediate grandmothers to maximum security men's prisons in Newfoundland. It just breaks my heart because like, I just get so frustrated knowing, like, it's just in justice after injustice after injustice, to send a grandmother to a maximum security men's prison, a three hour flight away from their home. We've also seen a young woman violently arrested in the middle of the night. That was the right at the beginning of all of this. The cop who, you know, violently arrested, later received an award, a humanitarian award. Sometimes words just don't come to me because I get so frustrated. That's one of them. And we're still being dragged through the court. We're still being, you know, targeted for just trying to protect our homeland from destruction. My charges personally were dropped, so I'm very grateful for that, but I still have to help pay off my legal fees. And, you know, good lawyers are really expensive, so there's a link there and we'll put it in the chat too. If you have any kind of spare change, you can pass along to our fundraiser page and help get some of these legal fees down. It's really eaten up a lot of our lives and it shouldn't have. It shouldn't, you know, you shouldn't have to kind of like put your life on hold for four years just to try and save your home. Some other impacts on our communities, you know, the government of Newfoundland and Labrador, they only consulted with one of the three different indigenous groups in the area. So the Indonesian, you know, they had their consultations with, but the Inuit of Nunasiyevut as well as Nunatuyevut have never given a free prior and informed consent. This is something that's required by the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous People. And, you know, because they kind of picked the government, I mean the provincial government picked one group to talk to and not the other two. It's so a lot of distrust between people and it's kind of like, you know, festering and creating these hard feelings between indigenous groups when, you know, that's really not, that's not serving anyone. We need to work together to try and, you know, help each other out kind of thing. So yeah. And meanwhile, you know, we have these massive mega dams in our backyard. These really long, sorry my words are feeling me a little bit here, these really long transmission corridors and they're bypassing all of these communities on the south coast of Labrador. They're going so close, but they don't connect to them at all. And meanwhile, these communities are still relying on dirty diesel energy. They're using diesel generators. It doesn't make any sense to me. Nothing about this project makes any sense. Nothing about Hydro makes any sense. The final point I wanted to bring up just because it's happening right now, the Indonesian hosts their annual elders gathering every year at Gull Island. So Gull Island is the proposed site for this third dam that they want to do. And from all over Natasanaan journey here, it's super important culturally. It's a wonderful time. I love seeing my friends there. The pictures are lovely. So that's happening right now as we speak on Gull Island and that's where they want to put the dam. So like, I don't know. All of these issues that we've seen at Churchill Falls and Musgrave Falls, it's only going to get worse. It's only going to be further magnified by this proposed dam at Gull Island. And the one at Gull Island is like on a whole other scale, Musgrave Falls is massive, but it's only 824 megawatts. The one that they're proposing is 2250 megawatts. So 2.7 times bigger, 2.7 times more awful. It's just this absurd idea that they want to even think about this after how devastating and destructive and like divisive this whole thing has been. And it's tricky too, because right now our, well our former premier, because we just got a new one like a week ago. But yeah, the former premier of Newfoundland and Labrador has gone on the record recently, just November of 2019, saying the biggest roadblock for the project has been getting electricity through Quebec. He says discussions are still very early, but he believes Quebec will begin to work with Newfoundland and Labrador towards making the project feasible. There's a very long history with the Church of Falls dam, but basically when they're talking about working together to make the project feasible, they're talking about building Gull Island, shipping the power down through Quebec and into New England, you know, that's what's really on the line. And that's why that's where you come in. That's why we do these kinds of discussions to really talk about what's happening on the other end of things and what are the impacts on the other end of these transmission lines. So you have an idea what it's not really green. It's not clean. It's really harmful. It's really frustrating. And I thank you for listening. I thank you for showing up. And I look forward to hearing what everyone else has to say. So now for me, I'm going to turn off screen sharing. All right. Wonderful. Thank you, Amy. Meg, you're up. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. So yes, I'm sorry. I did want to point out that we have another speaker tonight in addition to who was on the agenda. We have John Gonzalez and I think he would probably fit in great right here. So Steve, if you wouldn't mind waiting for a few minutes, that would be great. John, did you want to say a few words? There we go. Okay. Can you hear me now? Tansinina. Can you make us unique? I'm not the old many blessings. Thank you for having me here tonight. So excuse me. Now, whether we're talking about B.C. Hydro and the Sightseed Dam or Manitoba Hydro and all the generating stations along the Nelson River and Hydro Quebec, these are provincial crown corporations whose policies go back to the racist doctrine of discovery. This is where all their land claims come from. And our people have been pushed onto 0.2% of their land base. You know, the genocide continues. And