Town Meeting Day: 5/12 Winter

Mother Nature threw pretty much everything she had at us on Monday during Town Meeting Day -- snow, rain, sleet, hail, graupel, black ice, and minor flooding. The only thing missing was a tornado. But maybe there was one and I just missed it.

Town Meeting Day is of course the one solemn day each year when people all over the great state of Vermont gather together and pretend they can understand a municipal budget.

In Middlebury's case alone, the budget ran to nearly 1,000 lines. (Line 55: Sales/Accident Reports; Line 812, Operating Supplies for Flag Football.)

I dutifully attended Town Meeting in Middlebury, where I was disappointed to find that the cozy confines of the Town Hall Theater were not in use this year for the meeting. Instead we were stuck with the cavernous, badly lit, generally pall-inducing municipal gym.

Apparently the town officials wanted us to leave early.

Sitting in that gym always reminds me of taking finals exams at my high school, which was built using the same kind of Depression Chic architecture. Just being in the gym, useful though the space may be, evokes a sense of exam-time déjà vu, guaranteed to make me wish I was home watching reruns of Family Guy.

This year's meeting saw the return of Town Moderator Jim Douglas (né Governor Douglas) after an absence of at least a couple years.

Say what you want about Douglas’s politics as governor, but he does run a smooth meeting.
And with his radio-trained voice, he can make even the dullest of subjects sound as if they should be interesting, mellifluously reading a budget item about "a single-axle, medium-duty plow truck" as if it were the latest news from the Middle East.

The former governor's characteristically dry wit was unfortunately little in evidence. It was only after the end of discussion and voting that he got a chance to crack wise.

Rising from the audience, former select board member Peg Martin asked Douglas, "Mr. Moderator, is it illegal for me to offer a perhaps germane comment?"

"Well," he replied, barely suppressing a smile, "we won't know until we hear it."

Then noting that the meeting had in fact moved on to "Other Business," Douglas allowed that “virtually anything is germane at this point."

Even with a 2.6% tax increase at a time when we are barely digging ourselves out of the Great Recession, the town budget was approved by an overwhelming majority. Just a couple of scattered "no" votes arose from the gathering of happy campers.

The voters are just fine with expenditures totaling $6.8 million. But ask them to allocate another $5,000 for the local Humane Society, and things get lively. Suddenly the question under discussion is the moral equivalent of war, with heartfelt opinions voiced on both sides of the question.

In comparison to last year when the Humane Society came out on the losing end of two votes, the organization was better prepared for this year's meeting and indeed fared better -- coming away with its requested appropriation from the town.

As more than one speaker noted, the appropriation of $5,000 was greater than the town grants to some of the worthy agencies that serve humans, among them Women in Crisis and the John Graham shelter for homeless people.

On other topics, one could pick up all kinds of momentarily interesting though ultimately useless information at Town Meeting.

We learned, for example, that Middlebury has 64 miles of town roads and an astonishing 15 miles of sidewalk. (Imagine what it would take to shovel the snow off all that sidewalk if it were done by hand.)

We were informed that the approximately $47,000 in annual debt on the new police headquarters is less money than it costs to heat the municipal building each year. (Another reason to hate that gym.) The town is facing an eye-popping 17% increase in the annual cost for employee health insurance. The newer diesel engines in town trucks now use urea – which according to Stan Warner, the town director of operations, sometimes makes the exhaust smell like French fries and at other times like hotdogs. A product called Ice B’Gone now supplements the 24 tons of salt the town throws on its roads each winter and, because it is less corrosive, is extending the life of our vehicles.

It was also a revelation to find that winter consists of five-twelfths of the year. For budgeting purposes, anyway, the town’s yearly budget for highway maintenance is divided up into “summer” consisting of seven-twelfths of the year, and “winter” for the other five-twelfths of the year.

Remember that old joke about how winter in Vermont is 10 months long, followed by two months of bad sledding? Not anymore. Now winter accounts for only half that much of the year, five-twelfths in all.

Apparently global warming truly has taken its toll.

Communal Boomer Retirement

It doesn't seem all that long ago that we were college freshman.

On a Friday night in September of 1970, the four of us trooped down to Mister Up’s for a big dinner out. We were full of excitement about what our new college adventure would bring.

The restaurant had a salad bar -- the first one I’d ever seen -- and I felt very adult and politically aware when I ordered a bottle of Almaden wine. It was a time when 18-year-olds could legally drink, and we were boycotting Gallo in support of striking California grape pickers.

