Mercury rising how to#
Mercury rising series#

There was no reason for Nalcor to cut off the Muskrat Falls dam environmental assessment study area at the boundary of Lake Melville, Calder told The Narwhal. Calder, a civil engineer and PhD student at Harvard University’s School of Public Health at the time, was one of a half-dozen American and Canadian scientists who worked on the peer-reviewed research project, led by Harvard. In 2014, the Nunatsiavut government, which represents the Inuit Land Claims Area, commissioned a scientific study of the impacts of methylmercury from the Muskrat Falls dam. Nalcor said it did not study Lake Melville - designated an “ecologically and biologically significant area” by the Canadian Science Advisory Secretariat - because it predicted that the Muskrat Falls dam would have no measurable impacts on the estuary, a traditional Inuit hunting and fishing ground.īut that decision didn’t sit well with Flowers and other Inuit. Lake Melville, a brackish subarctic estuary downstream from the Muskrat Falls dam, was not included in an environmental assessment conducted by Nalcor, the province’s publicly owned energy corporation. It’s not an industrial seal hunt here, it’s for sustenance.” Mercury impacts extend far beyond area considered in environmental assessment: Harvard study Right now, it’s spring hunting for seals. It’s the smelts, it’s the trout, it’s the shellfish, it’s all the fur-bearing animals in the area that depend on the seafood. “It’s all the other seafood and wildlife, too, that we depend on in Lake Melville.

Mercury rising how to#

Martin Shiwak, an experienced Inuit trapper and hunter, tries to impress upon his children the importance of understanding how to live off the land on Labrador’s rugged northern coast. “This is what our body consists of - our cellular make-up is fish and seals and the wild birds that come into the rivers,” Flowers said.ĭane Shiwak, 8, removes his gloves to absorb the warmth from the breast of a ptarmigan that he shot with his father Martin while on the land in Rigolet in northern Labrador. Most human exposure to methylmercury comes from eating fish, although marine mammals like seals and other traditional foods can also carry high levels. When large hydro dams flood river valleys and forests, microbes convert inorganic mercury - found in soils worldwide in greatly increased levels due to coal-fired power plants and other industrial activities - into methylmercury, the type of mercury of greatest concern for human health. “It’s widely known that hydroelectric development has a methylmercury impact,” said Ryan Calder, a Duke University postdoctoral associate and expert on the methylmercury impacts of hydroelectric development. In the next year, when the Muskrat Falls hydro dam on Labrador’s lower Churchill River floods an area twice the size of the city of Victoria, methylmercury will immediately start to contaminate the food chain as microbes feed on inorganic carbon stored in flooded soils and vegetation, setting off a sequence of events. “We’ve depended on that food for decades and centuries as a way of life.”īut this spring will be the last that Flowers and her daughter, who is five months pregnant, consume country food from the Lake Melville area without fear of health impacts from methylmercury, a neurotoxin so dangerous the World Health Organization ranks it among the top ten chemicals of public health concern. “Half the people here can’t afford to buy from the stores,” Flowers told The Narwhal. “We’re paying $30 for a small chicken.” A medium-sized cabbage costs $4 or $5, while a package of cheddar cheese fetches $18. Traditional foods still form the backbone of her extended family’s diet, as they do for thousands of Inuit who hunt seal each April and catch salmon in June.Įven if Flowers wanted to buy all her food from local grocery stores, “the price of food here in Goose Bay is just outrageous,” she said.

Marjorie Flowers grew up in the Labrador community of Rigolet on the shores of Lake Melville, eating nutrient-rich Inuit foods like brook trout and seal.

Mercury rising series#

This is part two of a three-part, reader-funded series on the Muskrat Falls dam inquiry.