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For the 30th anniversary of the George D. Aiken Lecture Series, Darby Bradley, President of the Vermont Land Trust joined Dr. Jan Albers in offering their perspectives on The History and the Future of Vermont's Landscape. Vermont Public Radio (VPR) rebroadcast the speeches on February 23rd. Transcripts links are listed below and VPR has posted audio versions on at its website.
If you have any questions, or would like a printed copy of either speech, please contact Dawn Lee at VLT (802-262-1214). “The History and Future of the Vermont Landscape” If you look around the country, you find that many states have strong senses of identity. There’s Texas, constantly confusing being biggest with being best; or glamorous California, like a young starlet trying to prove it is not just another pretty face. Aristocratic Virginia thinks it won the Revolution single-handedly—as does Massachusetts. Other states’ images are more murky—think of North Dakota or Delaware or Nebraska. New Jersey recently tried to address its image problem head on with a contest for a new license plate slogan. One of the front-runners, last I heard, was “New Jersey—The Whatchalookinat State.” Vermont may be small, but it is a place imbued with a strong sense of being special. Our exceptionalism is largely based on two things: first, a belief that Vermonters have retained more of their crotchety independence than other Americans and, secondly, our pride in having preserved a landscape of exceptional beauty. Tonight I am going to talk about some of the historical forces that have created the Vermont landscape we value. Darby will have the more difficult task of trying to predict its future. The landscapes we live in are the greatest example of the transformative force of human beings, and yet we generally take them for granted. Step back for a moment and think of the clearing and earth moving and extracting and burning and building we have done on this great ant farm of the earth, and it hits you again that there is no more potent symbol of the pure power of our species than the landscape. Most of what we see around us is the result of human choices, piling up in layers, like silt or snow, year by decade by century, until its has all been transformed again and again. We live surrounded by our decisions, but not all landscape decisions are created equal. Each age finds its own answers to what my fellow-Minnesotan, Garrison Keillor, has dubbed, “life’s persistent questions.” So the history of the landscape is the history of how people have chosen to change the land in the course of creating shelter, getting food and making a living; and what they thought they were doing, at the time. That is where our historical understanding of Vermont’s landscape can begin. I am going to speak tonight about four formative periods of Vermont history and how their distinct characteristics have shaped the landscape for good and for ill. First, the peculiar circumstances of its settlement gave Vermont a distinctly independent air. Secondly, the growth of community in the early-nineteenth century bequeathed to us a remarkable aesthetic legacy. In the third era, the poverty of the late-nineteenth century preserved lost ways of life and reinforced the state’s remoteness. Finally, the modern period sees a Vermont struggling with the tensions between freedom and community, preservation and development. Vermonters feel an affinity with the rest of New England--so much so that we tend to forget how much later European settlement came here. The Puritans who settled southern New England came in groups and set themselves up in the English pattern, where farmers live close together in villages and go out from there to work their fields. So they dwelled in close communities from the start, with all the social constraints that entailed. The records they left us are full of disputes over pigs wandering into neighbor’s gardens, fights over fences and nosy Parker condemnations of improper behavior. They had to adapt to each other so that the community could survive in this place that was, to them, a wilderness. As European settlement progressed in the rest of New England, Vermont remained a remote frontier—a rugged and dangerous battleground between the farmers of New England and the trappers of New France. This no-mans-land could not be settled safely until the battles of the French and Indian Wars came to a virtual end at Quebec City in 1759. The subsequent fights between New York and New Hampshire over the right to grant land in the region led to further delays. By the time most of Vermont was opened for settlement, in the decades before the American Revolution, it was almost 150 years since the first pilgrims sailed into Plymouth Harbor. That is about the same amount of time we have between us and the Civil War. So almost everything about the founding of Vermont was different from the experiences of much of the rest of New England. Their settlers came from Europe—most of our earliest ones came from later generations of what had, by then, become New England Yankees. Their settlers came to a wilderness, while ours came from families with generations of experience in this environment. The first New Englanders chose to live in tidy, well-regulated communities, but Vermont was settled in a wild free-for-all of land speculation and mayhem. The young men and women who came to Vermont were fleeing the confines of the hothouse villages of their forbears to the south Many of their holdings were 50-100 acres in size, so they were necessarily spread out on the landscape. Villages only developed here when they became economically necessary. So, right from the start, Vermont may have attracted people who wanted a greater measure of freedom—or could at least endure a culture of less restraint. Long before America had the Wild West, it had the Wild North Woods of Vermont.
