Environmental Justice: Some Questions for PSNH

In her 2009 scoping comments on a proposal by the Transmission Agency of Northern California to build a 600-mile overhead HVDC transmission corridor through low-income intermountain communities with minority populations in Shasta County, a project called "TANC TPP," Jean L. Saffel invokes the policy of environmental justice and raises a number of critical questions related to it.

What is environmental justice?

On February 11, 1994, President Clinton signed Executive Order 12898, which directs federal agencies to make achieving environmental justice part of their mission by identifying and addressing, as appropriate, disproportionately high adverse human health or environmental effects of its activities on minority and low-income populations.

The Environmental Protection Agency defines environmental justice as "the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies. EPA has this goal for all communities and persons across this Nation. It will be achieved when everyone enjoys the same degree of protection from environmental and health hazards and equal access to the decision-making process to have a healthy environment in which to live, learn, and work."
<http://www.epa.gov/compliance/environmentaljustice/>

As Saffel explains, "environmental justice involves reviewing a project’s significant

individual or cumulative impacts on human health or the environment, including

interrelated social and economic effects," to prevent disproportionate adverse

effects upon disadvantaged communities, e.g., those with lower income and higher

unemployment rates (48).

One of the disproportionate adverse socioeconomic effects of a major transmission project like TANC concerns the universally acknowledged drop in real estate values, which seriously disadvantages senior citizens on fixed incomes, Saffel notes:

"Many senior citizens in Oak Run and Round Mountain will not live long enough to

recover from the financial impacts of this corridor project. How will TANC mitigate such

impacts for lower income residents such as seniors, those on fixed incomes, etc?

For many Americans their home and equity in that property is all they have to carry

them through retirement and their so-called golden years. These Transmission Lines

will create a significant reduction in property values of seniors, dramatically changing

people's lives. How will they manage to survive until their end days? How will we?

The ratepayers who are beneficiaries of TANC TTP are not the people whose lives,

living environment and property values will be disrupted by this project. Who will

mitigate for these long-term costs for our communities? Will TANC?" (48)

 TANC's profitability, she concludes, does not justify environmental injustice:

"Improving TANC’s profitability is not an equitable, fair or environmentally just
reason to build TANC TTP and leave the irreversible environmental impacts in the
laps of economically strapped counties and the equally strapped impacted families" (50).

Will PSNH mitigate for the long-term costs of the Northern Pass project on the economically strapped North Country, including our senior citizens who will not live long enough to recover from the financial impact of the project? Will PSNH say it's "too expensive" to mitigate by burying the lines or running them along public ROWs? Does PSNH find it acceptable that those who will profit from the Northern Pass are not the people whose lives, living environment, and property values will suffer for it?   

  Saffel's full report is worth a read. (But a warning for those on dial-up and satellite:
it's a big file, 5MB.)


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Environmental Injustice in NH

Follow the Money in NH and You Won't Find the HVDC Lines

Q. Where does PSNH want to put their above-ground transmission project?

A. Coos and Grafton Counties

Q. Which two NH counties had the largest percentages of people living below the poverty level in 2008?* 

A. Coos and Grafton Counties (13%, 10.6%)

Q. Which NH county had the lowest median household income in 2008?

A. Coos County ($42,788)

Q. Which NH county had the lowest per capita money income in 1999?

A. Coos County ($17,218)

Q. Will the Northern Pass economically benefit Coos and Grafton Counties?

A. No

Why should NH's most economically disadvantaged area be asked to bear the additional burden of a transmission project that will ruin its beauty and further depress its economy?

This is environmental injustice in action.

Q. What was the total compensation package of Charles W. Shivery, Chairman, PSNH/Northeast Utilities, in 2008?

A. $6,466,795.**

Q. What was the total compensation package of Gary Long, President and COO, PSNH, in 2008?

A. $708,393.**

* Statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/index.html

**see http://www.puc.nh.gov/Regulatory/CaseFile/2009/09-035/LETTERS,%20MEMOS/09-035%202009-11-09%20PSNH's%20Redacted%20Response%20to%20Order%20No%2025,037.PDF

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Robert Frost and the Northern Pass: "Freedom Lies in Being Bold"

Although it appeared in his Pulitzer Prize volume of poetry entitled New Hampshire (1923), Robert Frost's long narrative poem "A Fountain, A Bottle, A Donkey's Ears, and Some Books" is not well known--unless you are from the North Country.

