A hub gone quiet

It’s hard to imagine Hudson Bay as Canada’s front door, but in the early years of European trade and settlement in North America, it rivalled the St. Lawrence River and the Eastern Seaboard as a gateway to the continent. York Factory, one of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s first and eventually most important trading posts, was built at the mouth of the Hayes River just 14 years after a Royal Charter granted it exclusive trading rights to the Hudson Bay watershed (eventually known as Rupert’s Land).

For Indigenous peoples who have lived on this landscape since the sea retreated thousands of years ago, the influx of Europeans to the area brought, among many other things, an expansion of their trade networks, with lucrative trading to be had at bayside posts. Unlike the French coureurs de bois who travelled inland to trade with First Nations, the Hudson’s Bay Company traders generally preferred to remain near the bay, leaving the inland movement of furs and European trade goods to the Cree (see the First Nations trade routes in purple on this map, while British routes are in red). Though bayside trade continued to ebb and flow well into the 20th century, colonial settlement never followed — leaving the shores of Hudson and James bays much as they have been since the end of the last ice age.

Wetlands matter 

Wetlands have not always been well loved. In fact, for much of the last century, they were reviled and actively drained, the removal of their odoriferous bugginess clearing the path for colonization and large-scale farming. Canada, which currently contains about one quarter of the world’s remaining wetlands, has lost an estimated 13 per cent of wetlands in the time since contact. The Hudson Bay Lowlands, almost never having had the pressure of permanent colonial settlement, have been entirely spared the fate that so many wetlands have suffered. As a result, they remain a linchpin in our global environment, regulating, cleaning and enriching water as it flows to the ocean (creating a food- and habitat-rich environment) and capturing, storing and sequestering carbon from the atmosphere. 

From carbon sink to carbon source? 

Peat is the accumulated muck that forms from slowly decomposing carbon-rich plant matter. In the Hudson Bay Lowlands, peat has been accumulating for thousands of years. Unlike forest ecosystems, which release sequestered carbon within 100 to 500 years, peatlands act as carbon sinks, burying carbon underground and keeping it out of the atmosphere for up to 10,000 years. Direct human impacts, like wildfires and drainage, lead to a significant release of carbon, but the net impact of global warming and the consequent thawing of permafrost is less definitive. Thawing peat is sure to release more of this stored carbon, but the increased density of plant life that can be grown in the newly thawed ground may help to balance this release by sequestering atmospheric carbon in its living cells. 

The wetlands feed the rivers; the rivers feed the sea

The densest populations of marine phytoplankton in the world’s oceans occur where nutrients
well up from the ocean floor or where they flow off the land. And nowhere in Canadian waters are there greater densities of phytoplankton than at the great Mackenzie Delta in Northwest Territories (a river that also runs its course through extensive wetlands) and the deltas of the Hudson Bay Lowlands’ rivers. This productivity can be seen in the phytoplankton blooms in Hudson and James bays, but is also evidenced by the convergence of birds and marine animals that stop at the tidal shores to feed along their seasonal migration routes.

Lands in the balance

Who has a stake in the Hudson Bay Lowlands? There’s the natural world, which seeks nothing but perhaps the space to exist. There are Indigenous Peoples who have called this area home since it rose up from the sea to become terra firma. There are those involved in the industries that strive to profit from the riches of the land. And there are the various levels of government tasked with balancing the wants and needs of the aforementioned parties. 

Managing the land

Land-use decisions in the North are primarily dictated by provincial and territorial governments. The lines they draw are often straight, though sometimes hugging rivers and shorelines. Some lands are set aside for protection, while others are developed for their resources. On the surface, this map shows the implicit challenges in having one government department to protect land and one department to exploit it. Otoskwin-Attawapiskat Provincial Park has been set aside to preserve nature, yet it is next to one mine and upstream of another. And if mineral development in the so-called “Ring of Fire” moves forward, it would completely surround this protected area, severely undermining its protection.

It is encouraging to see proposed Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas in each of the three provinces of the Hudson Bay Lowlands, potentially moving Canada towards its goal of protecting 30 per cent of its lands and waters by 2030. And yet, the balance between protection and resource exploitation must be carefully struck to ensure meaningful compromise between the interests of nature, First Nations and non-Indigenous Canadians.

Exploiting the land — to save the planet? 

Industrial interests often describe nature — plants, animals and minerals — as resources and, as such, their value lies only in what they can do for us once they’ve been exploited. But the Ring of Fire mineral development project is hinging its forward progress on selling the exploitation of scarce resources (nickel, cobalt, lithium, manganese, graphite and copper) not on the grounds of profit or jobs creation, but as part of a climate-change solution, given that most of these minerals are used to make batteries for electric vehicles.

Though a meaningful cost-benefit analysis for the Ring of Fire and other mineral extraction projects in the wetlands is a nearly impossible task, what I see through a cartographic lens is clear: a permanent road built into the heart of this now nearly roadless land would be the thin edge of the wedge. Where one road goes, more are sure to follow, releasing more carbon in their construction and exposing the Hudson Bay Lowlands to further development.