Other places name their churches after saints, but Vermonters named this one after Ira Allen! That tells you something about the unique character of this place. Vermont had no shortage of hucksters, willing to extol her virtues to potential buyers, and it was working. By 1790, over 85,000 people had come to Vermont to make their fortunes, swelling to 217,000 by 1810. Some made bad choices, like Moses Warner, the first settler in Andover, of whom it was written, “…he selected his farm …because, as he said, it was free from stones; but he soon found that there were plenty underneath the leaves, and the farm is today the most stony one in town.” Like all frontiers, early Vermont was short of women, but the ones who came were pretty feisty. When the Rev. Nathan Perkins of Connecticut toured Vermont in 1789, he wrote, “I ask myself are these women of ye same species with our fine Ladies? tough are they, brawny their limbs,--their young girls unpolished--& will wear work as well as mules.” Conditions could be very primitive. In one village, a dozen women had only one needle between them, and would meet for sewing bees where they could share it. So settlement happened in an atmosphere that put few restraints on the rights of the individual. Tens of thousands of axes were chopping down acre after acre of virgin forests, with devastating environmental consequences. Without their trees, the mountainsides were opened to erosion, and the habitats of plants, birds and animals were destroyed. By the time of statehood, in 1791, beaver, otters, catamounts, deer and many other creatures were already becoming scarce. All the while, the settlers, acting independently, never doubted that they were nature’s improvers, not its destroyers. But as the first frantic scramble of hand-to-mouth subsided, even wild Vermonters started to create the structures of community. Town meetings began and town officers were selected—the beginnings of that face-to-face local government we still hold so dear. In this second phase, taverns, schools, lawyers' offices and churches were beginning to appear, usually in about that order. Tidy towns were being built, as the settlers sought out supplies, markets and a new measure of culture. The growth of community would gradually lead to greater restraints on individual freedoms, and the exploitation of the land. Vermont’s economy was starting to take off. As early as 1791, John Lincklaen, a Dutch land agent who was visiting Vermont, found that “The settlements are new, but people begin to live at their ease.” The turn of the nineteenth century saw the beginnings of a great economic boom. Crops were initially bountiful, stoked by centuries of nutrients that had built up in the forest soils. The Merino sheep was introduced in 1811, and soon a million and a half of them would dot the freshly-cleared mountainsides. Extractive industries were furnishing lumber and stone to the world. A small Industrial Revolution was getting off the ground, making textiles, stoves and many other products. By 1820, over 80% of the families around Windsor were buying things from local businesses each year—most of them people whose settler parents and grandparents had hardly ever seen a shop. Middlebury is a good example of such an upwardly mobile young town. The little hamlet got its first shop in 1790. By 1830, it was the second biggest town in Vermont, [pop. 3468] because its boosterish citizens--eager to show their taste and self-confidence-- had cared enough to build schools, a courthouse, a Masonic lodge, four beautiful churches, a few shops, some imposing private houses, a number of substantial industrial buildings and a College. The Vermont villages were not large, but they represented a distinct break with the surrounding countryside. Farmers might come to the village to do their business, but the villagers were not going out to work on the farms. Vermont was generating enough wealth to allow some folks to move off the farm and live lives more like the ones their ancestors from southern New England had left behind. The classic Vermont village of our fantasies—and our postcards—is largely the product of their efforts in the early-nineteenth century. By 1853, in a talk before the Rutland County Society, Henry Lester was boasting of Vermont:
He spoke too soon. After the Civil War, Vermont was facing a force that would have the greatest impact on the landscape here since the clearing of the Northern Forest: poverty. The poor had always been with us, for even in the good years there had not been a lot of wealth here for most people. Stories like that of John Whittemore were common. As a baby, his parents brought him from Massachusetts to a farm in St. Albans. When his father died, the mother was left with four young children; and John later wrote that, “It may well be supposed we were poor and needy, and often in need of the comforts of life…[In winter] to rise in the morning and see the ground covered with snow and no wood to make a fire, and no clothing to keep me warm, and no shoes for my feets, but old worn out ones of my mother’s—all these together made it so gloomy that I would almost give up in despair.” Tales like his would become all too common as