right now there is a termination framework going on in Canada. And this is about cultural genocide. So many of our people are saying that, you know, Hydro has taken over where the Indian Act and residential schools have left off. And there's a lot of layers and layers of trauma in these communities. These are already impoverished communities. Look, our waters are undrinkable. You know, our wildlife cannot keep up with the fluctuation of the waters or people who've been navigating those waters for about thousands of years are now dodging debris as they're going along in their motor boats. I thought I was going to get killed a couple of times. But I was glad I had a good person running the boat. But, you know, people are hitting debris. People are falling into the waters. Thank you, Amy, for so eloquently talking about the methylmercury poisoning, that dangerous neurotoxin, which accumulates in our food supply. And, you know, I think that it's important to understand, you know, this is a, this might be a lot for somebody who is just opposing corridors to chew on. But I think it's important to get a snapshot of the people that are most heavily impacted by these communities. People, you know, who have lived a certain way of life for thousands of years and immediately had their food supply wiped out, immediately displaced, immediately put on a fraction of their land. And, you know, we, right now, you know, both Canada and the United States have a truth and reconciliation obligation to Indigenous people, you know, by way of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People. So I think this is something that needs to be taken before the global community. I don't think it's something that will be solved with Intrudeau's termination framework. You know, these, the devastating effects on the lands and on these carbon sequestering boreal forests are akin to, you know, the tar sands and the vast mining operations in Canada. The most important thing is to realize is that people are dying, you know. You cut off the food supply, you know, and the sturgeon disappear and the moose are no more. And, you know, these are communities where, you know, food, food supply, food prices are just astronomical. And, you know, and, you know, there is a great lull of despair over these communities. We have high incidences of teen suicide. And, you know, so I don't know if I'm taking up too much of our time. I'll just, I'll just end up with saying, you know, we really, we have to say no to this Canadian hydro. Say no to the Champlain Hudson Power Express. Say no to the New England Clean Energy Connect. These are not clean. These are not green. They are contributing to the cultural genocide of Indigenous people. And the propaganda machine right now is telling you that this is clean and green. They're getting subsidized as clean and green. They're getting green bonds. Okay, this will not bring us to net zero. You know, New York is trying to bring themselves to net zero, you know, by diminishing the, you know, the dirty natural frack assets over there. They want to bring in the hydro. And they're not addressing those most heavily impacted communities, which are, are Indigenous communities, you know, all throughout Turtle Island and Canada, Kamitschekamak, Labrador, BC. You know, this is, this is, we have a big problem here. You know, this is, this is huge. And I want to thank Namra and everybody who's working so hard, you know, to elevate Indigenous voices. And so thank you. Thank you so much, allies. Thank you so much, John. And we'll have plenty of time for questions and answers at the end. So we'll move on to our next speaker, Steve Brooke, who is from Maine, and we'll talk about the impacts of the corridor in Maine. And of course, we're all one planet. So whether it's Harming Rivers and Butlins and Fisheries in Maine or Canada, it's all a question and it's all a price of this Canadian hydro. So Steve will introduce himself. Thank you very much. Let's start off with my first slide. And I'm going to talk in two parts on this program tonight. I'm going to start by talking about the Northeast Energy Connect corridor across Maine and how it really is a disaster ecologically within Maine. And I think it's fascinating to hear from the Indigenous voices and now to understand that what's happening now is we're facing the same issues here in the United States as industry really sets these programs going. Can you get that full slide up rather than the overview of it? You'll have to get the PowerPoint working because only a portion of it shows. My point in the first slide is that that's the second slide. We have to go back one slide. That's much better. Thank you. So there are two images here. The one on the right shows the mapping of the corridor that comes to bring hydrocubec power down into the lower Maine grid to be delivered to the Boston market. And the map on the left talks about really an important 2015 assessment that shows in bright pink where the brook trout habitat is clean and it's really protected by the forest that surrounds it as it goes to blue and later to red the grades and the degrades and the degrades. And I think it's really important to understand that when Iberdrola from Spain and central Maine power who are the same set this corridor up they intentionally put it into the wilds of Maine thinking that there'd be nobody there to complain and in fact they're really destroying the last of what's left of clean habitat for fisheries in our state of Maine. Let's go to the next slide please. The NECEC route the next slide please. The NECEC route crosses into an area of sub-water sheds that is going to come up in the next set of slides and there are sub-water sheds that show a lot of detail of exactly where the fishery is. I don't know who's working on the slides please. Can we please go to the next slide? The slide over here. Anya are you having trouble? Yeah is it not forwarding slides? No. On slide number five now. No we need to go to slide