I remember being amazed that Mister Ups was charging the enormous sum of one dollar for a dessert. We all agreed that was way too much.

Forty years later almost to the day, the same four of us were sitting around the dinner table last Saturday night, at the Washington, D.C. residence of one of the four.

But this time instead of talking about the freshman year that had just begun, we were talking about our retirement plans.

When you're a young adult making your way in the world, older people tell you that it all goes by so fast.

You nod your head as if you know just what they mean. But really you don't.

Then one day you wake up, you're pushing 60, and you start thinking about where and how you will live when you get old and retire.

With the same four of us around the dinner table last weekend (plus a fifth in the form of a simpatico spouse), we counted ourselves as being very lucky -- both that we could gather together frequently and in good health, and that, we decided, we would like to live together when we retire.

There seems to be little consensus on what the next 30 or 40 years will look like for Baby Boomers in what the Social Security Administration has called "America's silver tsunami." But there is widespread agreement that as with so many other things, we Boomers will reshape retirement, both where and how we live.

Because our fivesome’s fantasy includes living in Vermont, I’ve begun to look around at the local options.

We are, for example, seeing the emergence of continuing-care retirement communities.

The Lodge at Otter Creek describes itself as “an all-inclusive adult community in a resort like setting. Every amenity awaits you, from the putting green to the swimming pool to the hair salon. There’s exquisite dining, the café, the fitness center, the library, the luxurious community rooms and concierge who will assist you with anything you desire.”

The vision for Eastview at Middlebury goes like this: "Here, in this cherished corner of New England, residents will enjoy a beautiful setting within a vibrant community. With 30 acres of lawns, gardens and woods, Eastview offers charming one-story cottages as well as independent and residential-care apartments within the handsome Inn at Eastview."

Extended Family, newly available in Addison County, offers a different model: "We help people age on their terms by offering premium services that promote independence, good health, and engagement in life."

But it’s not a community like Eastview or the Lodge at Otter Creek that the five of us contemplated as we sat around the dinner table last weekend.

Call us naïve, but our vision is a collection of houses in the country near a college town, with clustered homes balanced by a modicum of privacy. We might draw on a cohousing model with private living quarters and shared common areas. There would be room for visiting kids and grandkids and, as we aged, perhaps free housing for a caretaker and/or nurse to assist us in our dotage.

What we basically want to do is gather those to whom we are closest, and circle the wagons.

There might well be a need for something like the services that Extended Family offers. But there is no room in our vision for retiring to Florida to play golf and bridge with people we don't know.

Perhaps ours is just an unachievable dream. But having made it 40 years together as close friends, we figure we've got a good shot as anybody at achieving our communal vision for retirement and old age.

Besides, we just happen to know of a nice little college town.

And we'd like to think we could go back to Mister Up’s, 70 years after our first year at college, have a bottle of tasty Vermont wine, sample the localvore salad bar -- and shake our heads at the high price of dessert.

Because we remember back when it cost just a buck.

* * *

A couple corrections and a clarification.

Several weeks ago I described those round white rolls of plastic on dairy farms as containing manure. I’m told that in fact they hold silage, also known as balage or round bale silage. So much for my dairy expertise.

In my last column I said that it was the county Democratic Committee that chose Paul Ralston over Amy Sheldon as Middlebury’s new Democratic nominee for the House of Representatives. In fact, as Michael and Judy Olinick noted in a letter to the editor that appeared in last Thursday’s paper, it was the town committee.

To clarify another point: The Olinicks disputed my statement that some observers had suggested Sheldon did not get the nod because she had mounted a write-in campaign against incumbent Harold Giard. My sources for the “observers” comment were two prominent local Democrats. But neither of those knowledgeable observers was in the room when the town committee made its decision. I’m assured by a friend who is a member of the town committee that the committee had nothing but praise for Sheldon’s efforts.

The Naked Truth on Skinny-Dipping Candidates

Vermonters will be asked to choose between two very different gubernatorial candidates this fall, and two different visions of Vermont.

But at least along the way, we can be assured of some laughs.

Republican Brian Dubie sees a stake imperiled by high taxes, anti-business sentiment and wasteful education spending. He's against reproductive choice and gay marriage.

Democrat Peter Shumlin sees a state that has made great progress on gay marriage while also defending reproductive choice, but that now needs single-payer healthcare.