Vermont went downhill. As the nation moved West, Vermont was not in a position to compete. The state’s economy was largely based on agriculture, but it proved to have very little prime agricultural soil. While the settlers had tried to farm right up to the tops of the Green Mountains, many were fighting a losing battle with the rocks. The amount of land in private ownership stayed stable, but the amount of it that was "improved" by clearing for grazing or cultivation declined rapidly as Vermont was ground down into a depressed poverty . In 1870, nearly 70% of farmland was considered improved, while in 1920, only 40% was improved. What that figure reflects is that, before the turn of the 20th century, Vermont was over 70% deforested--almost the exact reverse of what we see around us today, when it is about 70% forested. Farms that had sold for $100-200 an acre in 1874 were fetching $5 an acre by the end of the century. The new railroads filled up with Vermont's greatest export in this period: her people, heading West. By 1870 over 1/3 of Vermont's natives had moved out of state. Many Vermont towns reached their highest populations by 1850, when the median town size was 1200 souls, and then began to shrink. By 1920, the median size had shrunk to 900 people, and many towns did not recover to 1850 population levels until well after 1970. Some never did. Late 19th century Vermont was a sad place where man had exploited nature, and nature was now mindlessly striking back by making it clear that much of the state had never been meant for agriculture. Many farms were flat-out abandoned, with devastating consequences for the hill towns. Clarence Dempsey, Vermont’s Commissioner of Education, lamented the impact on rural schools:
The loss of the hill farms meant the loss of communities. By 1900, apart from the successful valley farms, which were increasingly dominated by dairy, a few small-scale industries and a limited number of extractive stone and lumber operations, the Vermont economy was in bad shape. Some immigrant groups were able to find employment in specialized trades—Italian granite workers in Barre, Welsh slate cutters in Proctor—but for the predominant Yankee population, Vermont had little to offer in the way of opportunity. While other states blossomed with the fruits of the Industrial Revolution and its attendant urbanization, Vermont was never fully able to compete. There is nothing pretty about poverty, but in landscape terms it is a powerful preservative. When people are poor, they don’t—they can’t--replace the old farmhouse with something new. Big factories don’t get built where there’s no money. The countryside doesn’t get eaten up by suburbs in places with no jobs for suburbanites. It is not just poverty that has helped Vermont retain so much that other states have lost—it is also its relative isolation. Our geographical position made settlement a challenge. At every stage since, transportation tended to lag: water travel, roads, railroads, freeways and airports were hard to get built here because of the state’s economic and demographic limitations. Vermont never really came to be on the way to much of anywhere, and that has also had enormous repercussions for the state. Most people who grew up in rural Vermont [and even ‘urban’ Vermont was relatively rural] had very limited contact with a broader world. A good sense of this can be gleaned by reading the memoirs of Walter Rice Davenport, who wrote in the 1920s about the isolation of his childhood on a dairy farm in the hill town of Williamstown, located between Montpelier and Randolph Center, in the decades after the Civil War. The biggest excitement he could hope for in a year was haying season, when he got to stay at neighboring farms—an experience that seemed very exotic to the boy, finding out that his neighbors did things a little differently at their houses. But the highlight of his youth came when he first got a chance to visit the booming metropolis of Montpelier. For him, the sight of this town of well under 5000 souls was almost overwhelming. In a section of his memoir called “Montpelier Vs. Heaven” he described its impact on a boy who had barely been off the farm:
For a boy living who had only lived at home, on a remote mountainside, with tallow candles, a pump for water, and so few books that he knew them all by heart, this small taste of the world outside was a revelation that would change his life. Thousands of Vermonters grew up in conditions equally remote. Even in the 1870s and 80s, Vermont was already one of the most rural states in the Union. Some Vermonters figured this meant they were the nation’s worst failures, as nowhere else seemed to have had the Industrial Revolution pass it by so decisively. As one of Vermont’s critics saw it, the Green Mountains had always been the state’s problem, precisely because they encouraged provincialism. Speaking to a Boston audience in 1911, James Paddock Taylor argued that,
But change was coming even to the remote mountains of the Green Mountain state. In the first half of the twentieth century, rural electrification brought new contact with the outside world through radio and telegraph and telephones. The pace of these changes—as with most changes before and since--was slower here, but it was coming, nevertheless. In 1929, an inspector for the Vermont Commission on Country Life was noting a closing of the gap between rural and town life:
The homogenization of culture he describes was to continue, as Vermont slowly began to catch up with the rest of the United States. The loss of local identity has been one of the most pronounced trends of the past century in America. We Vermonters have been granted something of a reprieve from the excesses of this trend by inheriting a tinier, more manageable, version of America. The question is, how much of what makes Vermont special can we keep? At the dawn of the 21st century, we are reaping the benefits of many of the Vermonts that have come before us. The Vermont tradition of crusty independence can still be seen all over the state on Town Meeting Day. Many people don’t want their landscape freedoms infringed upon, whether the issue is farming or hunting or septic regulations. It is an independence that can threaten planning and conservation. But this independence has as often been put to the service of the community, manifesting itself in a willingness to try things to preserve the landscape that most states wouldn’t, like the billboard ban, and the bottle bill and Act 250. All these things have been more boon than bane to the economy of this state. The beauties of the Vermont landscape are largely the result of a fortuitous boom and what has been, for our generations, an equally fortuitous bust. Vermont had its greatest early economic success at a time when everyone who could afford lintels over the windows and a lovely paneled front door thought it was worth it to put them on. Good architecture survives, and the fruits of their legacy are still desirable residences. Where the hill farms failed, the trees have grown back, and these areas are now in great demand for housing lots and recreation. Poverty has been bred in the bones of the state for so long, that it has become one of our defining characteristics. In saying that, I do not mean that Vermont is still as poor as ever. But I believe that a century of poverty has given us a culture here that is somewhat less materialistic than that which prevails in much of the rest of America. Calvin Coolidge noted this tendency in his Autobiography, saying of the Vermonters he grew up with in Plymouth, “They drew no class distinctions except toward those who assumed superior airs. Those they held in contempt. They held strongly to the doctrine of equality.” Native Vermonters do not tend to be wasteful of resources. And many of the wealthy people who retire here from out of state choose to come because they want to leave the worst of American materialism behind. Apart from a few pockets scattered around the state, you don’t see a lot of Hummers, or 10,000 square foot houses, or even $500 a plate charity dinners in Vermont. We don’t much go for show. But, perhaps without realizing it, we have for too long relied on our relative remoteness and poverty to save us from ourselves. We may once have been rocky ground for the excesses of American consumer culture, but the big box land of Williston might be changing all of that. We don’t want a Vermont covered with McMansions, but we’re loath to curtail our neighbor’s freedom to build what and where they like—or our own desire to sell them a lot. Some politicians and developers will tell you that “we can have it all” here in Vermont—the sprawl and suburbanization that characterize much of America’s current development and the small scale and character we have long revered. They are wrong. The economic engine that drives the Vermont economy is our state’s uniqueness. That is we what we have to offer, and what will attract jobs that pay a whole lot better than a Wal-Mart. Our riches are based on the richness of our landscape, and anything that erodes that threatens to make us poorer. We can no longer rely on the isolation and lean resources that long served to protect our state from the trends that have undermined the character of much of America. We live in an age of telecommuters, who can use computer hookups, faxes, and satellites to do a wide variety of jobs from Vermont without reference to the limitations of the landscape. Does the new economy hold more peril or promise for us? It is our job to create a new land ethic that will protect this landscape while providing people with a satisfying and supportive place to live. Because we all have our hands on the land. “The History and Future of Vermont’s Landscape” February 15, 2006 Two years ago, my wife Liisa and I spent ten weeks roaming the country, visiting land trusts, seeing what they were doing and finding out what was working and what was not. One of our stops was in Gunnison, Colorado, where we met with a group of ranchers that had started a land trust. We could see from their maps that they had already protected an impressive amount of land. “You must be very proud of all you have accomplished in such a short time,” I said to a rancher who had been one of the founders of the organization. His reply was almost angry, “No,” he said. “I’m not. We started the land trust not just