number two please. No. Is that the right slide now? We're not saying anything. That's slide number one still. We need to go to slide number two please. There we go thank you very much. And if it's possible to hit the same just a position of the of the power of the map that goes across the state and over here in the area where the the corridor goes down and starts to go through it you're crossing a lot of these sub-water sheds where the Brook trout population is so special. The bright green and the lesser green are the areas that we're really concerned about protecting if we're going to protect the Brook trout population here in Maine. Let's go to the next slide please. And as we go down into the area of the corridor on the next slide please. Sorry I'm just having some technical difficulties. Thank you very much. As we go to the next slide what we're going to see is a detailed map that starts to show all of the detail of the watersheds that this corridor crosses. And remember that this is not just a straight little line on the map. This is actually a 300 foot wide corridor. That's a corridor the size of the New Jersey turnpike through forested rural Maine. And the watershed that we're looking at here on the Moose River there are 18 separate stream crossings. And in the next slide that we're going to look at the cold stream project we invested eight and a half million dollars of public funds to protect all of these streams. And now we have this enormous project that's going to come crossing it all. Two crossings in the tenth of a mile, nine tenths of a mile. And then it parallels a lot of the important habitat that we're working to protect. Let's go to the next slide please. When Central Maine Power set up and started talking about what was being done here they said oh there'll be absolutely no impact on any of the public lands. And this is an area of public lands. There were two public lots and the corridor actually comes down, crosses over the habitat we're trying to protect and then bisects these two lots. So in long segments of this corridor it runs parallel to the protected water that's habitat along the stream from Brook Trail. So it's very frustrating to see that Central Maine Power and Iberdrola have used a portion of a unique zone in our state with intact, intact truck trout habitat to design and to build their corridor on. Let's go to the next slide please if we can. So this is the northeast corner of where the public lots are and there's already a road that crosses the area and now you're going to layer onto the road the corridor and layering on layer upon layer of habitat degradations for an area that's supposed to be protected. Let's go to the next slide please. Can we go to the next slide please? Has it forwarded to the next slide? Yes this is the public lands along Tom Hegan. Again you can see nine stream crossings all in little blue lines all going to destroy the habitat that we're working so hard to protect Brook Trout. Again very discouraging and very discouraging to find that Central Maine Power is chosen a route that specifically goes into areas that have been designed for habitat. Let's go to the next slide please. This is the one that really bothers me because we passed a law a year ago a couple years ago in the state of Maine to create state heritage fish waters where the waters and the fish in these waters receive extra protected status yet here we have a Central Maine Power corridor coming through exactly where the spawning habitat is and in the map that Central Maine Power created they've got a lot of the stream crossings but none of them have all of the unmapped springs that enable spawning habitat for the Brook Trout. Let's go to the last slide please the next one. It looks like that's the last one on this slide deck do you want me to switch to the next one? Well I guess I'll just wrap this up this is a lot of detail that goes into impacts that are ecological for Brook Trout and spawning habitat is real rarity and to have Central Maine Power and Iberdrola intentionally locating their corridor where we're trying to protect the habitat it is it's just ingenuous of them they're lying to us outright when they say that they're creating no impact on the habitat that we're working so let's move to the next set of slides because I think this is going to really add to what we've heard today. I'm going to look at the next set of slides please Anya. We're going to want to talk about dams and we're going to be talking about dams for little teeny small ones like the one right here where we have habitat that's being fragmented with culverts and it really doesn't matter how minor the impacts are when you're talking about water ecosystems dam impacts like this extend miles upstream and downstream because it disrupts all of the ecology that's in the river system. Let's go to the next slide please Biology is really very complex when you can get advanced degrees in enormous detail of individual insects within this ecological environment but the more we study these systems the more we learn about just how complex they are and even more important all of the species that evolved over thousands tens of thousands of years they are co-evolved and they support each other each one is part of the other species so it's very difficult to talk about the impact of a single species let's go to the next slide please. As you have a watershed that comes down from the mountains as you locate dams at any location on this watershed you get enormous significant impact on my local river the Canabac River the river is full of freshwater mussels and freshwater mussels live in a system that's in essence a one-way system all of the water goes downstream yet these mussels are enabled to inhabit the entire ecosystem simply because they're they're you have co-evolved with the freshwater fish that come in and the saltwater fish that come in in the spring the mussels release their spat into the column of water and it attaches to the gills of the