James Bay forms the southern tip of the much larger Hudson Bay in Quebec, Canada. To the east lies the Quebec-Labrador peninsula, an undeveloped area with vast expanses of pristine wilderness. The region is similar to Siberia, covered in tundra and sparse forests of black spruce and other evergreens. It is home to roughly 100 species of birds, twenty species of fish and dozens of mammals, including muskrat, lynx, black bear, red fox, and the world's largest herd of caribou. The area has also been home to the Cree and other Native Indian tribes for centuries. Seven rivers drain the wet, rocky region, the largest being the La Grande.

In the 1970s, the government-owned Hydro-Quebec electric utility began to divert these rivers, flooding 3,861 square miles (10,000 km²) of land. They built a series of reservoirs, dams and dikes on La Grande that generated 10,300 megawatts...