to preserve the land, but to preserve ranching.” He could see that culture eroding, in a flood of money from Denver and Los Angeles, in the surge of second home buying that was making it difficult for his neighbors’ children to afford homes near Gunnison, and by newcomers who preferred to raise horses rather than pasture cattle. Despite the land trust’s success, he felt they were losing the soul of their community. Which caused me to reflect on Vermont. In the past 35 years, we can point to many accomplishments that have helped preserve our natural and cultural landscape: Act 250; Act 200; laws regulating water pollution and clearcutting; the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board; half a million acres of conserved land; 8,000 affordable homes; education equity through a statewide property tax; health care for children; and civil unions, just the latest step in Vermont’s long march for civil rights that early on had opposed slavery and McCarthyism and supported a woman’s right to vote. But is this enough? Will our grandchildren and their grandchildren find the essence of Vermont that we have known? The late Boston Globe editor Tom Winship once asked: “Can Vermont survive prosperity?” Can Vermont survive globalization? As we reap the benefits of prosperity and globalization, will we be able to hold on to what is so special about Vermont, special enough that the National Geographic Society ranked the state as sixth among the world’s most desirable, unspoiled destinations? What is it that makes Vermont special? Its physical appearance is not so spectacular. Other places have higher mountains, more lakes, bigger trees, better soils. A friend recently remarked, “Vermont doesn’t make your jaw drop; it just makes you smile.” Yet, when we return to Vermont after a trip away, we feel a difference. Others sense it too. My wife grew up in Finland. Some years ago, a childhood friend of hers came for a visit. The friend had never been to America before. After spending a few days in Boston, she took the bus north. Practically as soon as she stepped off in Montpelier, she asked, “Is Vermont different from the rest of America? What is the difference I am seeing?” Even before she had walked around the city or talked to any people, she sensed that somehow this place was not the same. For the past few months, I’ve been asking people what they find special about Vermont, and have received a variety of answers. One is that people here are close to nature. Over half our population lives in towns with fewer than 2,500 residents, which makes Vermont the most rural state in the nation. Even city dwellers can usually find a wild place within ten or fifteen minutes of their door. For the vast majority of Americans, people and wild things live in separate places. One travels to find nature, and leaves it to go home. Here, nature is part of our everyday lives. Others said it is the working landscape that makes Vermont special. I particularly value the fact that Vermont still has farmers, loggers and foresters (including a son) who make their living from the land. Others turn the raw production into cheese, furniture, and manufactured products here in the state. This is part of the first run of green-certified hardwood flooring that we harvested off conserved land in Vermont. A local mill sawed out the logs, but we had to truck the boards to Canada to turn them into flooring. Perhaps someday we’ll be able to produce the flooring here in the state. Many Vermonters participate in our natural resource economy, perhaps not as a primary occupation, but as part-time sugarmakers, Christmas tree growers, livestock raisers, and woodlot managers. They all have their hands on the land. But the value of the working landscape is not just economic or aesthetic; it is also cultural. Jan noted that our landscape reflects our history. Communities with working farms and forests retain a part of that history. They are different culturally than places where agriculture and forest industries have essentially disappeared. Some years ago, when I attended a conference on sprawl in Bar Harbor, the head of the Maine State Planning Office observed: “Rural communities are organized for production. Suburban communities are organized for consumption.” I remembered his statement a few years later, when some of my Calais neighbors fought a proposal by a local farmer who wanted to open a small quarry on his land. The quarry was to provide stone for patios and stone walls and crushed rock for town roads. I’m happy to report that my neighbor got his permit, and that Calais, at that time at least, was still a rural community. There is something ethical about relying upon our own resources to meet our needs. Wood energy has always appealed to me for this reason. If we burn coal and oil, most of the environmental costs accrue somewhere else. With wood energy, we must deal with the consequences of our demand. Other people spoke of “scale” as part of the essence of Vermont. Towns are small. Direct democracy still works here in town meetings where we decide issues that affect our daily lives. Even at the state level, political leaders and institutions are accessible. I’ve often wondered how