fish that are migrating through the system so they thrive upstream with the fish that are coming in from the ocean the impacts of dams breaks all of this into multiple fragments of the ecological community and so when you have one dam you you destroy a section of the river if the dam is lower down on the river close to the ocean where the sea run fish are blocked from coming in the actual impact is far greater let's go to the next slide please not all dams are created the same here in Maine we have a lot of older dams that are called run-of-river dams these are dams where the the flow of the river is contained partially in a head pond but whatever comes into the head pond goes down and quickly joins the river back down so the regular flow cycle of the river can be continued this is not like the big Canadian hydrodams that block and flood enormous areas and store the water from one season to the next let's go to the next slide because I think this is something that's really important to focus on this is the annual flow of the Kennebec River taking very close to my home and in the winter you'll get a little bit of water coming out but it's really the spring fresh it in May June as it tapers off at the end of June and into July this is when a lot of the ecological activity and all of the the river system comes alive and is refreshed in the summertime the flows decrease decrease decrease and this year there are even lower than we have here because we're in the middle of an enormous drought we hope sometime in November the flows will come and we'll get another shot of water and again the rivers will rise this is all feet of elevation on the left scale and time on the bottom scale so the varying flow of a river over the course of the cycle of a year is something that's very important to all of the creatures that have gone and evolved in this river system let's go to the next slide please this is this is in Waterville, Maine close to where I live and these are old run-of-river dams that were built as part of the industrial revolution the industrial revolution started by making hydromechanical power and around the turn of the 20th century in the early 20th century electrical generators replaced the mechanical tools but the impacts are still the same here in Maine and in Canada as well they block migratory species they disrupt and eliminate the natural river system the impoundments cause the water to heat over the course of the summer and discharge in the fall when they should be discharged in colder water and these small dams have a really big impact ecologically for a very small amount of power this dam for example generates about three megawatts only three megawatts of power when you compare that to the numbers that we heard earlier about the big Canadian modern dams these are just drops in the bucket electricity wise and this is one of the reasons that we removed a dam just downstream of this one from the Kennebec River and we're working on others right now let's go to the next dam please next slide please so the Canadian mega dams are enormous they're unlike anything we have in the United States those of us that live here in the states have no points of reference on the scale of these enormous structures and it was really shortly after the end of World War II that Canada began to really start building major dams all along its waterways that were down along the U.S. border and I think that these dams have all of the ecological problems that we've seen with the smaller dams that I talked about earlier but they're even worse with these enormous dams that impact the whole of Quebec and further west Manitoba and also Saskatchewan as well as Labrador let's go to the next slide please just this summer a new publication has come out I think we really want to pay attention to this one because this this is a book that was published by activists in Maine and it goes to the actual impacts of these enormous Canadian hydro dams these mega dams and its new technology and its new understandings of ecology and it was really developed a lot of this it's because these Canadian dams are designed for perpetuity they're designed to be there forever they're not like American dams that have to be re-licensed every 40 years or less where as we re-license them we have a chance to attack the ecological damage and we can get rid of them one by one but Canada has a very different governmental system so that these dams are really built for perpetuity this book has a lot of controversial information in it and a lot of the conservation and controversial information is going to be challenged by hydro Quebec but there are some parts of it that I think are really true and that I'd never thought of before and I'd like to share them with you let's go to the next slide please when we talk about the St. Lawrence River and the effluent of the St. Lawrence River there was a Dr. Hans New who was a research science at the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans at the Bedford Institute in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia and he started looking at how the river as it comes out and it joins the saltwater of the sea develops what's called a saltwater wedge let's go to the next slide please and the details of how the saltwater wedge works are complicated there's a halcyon line that is the actual boundary between the saltwater that's heavier underneath and the freshwater that's on the surface but let's go to the next slide please the the the whole issue is the turbidity and the currents that come in to affect all as all of these different currents meet it's important because the turbidity brings fresh saltwater nutrients from the depth of the ocean and Dr. New discovered that these salt wedges can extend as much as 200 miles offshore so let's take a look at the next slide please because we we we can see what happened on the St. Lawrence River system early in the 1970s and late 60s big dams began to be built on the St. Lawrence and the