Yet thanks to Monday's first debate of the general election campaign, we now know both candidates have been skinny-dipping.

That's because, along with the weighty matters kicked around by Dubie and Shumlin in their first debate, there was also a query about their swimming history. I guess it was the Vermont equivalent of the "boxers or briefs" question tossed at Bill Clinton during an earlier, presidential debate.

It'll be interesting to see if Brian Dubie can get elected by reading from the same script as his predecessor, Middlebury Republican Jim Douglas. The anti-tax, anti-regulation mantra worked well for Douglas. But it's an open question whether an increasingly liberal electorate will decide it's heard enough of that particular song.

Also worth watching: Can Shumlin keep his quick tongue and combative instincts under control between now and November? He's managed to stay polite in this campaign to date. But his reputation persists as being somewhat sharp-elbowed, at least by Vermont’s gentle standard.

Judging by the early indications from Monday's exchanges, Shumlin has an edge over Dubie in Debate 101. Shumlin has his talking points down, having endured more than a couple dozen number Democratic primary debates.

By comparison, the perhaps rusty Dubie opined in Monday's debate that "even housewives" were smart enough to do a better job with the state budget than the Democratic Legislature had done.

I can see it now, the new third wing of the GOP campaign: Stupid Housewives for Dubie.

But if he keeps going this way, the lieutenant governor might not get many votes from surrendered housewives, either. The state, he said in Monday's debate, should "do what families must do … shrink middle management.”

Family middle management? Um, would that be children?

Official Movie of the Dubie Campaign: "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids."

And then there was that deliciously Freudian slip in which Dubie said that to cut the cost of state government, Vermont should "target the most vulnerable."

A Dubie spokesman said later that he meant to say Vermont should "protect the most vulnerable."

But with the lieutenant governor suggesting he can cut state spending by $100 million next year, we shouldn’t be surprised if a few of Vermont’s most vulnerable are feeling even more vulnerable today.

***
Before it fades into obscurity, I can't help but note the folly of State Sen. Doug Racine's demand for a recount in the Democratic primary. After more than two weeks of waiting, the surprisingly speedy recount showed that not only had Racine truly lost to Shumlin in the Democratic primary: He actually got fewer votes than the initial tallies had shown.

If Shumlin loses this fall's election -- and it will surely be a close one -- Democrats will look back in anger at Racine's demand for a recount.

The recount delayed the true start of the Shumlin campaign at a critical time, forcing him to go into stall mode when he could have been out raising money and hiring staff.

The lengthy uncertainty engendered by the recount -- and the decision of Shumlin, Racine, and the third-place Deborah Markowitz to campaign together -- presented Vermonters with the specter of a three-headed, pre-recount zombie, Vermont’s version of the Politically Undead.

Democrats tried to put the best possible public face on the recount, though I suspect they were privately gnashing their teeth. I certainly felt that Racine's demand for a recount was unwarranted given the size of Shumlin's lead compared to the number of votes cast.
Shumlin, too, must have been privately seething. But he managed to bite his tongue and play along until the recount was finalized.

Racine indicated he felt pressured by his supporters to ask for a recount. But his never-say-die narcissism may cost the Democrats the governor’s seat, in a short general-election campaign against a very well funded Republican.

Headline of the primary season, by the way, was in the Burlington Free Press, above its front-page report of the recount results: "Shumlin wins... again."

***
Along with Racine, East Middlebury's Amy Sheldon was another unlucky hopeful who got a couple lessons in politics over the past month.

Sheldon waged a spirited write-in campaign in the local Democratic County primary against incumbent State Sen. Harold Giard, who himself was running as a write-in because he failed to file his re-election campaign papers in time. Sheldon narrowly lost but made a strong showing.

After that close defeat Sheldon again lost -- this time by a single vote -- when the town Democratic committee gathered to name a replacement for the unopposed-for-reelection Rep. Steve Maier, who puzzlingly decided at this late date against another term.

In the committee's vote, Sheldon lost by a 6-5 tally to Paul Ralston, he of the Vermont Coffee Company. Ralston will now join Rep. Betty Nuovo as Middlebury's contingent in the House. Some observers suggested that her challenge to the incumbent Giard cost her the committee’s support.

Ralston's business background will no doubt be the butt of a few good-natured jokes. Herbert Hoover ran for president promising "a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage." Will Ralston seek reelection in 2012 promising an Americano in every cup?

