One of the two candidates in the District 12 Senate race is calm, serious, and grounded, while the other one is hysterical – and not in a funny way, and not in a way that benefits the overwhelming majority of New Hampshire’s citizens.

I’ve had several long discussions about policy issues with Melanie Levesque over the past several months, and came away impressed and inspired by her careful weighing of who would gain and who would lose in NH from each of the solutions being hotly debated. From reproductive rights to funding public education to common-sense gun safety, Sen. Levesque starts from the premise that we have to “take a deep breath” and not fear the solutions that will improve public welfare and reduce injustice.

But I’ve also seen Kevin Avard up close and personal, and – on an issue where I have nationally-recognized expertise – found him to be so consumed by fear and malice that he quite literally poisoned the legislative debate. I commend to your attention this 3-minute video clip of Sen. Avard speaking on the Senate floor this past May – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvbPVcw125w&t=4679s.

After his tirade, the Senate voted 16-8 to pass HB 1454 anyway. It was a simple half-page bill that would have required new landfill developers to choose sites anywhere other than the small minority of places that are both extremely close to one of our rivers or lakes and in hyper-porous soil that would let leakage from the landfill pollute the water body long before it could even be detected. The bill was vetoed by Gov. Sununu, and the Senate failed by 4 votes to override it in Sept.

Mr. Avard is absolutely entitled to disagree with the vast majority of legislators. A calm speech about why he believes we ought to favor one out-of-state company (and its plans to create about eight new jobs in New Hampshire) over the state’s environment might have added to the discussion. Instead, here’s what his colleagues, and the voters, got:

• The delirious claim that if NH was to strengthen its landfill siting criteria, leaving us still only about half as strong as nearby states (which yet have thriving landfill industries), there would be no place to put any trash. He slammed the bill’s proponents as “selfish” for wanting a developer to move a few or many miles away if the particular “backyard” it was insisting on was scientifically ruinous. Is it “selfish” of military bases to restrict a very few kinds of businesses – those that shine floodlights or broadcast powerful radio signals – locating next door to them? Avard apparently thinks so.

• But as bizarre as that claim was, Avard went much, much further into hysteria. Because, he shouted, the legislation would “move the goalposts” (by fixing a 40-year old mistake in the DES regulations), “nobody is ever going to do business in the state of New Hampshire if this bill passes.” If you think that Kevin Avard just saved us from a giant ghost town filling the space between Vermont and Maine, then re-elect him. But if you think it’s unhinged to say that “nobody will ever” open a restaurant or a machine-tool factory in NH again, if we stopped putting landfills in sandpits next to lakes, he’s not your guy.

• The final indignity? He then yelled that the promised construction of a “$100 million recycling center in Manchester” was “part of the Dalton [landfill] application,” and that relocating the landfill to a safer location would kill this unrelated project. To use a technical term, this is nuts. If a company thinks they can make money with each of two projects, they’ll build the one regardless of whether they can build the other. So he either enabled this threat, or his anger just made him confused enough to concoct a dual application that never existed.

And cheerleading for millions of tons of PFAS-laden trash next to our state’s water bodies isn’t Avard’s only cause. He just sponsored a bill to encourage the burning of plastic waste. This is an improving technology that may soon be viable without causing too much risk from the toxic air pollutants released. But to call it “advanced recycling” is an insult to anyone downwind, and shows contempt for science. There’s a big difference between melting plastic to mold it into new plastic, versus just burning it. Now that Connecticut killed a similar chemical-industry-sponsored bill there, plastic waste from CT may be headed our way for incineration, thanks to Avard.

“Hysterical” was for centuries a slur aimed at women who, in the eyes of the patriarchy, were given to “blindness and emotional outbursts.” In this race, please consider voting for the candidate (Sen. Melanie Levesque) who has her eyes open and her emotions in control and in service of the people.

Adam M. Finkel has been a professor of environmental science at Princeton, Penn, and now Michigan. He was a top appointee at OSHA and the EPA in the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. He is a resident of Dalton, New Hampshire.