flow of the nutrients that comes out in the salt wedge through the gulf of St. Lawrence into the North Atlantic where all of the cod populations were was shut off and at the same time all of the cod populations that Europeans came to North America for just disappeared and nobody has ever understood where did these populations go and I think that it's increasingly clear that it was the Canadian dams that were put in on the St. Lawrence River that impacted all of these offshore fisheries and has caused the economic collapse of most of Atlantic Canada and it's it's dramatic and this is just new information that's coming to light that really builds to the indigenous people's stories from the north let's go to the last slide please because these enormous Canadian dams that have been built all across Canada they have extraordinary extensive impact they flood extensive lands they force indigenous communities to move away from their ancestral homelands I'm pretty convinced that the dams in hydrocarabin have flooded the migratory routes of the caribou herds and that one of the reasons that the happy valley group of Native Americans have not had caribou up in their world is because they the migratory paths are now blocked by the these mega dams changes in flow of all of these have disrupted the ecosystem enormously the first nation people can no longer use the frozen rivers to travel on in winter to travel to their winter hunting grounds the river ice is multi-layered with each little flow that the dams release little skims of ice form but there is no solid ice which would be the normal situation with a free flowing river where the the flows decrease and stabilize in winter and I think the disruption of these is going to be impacting the saltwater wedge that goes into James Bay into the Arctic Ocean and I think that that's going to be a very significant impact on the offshore fisheries as well as the onshore fisheries let's go on and talk about the impoundments that we have here we've heard a little bit about the methylmercury methylmercury forms in what's called a littoral zone and the littoral zone is where light penetrates many of these great impoundments are very shallow and so when the sunlight hits the bottom the metallic mercury that's present everywhere in this ecosystem is methylized it adds a molecule to it so it can be bio-accumulated and we've heard about how this works its way up the food chain from Amy I mean it is incredible to think that the Canadian government is setting up ecosystems that poison the indigenous people that live there and I think that the other thing that's increasingly clear that the new book Blue Deserts is beginning to point out is that the impact of warm water discharges into this Arctic environment is very likely having an enormous impact on sea ice and we hear about the the Arctic opening up in winter and that it's climate change but I think a lot of it is the presence of these dams and as the sea ice disappears it impacts the polar bears and all of the peoples that live in the northern end of the ice pack I mean it's incredible to see how this is all going on and then you have open ocean water in the Arctic which adds heat to it which really impacts global warming in ways that we do not yet understand let's go to the last slide please I think that this last slide you've seen before and it really talks about the interconnectivity and at all reaching down now towards the United States and what we're hearing from central Maine power and iberdroler is that they want to draw this big line across Maine a 300 foot wide corridor not for one power line but we're going to see multiple lines along this corridor if it's permitted the ecological and social impact of the large Canadian mega dams on the electrical power they generate make the power anything but green this is the dirtiest power imaginable this is the deal with the devil where they're sacrificing all of the peoples of the north all of the ecosystems of the north for the electricity that they think that they can sell into the united states so my objection to the Spanish owned power line to bring dirty hydro power from comeback down goes to be well beyond the ecological damage to the brook trout that means so much to me canadian mega dam power is simply too dirty to be imported to the united states and it's up to all of us to work together educate the american people to understand this disaster that we are supporting thank you very much and i'll pass this on to the next speaker uh thank you so much okay go ahead go ahead go ahead Becky no go ahead Becky so i just want to thank all of the speakers so much it's really informative um and i we were we're happy to take questions um i think the best thing to do is to put them in the chat if you have any um and um i also see that in the chat there are a number of people who would like to have the book so i would say you can either get in touch with um uh main dot chapter at sierraclub.org is an email for our address or coordinator dot namra at gmail.com uh and give us your uh contact information so we can get a book to you um so uh then i uh just wanted to see if there are any other questions has anybody raised a hand on a question no you can can we mute i mean can we unmute people if you want to unmute yourself you could identify yourself and ask a question as well i'm seeing messages here but i'm not seeing questions. Becky you have a question from Catherine Skopik she's raising her hand great i go ahead rachel thank you um very much i enjoyed that and learned so very much from all of you what is the best thing one can do um to stop this uh uh here in new york city i know both mayor de Blasio and governor Cuomo seem to be for this project and i've begun to fight with others and to bring the issue forward to the general public uh what do you recommend as the best kind of action to stop it right now before it goes any further can i uh step in for that please sure uh well most recently uh we just released