As for Sheldon and Racine, in their respective write-in campaign and recount request, they’ve had hard reminders of a reality that those in the political arena often face:

You’re damned if you do, and damned if you don't.

- 30 -

College in the Age of Helicopter Parents

Barbara Hofer is having more fun than the average college professor. With her new book featured on The Early Show and in USA Today, who can blame her?

Hofer, a psychology professor at Middlebury College, is co-author of "The iConnected Parent." The book explores the reasons behind the often-creepy connection that many of today's college students have with their parents -- and what Mom and Dad can do about it.

Anybody who's recently been on the Middlebury campus can't help but notice how much time students spend on their cell phones, even walking between classes. Turns out, Hofer says, they are often talking to their parents, to report on such earthshaking topics as what they'll be doing after class or what their roommate said last night.

Research by Hofer, her students, and co-author Abigail Sullivan Moore revealed that it’s not uncommon for college students to talk and e-mail with their parents four or five times a day. Indeed, they found, the average student is in touch with a parent, via “electronic tether,” more than 10 times a week.

Does this matter?

You bet it does. Says Hofer: “Those who are talking a lot with their parents are less autonomous,” at a time of life when their primary task is to develop autonomy.

How bad is it? Hofer's research revealed that 19% of college students are e-mailing papers and other assignments home – so their parents can check their work before it’s submitted.

Sometimes young people's dependency on their parents gets truly out of hand. For example, Hofer and Sullivan felt it necessary to caution parents of high school students, when they are applying to college, against talking about where "we" are applying (as in, "We really want to get into Amherst, but we'll settle for Middlebury if we have to.").

This is the Age of the Helicopter Parent, and of the college junior who can't make up his mind what course to take without consulting mommy.

All of this sounds especially bizarre to many Baby Boomers. When we were in college, we did our best to talk to our parents as little as we could.

I remember one tortured Sunday night phone call with my parents in which I had to explain, as Christmas break approached, why they hadn't heard from me since Labor Day.

My mother, whose college career culminated in a major in Martyrdom and a minor in Guilt Creation, was especially adept at raking me over the coals about this.

But she would have been even more freaked out, had I called or written her four times a day.

So why are today’s parents and college-age children so excessively connected?

The simple answer, Hofer and Sullivan say, is that they can be. Inexpensive and ubiquitous cell phones and e-mail -- not to mention texting and Skype -- make it seem quite natural to be regularly in touch.

It doesn't take Sigmund Freud to figure out that this long umbilical cord can be choking.

Rather than having to manage their own class schedule, study habits and friendships, students can and do habitually turn to their parents. Sometimes they rely on a parent to call and wake them up each morning. Faced with even a small crisis, Hofer reports, mommy is often the first person a student will talk to.

Compare that to a couple of generations ago. Back then, by the time young adults had reached age 20 they were often married, financially self-sustaining, and themselves parents of young children.

Perhaps even more disturbing than parents' overinvolvement in the lives of their college students is what happens when they graduate. Hofer found that the frequency of communication between 20-somethings and their parents actually increases after college.

That entanglement may be part of a larger trend. Clark University psychology Professor Jeffrey Jensen Arnett calls it "emerging adulthood." Skeptics call it "failure to thrive."

A recent piece in the New York Times Magazine, for example, reports that 40% of people in their 20s move back in with their parents at least once.

Whether one sees the daily communications between college students and their parents as sweet and touching, or as disturbingly obsessive, it's clear that American society remains ambivalent about emerging adulthood.

My Baby Boomer peers and I sometimes look back with regret on the lack of communication between ourselves and our parents when we were younger.

As we became parents ourselves, many of us resolved to be closer with our kids that our parents had been with us. We knew the cost of lost connections. And if we knew our history, we knew that it was natural -- before jet travel and socioeconomic mobility -- for two or even three generations of a family to be in daily contact, sometimes under the same roof.

As one commentator put it on the website of the Early Show after Hofer's appearance there last month, "When did it become a negative thing to be connected to family members?

But another commentator on the website, who said she worked in an office with recent college graduates, described them this way: "They can text, IM, log into assbook, & have a spreadsheet up on the PC to show they are ‘doing work.’ But they don't even know how to use a copy machine & put a presentation together. Pathetic."

So what's a college student to do?

“It doesn’t mean divorcing your parents,” says Hofer. “It means having a relationship with them, in a way of owning your own behavior, governing your own emotions, and not needing to be reminded of everything.”