well Act 250, with its regionally-based district commissions, or the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board, with its seemingly opposite goals of housing and open space, would work in larger, more populous states. The current fight over building wind towers on ridgelines is mostly an argument over scale. Bigger wind turbines are more efficient, but many Vermonters are willing to sacrifice efficiency to keep development in scale with their landscape. Vermont’s small scale means that we know each other, that our reputation as somebody who can be trusted, or somebody who must be watched, follows us around. It also means that a person with limited political or financial capital, but with a good idea, can still make a difference in their community, if they are willing to spend the time. The Burlington Free Press recently lauded Sherry Belknap of Bloomfield, Vermont. Sherry comes from a long line of woods workers. He sold logging equipment for most of his career and, with his wife Darlene, makes the Walking Boss suspenders I am wearing tonight. Many years ago, Sherry’s grandfather was the legendary Walking Boss for the Connecticut River Lumber Company, which harvested timber throughout northeastern Vermont. Eight years ago, when Champion International put its Northeast Kingdom holdings on the market, Sherry became a local leader in the effort to conserve those 132,000 acres in public and private ownership. He later chaired the steering committee that helped develop the management plans for the State lands and for public recreation on the private lands. The debate over the Champion project became very highly charged at times, and Sherry’s involvement came at some personal cost. Yet, by putting himself on the line, Sherry has made a difference in the lives of generations of Vermonters who will never even know his name. But if there is one characteristic of Vermont that was mentioned more than any other, it is our sense of “community”. Isn’t it interesting that Vermont’s State motto is “Freedom and Unity?” I was raised in New Hampshire, where it’s “Live Free or Die.” Vermont’s motto portrays a sense of mutual dependence that must come from our agricultural heritage, small land ownerships, and the long period of economic isolation which most Vermonters endured during our early history. A friend recently told me a story which epitomizes the sense of community one can find here. He was a young attorney, fresh out of the Army, new to Vermont, and with a wife and two young children. He was seeking a bank loan to buy a home in Rutland. The banker looked over the paperwork. Everything seemed to be in order, except that my friend was not earning enough money. After a moment’s reflection, the banker picked up the phone and called the senior partner in the law firm. He told the partner what the problem was, and asked: “Can you swing an extra $50 a week?” The result was that my friend had his first raise and his family had a new home. Many factors contribute to a sense of community. It may be an historic building, the town hall, or a restored opera house. In my town of Calais, people gather at the Old West Church for Christmas Eve services, and at the Maple Corner Community Center, which was revived by funds raised from the sale of a risqué “Men of Maple Corner” calendar. In other communities, it is a traditional activity: a First Night, a Memorial Day parade, or a fall foliage celebration. Some of my grandchildren live in Vershire. Each year, the community sponsors a three-week, free summer camp for kids, paid for by fundraising events held in town throughout the year. In Underhill, it’s a sledding hill; in Starksboro, it’s a ball field; and in Brattleboro, it’s a farmers market. Wherever the place is, people come together to play, work, talk, and share their lives. This specialness of Vermont—this combination of geology, human activities on the land, proximity to nature, scale and sense of community—is it threatened? And if it is, what must we do to retain it? Each of us will have to make up our own mind about the degree of the threat. For me, not only is the threat real, but we probably have less time to act than we think. In the past, change has come more slowly to Vermont than to southern New England or other states, for the reasons Jan explained. However, as Colorado, northern Maine and other rural places are now finding, change can also come very rapidly. Vermont is on that cusp. This state is becoming increasingly attractive for second home buyers. In 2004, ten percent of the primary homes sold in Vermont were converted into vacation homes. The figure for Windham County was 24 percent. This puts added pressure on the supply and cost of homes for Vermonters and on our farms and forest land. Where and how will our need for housing be met? Will it fit into Vermont’s traditional settlement patterns or sprawl across the countryside? We don’t have to look very far beyond our borders to see what change can bring, if we don’t try to shape it. The business of retailing is changing. Vermonters want and deserve access to quality goods at reasonable prices. Will retail stores be the heart of our downtowns, so that as in Rutland, smaller