a film and we had a press conference addressing the coalition of northeastern governors who are meeting with the premiers of Quebec uh or not just Quebec but all the uh eastern premiers and they come together to discuss uh energy policies uh that will potentially tether us to head hydro for the next 40 to 60 years uh here in the state of Rhode Island Governor Gina Romando is one of those governors Governor Cuomo in New York he is one of those governors uh Premier Legault they're there are quite a few i don't know all their names but um i would say you know get in touch with uh uh you know your governor or your premier and um you know demand uh help us demand representation uh aren't things that are going to impact us you know we uh indigenous peoples need uh free prior and informed consent and uh we have the right to self-determination and um so that's a good place to start and of course uh north american uh mega dams resistance alliance you know and and when these get time you can get in touch with uh anybody from those two organizations uh they're doing a lot of wonderful things for uh hydro impacted communities thank you what's the governor's group called again the governors that meet northeastern that's the uh coalition of northeastern governors coneg is the acronym thank you very much yeah thank you very much standing yeah and thanks john and and this is meg i would add with regard to new york city um get involved in some of the activity around um demanding that mayor deblazio have a transparent procurement process for renewable energy there are secret negotiations going on right now behind closed doors with um mayor deblazio and hydro kebab back in blackstone group which is the uh international financier that is trying to push through chippy they have a permit process going on in front of the public service commission so there's lots to do there and there are lots of groups we can put you in touch with that if you're with 350 or some of the other groups in new york city um we can give you more details about that i'm in i'm in seara club and i know people in 350 and a couple other people as well so we'll start to gain right thanks and joining each other also i just want to mention that great thank you for those people on the call um who are in main seara club has an energy uh team and we are working very hard to continue to stop this effort um on the part of uh cmp so uh you can get in touch with us uh at main dot chapter at seara club dot org and we'll be happy to have you join the team also writing letters to the editor because the fight is not over yet we have a lot of pending lawsuits uh that are happening uh on the state level and so uh join us if you like and we will continue to do this this work in main thank you becky can i ask a question oh yeah sorry all right oh go ahead i'll go after please go ahead yeah oh i'm sorry i couldn't see anybody else's hand up do you want to go please no please go ahead and i'll go after you that's okay please so my question is a little bit speaking of frustration you know i work to stop a pipeline near me west roxbury lateral and massachusetts and then you know folks were getting blown down today literally um in weymouth um with the crack gas pipelines and the compressor and you know it's always a game of perceived and fake perceived energy need and i know that when we were doing our work in west roxbury you know there was always this oh my god the old ladies of west roxbury they're going to be cold they're going to have to put on a sweater in the winter they're going to lose their heat you know this kind of game of like pretending that we care about the people and i just hope that we can counteract that successfully you know because those little old ladies so to speak as they were referred to by the companies were the first people out on the line protesting these these pipelines here and i just get really really tired of this fake perceived we're running out of energy need um and i'm wondering how we can counteract that um you know because it's we all know it's about making the big money um but yet they do such a great job of this pretend need for energy so if somebody can just comment on that i can quickly mention that iso new england is a one is is an organization that um you know all of new england i know iso right so iso new england we need to be writing a letter to the editor about questioning what their science is because they i don't believe it's based in science we have i we have a question uh for steve um if you can elaborate around the science of the warming ocean from holding back water and the fisheries what groups are working on this um the uh like gulf of main research or clf do you know i i honestly don't know of a lot of groups that are working hard on this at this point i i think that the russians have done more research about this because they actually use some of this discharge to break up ice and some of their communities all along the north of cyberia um this is really embryonic science this is impacts that nobody anticipated defined from these mega dams and um cmp and ibidrola and hydro kebek and all of the provincial power companies are going to argue against it saying oh there's no information there's nothing there i think we've got a long way of go and a lot of unknown science to really make this charge stick but it's but it's common sense a lot of science you can look at and understand the mechanism and how it works so we need to get oceanography involved in the impacts of these large dams disrupting the river cycles discharging warm water into the arctic and helping to break up the arctic ice which really is a cause of an enormous amount of ecological change that we have no idea and no understanding of at this point thank you steve i just wanted to say something about the people of the feather in the james bay area those folks have put together a film about the warming water that lays on the on the ice where the ducks and all can't go down and get