Comments by Ted Fitts to the SEC on Northern Pass

I am Ted Fitts, a property owner in Whitefield, and I teach courses in environmental history.  My ancestors showed up in New Hampshire in 1634, and now responsibility for the land is on our watch just as it was earlier on theirs.

So I speak with some reverence for tradition.  The decisions that you make in this case will have a huge impact on the legacy you bestow to our state.

Think well on it.  Nothing is lost by taking time to reflect on the degradation of a transformed landscape.

When you walk out of here tonight, and when you meet to make siting decisions, you will see and feel the power provided by electricity.  We use it; we need it; we appreciate its advantages as it lights our world.  And you may also turn out those lights at times, perhaps after you read your children a bedtime story—I’d recommend The Lorax by Dr. Seuss—tonight or any other night.  All across this state, thousands of citizens are depending on the power this company provides.

But what my neighbors in the North Country and I resist, and what I appeal, as an intervener, that you embrace, is the transformed power of a degraded landscape that you have the power to prevent.

The issue here is NOT about individual jobs, nor about individual rights to use land or corporate rights to provide services, nor about individual preferences. 

The one issue in front of you is your responsibility to our COMMON birthright:  an environment preserved from selfish and greedy assault and scarred by corporate muscle.  The lands around our communities, the vistas we see, are not the provenance of the powerful and the wealthy and the greedy.  The scar that enormous towers represent stands as emblematic of a willingness to give privilege to profit over preservation, to prioritize speedy development over assured safety, to declare that all progress is good progress.

So I rise here to ask that you embrace the precautionary principle and oppose a project whose electromagnetic health risks are yet unknown.

And I rise here to ask that you reject a project whose negative transformation of the environment IS known and would be visible to every community as long as steel shall stand against sky.

I am asking you to stand against those towers.  Bury them if this project is, in your judgment, essential, but deny the right to degrade our state.

You will leave a legacy to your children and to my children and to the children of power company executives.  You will decide if enormous towers that can be buried are worth degrading our communities.  I am asking that you NOT allow this company’s proposed scar to be tattooed into our common landscape.

Thank you.