stores, restaurants and other businesses benefit from the traffic generated by Wal-Mart? Or will the big boxes cut the commercial heart out of our traditional centers, so that people who live downtown will have to travel to the suburbs to buy groceries and hardware items? We can affect the outcome, but only if we are willing to act. And will Vermont continue to have working farms and forests? Will Vermont farms supply more of our food, at home and in schools? Will wood and wind keep more of our energy dollars circulating in Vermont? Will we have places to experience wild nature and reflect upon the beauty of our world? The answers we choose to these questions will decide the future landscape and character of Vermont. So what can we do to preserve what is special about Vermont? Let me mention four areas where we can take action. They are not the whole answer, but they are a start. First, hold onto our traditional settlement patterns. Second, preserve our “gathering places”. Third, learn the stories of our communities. And, finally, think about our private actions and public decisions in a “community” context. Let me start with settlement patterns. Ever since Governor Hoff’s Administration published the document “Vision and Choice” in 1968, Vermont’s policy has been to promote a pattern of downtowns and village centers surrounded by rural countryside. This policy has been reflected repeatedly in legislation over the years, in Act 250 in 1970, Act 200 in 1988, the 2002 Downtown Bill. Coupled with this policy has been the goal of preserving, to the extent we can, our traditions of land use, including farming, logging, hunting, fishing, hiking, skiing and snowmobiling. Part of what we must do is protect the land. Land conservation. My business. Conservation is an essential element – we won’t have Vermont if the landscape is consumed by sprawl – but as the ranchers in Gunnison, Colorado have learned, it is only the beginning. We must also help create the conditions where farmers and forest workers can make a living and live a good life. We must invest in businesses that will add value to their products. We must promote their products. We must buy their products. To preserve the countryside, we must also strengthen our downtowns and village centers, making them more attractive for private investment in housing and commercial development. If a family wants to live in an urban center, but can’t find affordable housing there and they buy a house in the countryside, that removes a housing opportunity for a family who wants to live in the countryside and must build a new house instead. Part of the solution to sprawl is to give people the opportunity to live downtown if that is what they choose. Vermont has a wonderful opportunity to strengthen its traditional settlement patterns by adopting growth center legislation this year. One of the problems with our current regulatory system is that we have never really decided, in a planning process, where we want development to take place and then made it easier to develop there. Act 250 says, in essence, if you can meet the criteria, you can develop anywhere. And because your neighbors may not like the result, you get legal challenges, appeals, delay, added cost, frustration, and sprawl. The objective of a growth center policy is to identify areas where we want to encourage development. Once these growth centers have been designated, the regulatory barriers would be reduced, the financial incentives in the form of tax credits and grants would be increased, and public investments for sewage treatment, transportation, and other services would be enhanced. For the past two years, a coalition of business and environmental interests have been focusing on this issue. With the work of a special legislative committee last fall and the Governor’s recent endorsement of proposals along this line, Vermont has an historic opportunity, for the first time in thirty years, to fundamentally alter the pattern of growth and development in this state. We must take advantage of this opportunity. It may not come again for another thirty years. The second action Vermonters must take is to preserve our “gathering places” and the places that give us our sense of history and heritage. There is a terrific new book entitled Vermont Gathering Places, photographed and written by Peter Miller with the support of the Preservation Trust of Vermont and others. It is a collection of photos and essays about country stores, churches, ball fields, fairgrounds, farmers markets, and other places where people come together to show, buy, share, exchange, and be part of each other’s lives. How important a village store, an opera house, a swimming hole, a car race track, and similar places can be to the life and vitality of a community. The question which Paul Bruhn, Director of the Preservation Trust, raises in the book’s Afterword is: Will Vermonters preserve their “gathering places” or in the future, will we too be bowling alone? Take a look at this book, and think about the importance of gathering places in your community. The third step is to teach ourselves and our children the stories of our communities. For at least a decade, we have seen a resurgence