the food that they uh traditionally have so there's a lot of there's a lot more information that maybe we all should get put together again as we go forward in the next couple of months to point out some of the other issues that are involved uh and especially i know we've had the um dr hagan on and so forth but i think it bears repeating because we we all have these questions thanks i guess um okay thank you oh wait a minute yes i'm i'm thank you very much um i wanted to ask um meg or maybe becky both of you uh the question of going back to new york city which is where i'm from and and and uh one of the last speakers from new york um where you know we were we have been working trying to work together on this to begin and uh i'm i'm wondering uh in the way that the the mayor has been working secretly to pull this off and uh get it done by the end of the year um i'm i'm wondering i mean the certainly there's the the city council i don't know if it's involved at all in this but certainly willing to bring it to the you know the the environmental committee at the city council um meg have you have you spoken to them yet um have you spoken to anybody at the city council about this in new york i mean no i have not i think that other folks perhaps within seara club or from some other groups in new york have been in touch with the city council but i have not okay all right so it's a there's no reason not to go back to them and with more and more information there's so much material that you all of you have brought out which is really fabulous and so um i think we need to maybe with your help develop a stronger strategy for doing something in the city and um katherine and i are certainly involved and there are other people certainly other people too but um so yeah we'll do our best if we can if you have any suggestions for us we are all ears and ready to you know ready to engage and follow some of your suggestions thank you john i wonder if thank you so much um i was just thinking in an answer to that sorry meg but i'm wondering if john gonzalez can put in the chat of the link to the film oh yeah it'd be good yeah um because that's a very useful tool okay i'm regina this is annie i gave you a little card at the march on sunday and you're always welcome to call me you do have my number right yes yes right okay yes okay we need to do something as a group collective okay um where is the um i can't find okay let me find the chat okay chat's down in the bottom bar and um and so it will be put in there in a second i think oh okay thank you thank you are there any more questions did i miss any i guess there was one question about um whether clf and gulf of main scientists are working on this and i just want to mention that we have um spoken to them but they have declined to um to look into this the science of this oh what a drag okay can i ask another question if if other folks are done sure let me know so um in terms of first nations people in the states um intervening um and this is not my belief but i'm just curious how the governments work do you have to be either state or federally recognized um for that intervention to be able to have standing within the either the state government the federal government or you know these companies um this is meg i'll take us whoops go ahead go for it i'll take a stab at that um it sounds a bit like a legal questioning a legal question i'm not an expert in um indian law but um you know over the years there have been comments submitted to different state and federal agencies as i mentioned you know the penobscot tribe in main submitting comments to the new england clean energy connect in my view part of the problem is that the laws that they're commenting under such as the national environmental policy act and others um you know theoretically stop at the border and that is the position that the federal agencies are taking which says you know we don't have to look at any of the impacts of these dams or where this electricity is coming from which is really an egregious situation and in particular new york city where you have the climate leadership and protection act which um hydrocobac is siding to as well as blackstone and tdi and trying to push this corridor through as clean energy siding to this law that has a very very strong climate justice goal and requirements the law says the clean energy plan of the state is supposed to benefit frontline uh environmental justice communities yet the impacts in canada are being ignored so um you know that's part of the problem and if an indigenous community here in the u.s was not in the line of fire of a particular corridor they wouldn't have standing to be able to go to court um i know there might be a lawyer on here kevin might want to weigh in on that but that would be my take at this point kevin do you want to add anything kevin castley from earth rise law center yeah sure meg thanks um you know it depends a little bit i think uh what you know i'm more i'm most familiar with federal court actions that challenge these types of corridors uh under the law that meg just mentioned nipa national environmental policy act or sometimes under the clean water act and um and if they're you know there's certainly if there are uh if uh i guess first nations or indian uh tribes in main that have that are impacted like the panopska and they've submitted comments to the core and there's a there's a federal action that is is filed um challenging the corridor uh they may uh be able to join that through intervention and they may have standing if they can show um that their interests are going to be harmed but as meg says uh unfortunately the courts have interpreted some of these laws as as not looking beyond the borders of of the us which is doesn't make a lot of sense in the in the context of greenhouse gases certainly uh and in those kinds of impacts and it also doesn't make a lot of sense when you are looking at a transmission project which is clearly connected um to to northern