Price per barrel : the human cost of extraction / by Robin Lynn Behl.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Nonfiction. This book is a memoir and travelogue. The subject is predominantly focused on public safety and health care worker conditions and the mental health effects upon them in extraction communities in the United States and Fermont, Quebec. Such service providers include first responders, firefighters, EMT/paramedics, dispatchers, flight crews, police officers, as well as municipal leaders (mayors, city planners/inspectors, governors), hospital administrators (nursing leadership, EMS liaisons, emergency department heads, and officers), and extractive industry developers. Mental health experiences include PTSD and suicide.For twenty years, Robin Behl worked to save lives, first as a firefighter, then as a paramedic and finally as a physician assistant. It's the kind of work that will change a person, the kind that leaves an indelible mark. People in these professions find some way to cope with the horror that is mankind. Robin's means of coping was to drive. For years, she drove long, long distances across the country, across the continent, until she had seen all fifty states and every province in Canada. Along the way, she ran into friends, her brothers and sisters in the badge. She found the other people who were still doing the work she had done, and they started to tell her their stories. Of particular impact are the stories that come out of the repeated cycle of boom and bust that has shaped our movement across the North American continent for the last four hundred years. Whether it's the gold for our coffers, the copper for our cell phones, the oil that powers our lives, our quest for the Moon, or our human need for entertainment, we come together en-masse to dig for it, drill for it and race for it. In each of those impacted communities, there are men and women in blue shirts and steel-toed boots, in white coats and stethoscopes, in guns and badges, who sacrifice their energy, their hairlines and their sanity to care for their neighbors. This book takes a look at what a sudden population boom can do to a town and to the people who care about it most.