Bellingham Comments from Digital Recorder - EISs for the Proposed ...

GATEWAY PACIFIC TERMINAL EIS SCOPING HEARING VOL. II
COURT REPORTER: BETH DRUMMOND PROCEEDING DATE: October 27, 2012
Page 95
1 I'm a teacher and I'm a licensed mental health
2 counselor, and I would like to talk about the unavoidable
3 negative and adverse impacts on our individual and community
4 mental health if this coal project goes through.
5 Unfortunately, these impacts seem to be the
6 unavoidable and inevitable consequences built into a
7 paradigm of a self-serving corporate capitalist system of
8 whom BNSF, Goldman Sachs, SSA Marine, and the coal companies
9 are charter members.
10 This corporate profit system depends -- depends
11 on our alienation from nature, our alienation from each
12 other, our alienation from ourselves, and our alienation
13 from our own experience. This is the definition of mental
14 unhealth, if not downright insanity. The cumulative impacts
15 of such a model actively works against mental health in the
16 communities.
17 I was born and raised in Alaska, and I was in
18 high school when the leasing of Pet. 4 began through the
19 Alaska pipeline. I watched the subtle, but systemic and
20 cumulative mental impacts on a community's mental health by
21 a huge, unnatural influx of money and the culture of
22 corporate reached status quo, and that's it. I do not want
23 this to happen here.
24 I ask you to please extend the comment period. I
25 beg you to please consider the mental and social impacts of