The poem opens with the speaker (a semi-autobiographical Frost) talking with "Old Davis," a local guide of sorts, who owns "a solid mica mountain in Dalton" with, experts predict, mica sheets as big as plate glass windows buried deep down. Some "Boston people" had come out to see it, and Davis wants to take the speaker there too.

Unimpressed by this gaudy phenomenon and its Boston visitors, the speaker instead wants Old Davis to take him to a more meaningful and elusive place:

the place where once, on Kinsman,
The early Mormons made a settlement
And built a stone baptismal font outdoors—
But Smith, or someone, called them off the mountain
To go West to a worse fight with the desert.

Davis drags his feet and scoffs at the idea of searching for that "old bathtub," but the speaker persists, and finally Davis consents even though "it's grown up some to woods around it [and] the mountain may have shifted since I saw it in eighty-five."

What follows is a day of tramping around the Kinsmans searching for the old Mormon settlement and its legendary fountain in the vicinity of the current WMNF Reel Brook Trail in Easton. The two men "made a day of it out of the world," "ascending to descend to reascend," as accurate a description of hiking the Kinsman ridge as has ever been written.

The Mormon fountain eludes them. Then Old Davis stumbles across something else that he thinks will placate the speaker--the likeness of a bottle painted, or stained by vegetation, on the side of a cliff--and further suggests that they search out the image of a donkey's ears formed by two converging slides. But the speaker dismisses these as likenesses "that surprise the thrilly tourist."

A frustrated Davis then leads the speaker to an abandoned house, not of the Mormon settlement, but of the poetess Clara Robinson, now dead. Books of poetry lie strewn about everywhere in the broken glass from windows shattered by "boys and bad hunters." In the old house, Davis and the speaker each pick up a book and begin reading, "both either looking for or finding something . . . .I was soon satisfied for the time being."

All the way home I kept remembering
The small book in my pocket. It was there.
The poetess had sighed, I knew, in heaven
At having eased her heart of one more copy—
Legitimately. My demand upon her,
Though slight, was a demand. She felt the tug.
In time she would be rid of all her books.

Frost's actual friend and hiking companion, Ray Holden of Franconia, has written that Frost often spoke of the legend of the Mormon settlement with its ruins that hunters occasionally came across. "Frost and I never took a walk without the sometimes spoken and sometimes tacit understanding that we were looking for that altar" (Thompson, Years of Triumph, 563-64).

In a legend rooted in historical evidence, Mormons did settle on the side of Easton's Beech Hill on South Kinsman Mountain in the 1830s, even if Frost and Holden never found the site. In the poem, the search on the west side of Kinsman for the evocative old settlement and its altar serves to provide a necessary day "out of the world" and anticipates finding the abandoned house of poetry in which the speaker experiences the sense of satisfaction that tourist attractions (mica mountains, images of bottles on cliffs, avalanche scars that look like donkey's ears) cannot give him. For Frost, the uncharted outdoors is the gateway to the temple of art.

In "A Fountain, A Bottle, A Donkey's Ears, and Some Books," Robert Frost, the iconic poet of New England, captures the deeper meaning of the North Country as a place where one may still experience a day "out of the world" in nature. It is sadly ironic that the apparent site of the old Mormon settlement for which Frost's speaker searches would lie in the shadow of 145' steel pylons if the Northern Pass project takes its "preferred route" through Easton and the White Mountain National Forest. Those same mammouth towers would march up and over the mountain through the original Kinsman Notch, in the col between Mt. Wolf and South Kinsman, and forever obliterate the haunting traces of Nathaniel Kinsman and others before him, perhaps even the Native Americans, who first walked into the Easton Valley.

What would Robert Frost say?

"Freedom lies in being bold."


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