parts of canada so um so i i think there are there are opportunities potentially depending on how it unfolds in main um and i'd be you know happy to talk to anyone uh you know who who might be more interested in in uh in that and exploring that possibility i think those those are voices that that the army corps uh needs to hear from as much as possible hi amy here i just want to jump in sorry go amy no good i just i want to jump in real quick and say that um you know when we're talking about borders and jurisdictions and like that kind of thing this is precisely how you know these colonial court systems work against us because they did it with muskrat falls in that when they did their so-called environmental assessment they hooked a very harsh line at the mouth of the river and said there will be absolutely no effects past the mess of the river we know that's not true like that doesn't make any sense it's not like the mercury in the water is going to magically disappear when it floats past a certain point right so i think a lot of this it's important to talk about but it's important to kind of keep in mind that that's how these systems work and they're working as they were designed to work in that they're working to you know rob us from our lands and territories and from our sovereignty i mean like in massachusetts you know the state is named for the massachusetts and yet they don't even have recognition you know and so like if they want to stand up and say things you know when you don't have that big federal game recognition you don't get to say things and have that have standing so i'm just kind of wondering people's in main being affected who are not necessarily federally recognized which i think is such a ridiculous system and how they're able to stand up for themselves good point i can't really answer that but we do have um melissa ferretti is the chair lady and president of the herring pond won't know i tried from plummeth massachusetts on the phone and melissa if you want to take a minute and talk about your efforts joining with the penobscot in the end of labrador and opposing the new england clean energy connect in the last couple weeks that would be great oops i think she might she's muted me i thought i was okay yeah all right okay we we're a we're a state recognized tribe as well and i do understand how the massachusetts feel um you you tend to be not taken quite as seriously i i think sometimes if you're not federally recognized which i agree with um with you that you know it's it's it's preposterous and it's it just doesn't even make sense but i think as a tribal nation who is passionate about these type of issues it's just really important to stand up anyhow and to speak your mind and and address these issues and support as as we did other other tribal community tribal communities to stop these dams so i think you know we wrote a strong letter to support um the inuit and the and the penobscot nation and i i encourage all tribal communities to do the same i think it's it's you know you really just have to make noise and and and people listen when we take you seriously you just have to stick up for yourselves i i think is you know really my point there that that helps at all thank you yes and i i do this is okay i'll add to that what's sorry go go go make go make all right i'll add to that um with the north and the northern past transmission corridor which was you know a twin to cmp and to chippy the new york corridor three u.s tribes did write to governor baker opposing that um in 2018 so um people here on the other side of the border have been standing in solidarity with indigenous and frontline communities in canada and i believe they'll continue to do that yeah yeah just keep on keep your head high and you know you just have to you just have to assert that right and just claim it and and don't let anybody tell you any different that's all i can suggest and we'll be here to support our brothers and sisters as long as they need us so thank you thank you melissa and thank you everybody for being on the call tonight um i'm sorry but i'm aware of the time we have a couple of other things that we want to talk about um we have an action slide which i think ania can put up actions you can take um the cr club main will be developing a or actually we're going to have a strategic planning session to um with our energy team and if anyone is interested in joining the energy team please um send a message to the chapter at main dot i don't see that's on here at main dot chapter at cr club org um and it is really valuable to email um or write a letter to the governors um it they have not allowed us to speak with them but more people need to you know contact them and say that we we really oppose this project governor mills in particular you know ran said ran saying that she would evaluate the project and you know shortly thereafter being elected she you know moved forward on it and i think you know we need to tell her that we need to hold up the mirror to her so anyway thank you so much um for this uh please take action please write to the governors and you can join us or in thank you for the Connecticut and and New York members who have joined as well as um Amy and John Gonzales and Melissa um and Steve um it's been wonderful to hear from you and uh thanks to everyone for joining um we have a there's we have another slide just to let you know is that we have another conversation about the lack of transparency and the money involved in the pursuit of big hydro on the october 27th so um i think there's a slide that will come up on that um but it uh so keep a look for that um in your inbox and um again this is this is Sierra Club main october 27th another one of these evening events so um please feel free to join us and uh thank you so much Steve Amy John Melissa Meg um and uh who am i missing i think that's it thank you thank you very much thank you thank you Becky for hosting thank you Becky as well okay thanks so much