Okay. Hi, everybody. My name is Frederick Von Karls.
I'm a clinical psychologist with a Ph.D. in psychology,
minor degrees in sociology and anthropology, especially
cultural anthropology, so you might think I care about
people from some of the work I've done and I do. So I
intend to tell a story here that might seem like it's
coming out of left field but over the time I have I
think I'm going to bring it to centerfield. I doubt
many people in this audience know about a people in
Hudson's Bay named the Nunavut Inuit people. Part of
their problem is that Quebec hydro has for quite a few
years now been dumping fresh water which is accumulated
through the spring runoff season in dams and reservoirs
and is often heated beyond the normal environmental,
let's say, proper levels and dumping that into the
Hudson's Bay at a rate that is really quite extreme and
this involves millions of gallons of water that's
released during the high peak energy seasons of winter
in Quebec and the northeast American coast. So what
happens with that. Well, what happens with it is that
the people who live on these little barrier islands who
are surrounded mainly by salinated frozen water at the
time of year when the release is held is that their
water and their environment, the whole ecological
environment they live in is changed dramatically. Fresh
water freezes at a much more accelerated rate than
salinated water. And also, it affects the environment
in another way that I'll just make a slight note to
that I think is a big environmental impact in that that
fresh water then floods the Labrador coast and creates
a problem of disturbing the deep water flow in the
Atlantic in terms of the Gulfstream's proper
functioning. The main point is that these people
survival is based on the Arctic idler which is dying at
remarkably great rates because of the resalinated water
so their culture here is going down the tines. What I
want to say is they didn't get a choice. They still
don't have a voice and that what I'm feeling here in
New Hampshire is we're given one option. We're not
given a variety of options. We don't have the
opportunity to negotiate directly with any power, we
have to rely on people that are here representing us,
and I hope they take it into account the fact that what
happens here will have a drastic effect on people here.
What happens here will affect all the people that I
think care about their environment in northern New
Hampshire which is a whole bunch of folks. And in
conclusion I'd like to say, and I'm not kidding about
this, that I think there will be a lot of depression
and some extra drastic consequences in people's
personal lives in New Hampshire which wouldn't be
addressed because we don't have the money for mental
health services to cover that here. I'll leave with
that.