of place-based education: Young people interviewing old-timers and creating community videos of the conversations. The Vermont Institute of Natural Science and Keeping Track teaching children and landowners about the plants and animals with whom they share space. Schools using Jan’s book as a classroom curriculum. Students mapping their towns using GIS technology. The University of Vermont’s PLACE program inspiring local residents to explore the geology, natural history, and cultural history of their town. By learning where we are, how we got here, and what we share with others in our community, we find our roots and build on our common ground. We should learn the stories of the food we eat and the products we use. When you buy cheese from a national company, the milk could have been produced anywhere and the cheese manufactured anywhere. When you buy Taylor Farm Gouda, you are buying an entire story of Vermont: of generations of families clearing and working the land in Londonderry; of John and Kate Wright, a young couple with a dream of starting their own farm business but without the resources to do so; of the Kohler family and an entire community pulling together to conserve the farm and help the Wrights make their dream a reality. It is a story that, in different ways, is repeated over and over across the landscape of Vermont. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we must learn to think like a community. We must do those things, individually and collectively, that will strengthen our sense of community. We must ask ourselves, as consumers and public policy makers, whether our decisions will strengthen or weaken the Vermont community. Part of the task is to look at our actions and our jobs in a community context. For my organization, the Vermont Land Trust, we must constantly ask ourselves, and seek the community’s opinion about, whether a particular parcel should be conserved as open space, or whether it is better suited for future growth and development. If a housing development is proposed in our neighborhood, we must ask ourselves whether this is an appropriate location to meet the community’s housing needs, even if it means we may lose some of our personal open space. If we are buying books and beer, we must decide whether to make our purchase on line and at the supermarket or pay a little more and patronize the local bookshop and village store. If we are government officials facing a decision on whether to locate the new school or a post office or a big box store in town or in a corn field outside of town, we must ask ourselves not just which location will be cheaper to build in, but which location will best serve and strengthen the community. By evaluating our actions and decisions not merely on the basis of self interest or lowest cost, but on the basis of the entire community of interests, we help insure that our sense of community will survive. Coming back to the question of whether Vermont can survive prosperity, no one wants to go back to the days when, so it has been said, Vermonters were so poor that they didn’t even notice there was a Great Depression. We want all Vermonters to prosper. We don’t want a Vermont frozen in time. But as things change, as we become more prosperous, let us hold on to the qualities that make this state special. Left to their own devices, the forces of the marketplace, globalization, and population growth, coupled with money and technology, will turn Vermont into a landscape no different than so many other places in America. Almost eighty years ago, President Calvin Coolidge said this about Vermont: “Vermont is the state I love. I could not look upon the peaks of Ascutney, Killington, Mansfield and Equinox without being moved in a way that no other scene could move me. It was here that I first saw the light of day; here I received my bride; here my dead lie pillowed on the loving breast of our everlasting hills. I love Vermont because of her hills and valleys, but most of all, because of her indomitable people. They are a race of pioneers who have almost beggared themselves to serve others. If the spirit of liberty should vanish in other parts of the union and support of our institutions should languish, it could all be replenished from the generous store held by the people of this brave little state of Vermont.” Land and people. Hands on the land. We may not be a race of pioneers anymore, but we can still have that indomitable spirit in the face of new global challenges. If Coolidge looked for the spirit of liberty and service today, he would find it in the compassion with which Vermonters handled the issue of civil unions, in the sacrifices our soldiers have made in Iraq and Afghanistan, and in our continuing efforts to preserve Vermont’s natural and human landscape. As you ponder the future of this place and its people, consider these words, in a somewhat mangled form, with apologies to Robert Frost: “Somewhere ages and ages hence, our grandchildren will be telling this with a sigh: Two roads diverged in a Vermont wood, and the road we took and the road we left behind, that has made all the difference.” Thank you. | ||||||||||
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