Making Lemonade on the Lemon Fair

When life gives you lemons, the saying goes, make lemonade.

So it is that on a Sunday afternoon, instead of returning from cross-country at Reichert or snowboarding at Sugarbush, we are heading west into the sunset – to go ice skating.

For those of us who spend the season playing outdoors, the torrential rain that washed away most of the early winter’s snow a couple of weeks ago had one huge benefit: It flooded hayfields all over Addison County. That, combined with two weeks of frigid temperatures, has created miles and miles of skating lanes where once there was only snow and grassy stubble.

We drive west on 125, headed for fields along the Lemon Fair River.

Walking north and carrying our skates, we come first to ice that cracks easily under our weight. But we’re not worried. We can see the grass underneath the ice, just a couple of inches down.

At last we are out far enough on the ice that, while we can still see the grass underneath, there has been enough of a flood to create a solid sheet of ice, which holds us steadily.

Placing our fleece-covered bottoms on the glassy surface, we tug on our hockey skates, then clamber to our feet.

Out ahead of us there are hundreds of yards of ice. Tentatively at first, then picking up speed, we go zooming across the surface, arms swinging.

Yes, it’s bumpy. No Zambonis here to smooth the surface, as at the municipal rink and the college fieldhouse. We’re skating on what Mother Nature gave us.

Not only are there bumps. In the process of icing over and thickening, the flooded fields have cracked, leaving long seams where the ice rises abruptly an inch or two on to the next gigantic plate. And in a process I don’t really understand, even the smooth stretches of ice rise in gentle rolls, creating differences of 6 inches or more in height.

Despite the vast skating distances out on the field, eventually we go looking for new frontiers.

At the edge of the field is a frozen ditch, three feet deep. On the other side of the ditch, waiting to be explored, is a flooded forest.

We test the icy banks of the ditch. They seem solid enough. We decide to try crossing the ditch, hoping there is not frigid water at the bottom. We’re glad to find it’s a solid down there.

From the bottom, it takes most of our upper-body strength to pull us up the slick other side of the ditch. Finally we clamber up the other side.

Again hoisting ourselves up on the uncertain runners of our skates, we take a few tentative strides -- and begin skating through the woods.

Soon we are slaloming through the trees – taking one to our left, one to our right, around a stump here, sprinting to the next opening.

“I’ve done a lot of tree skiing before,” I say to my skating partner. “But this is the first time I’ve ever been tree skating.”

The westering sun shoots gentle yellow beams through the tree limbs. We not just navigating through trees on the edge of a field. This is a Fairy Forest, and we are skate sprites exploring our domain.

I’m thinking of the times when I was a boy and my father would take my brother and me skating along an abandoned stretch of the year a canal, in the western New York town where we grew up.

Dad was a busy country doctor. But occasionally he could sneak out on a Wednesday afternoon for an outdoor skate with his sons. At home, my mother would have hot chocolate for us before dinner.

As I’m skating the Cornwall field and forest, all the time I’ve been eyeing the Lemon Fair.

In fact, I’ve had my inner eye on it much longer than just today. I’ve fantasized about skating on that river for years, and have never done it.

I’ve spent enough time on the ice out here to know it’s thick enough. “You only live once,” I remind myself.

I lie down on the ice, spread my limbs, and slide off onto the surface of the river.
Standing up and beginning to skate, I find that I’ve been missing the best ice of all.

Though covered with a bit of snow, the surface is almost smooth. I skate hundreds of yards in one distance upstream, then a good bit downstream. My states make little V-shapes in the snow, scratchings of where I’ve been.

Off to the west out there over the Adirondacks, the sun is sinking, a fat fireball.

As it recedes, it shoots a giant skyrocket over red light straight up over the river. If I died right now, it would be OK.

Finally back in the car as it grows dark, I head toward town, the Grateful Dead’s “Sugar Magnolia” on the stereo: “Saw my baby down by the river.”

Pulling into the co-op parking lot, I spy a bumper sticker that just about says it all:
“Savor Every Second.”

-- 30 --

Food for 350

Spurred by the recent harvest and the impending winter, a lot of us have been thinking harder about food this month.

This week we’re turning that thinking into a special effort to collect donations to the local food shelf (at the co-op in the donation box inside the entrance), and to share the season’s bounty during a giant potluck.

The Middlebury Farmer’s Market has been an ongoing inspiration for this focus on the scrumptious and nourishing. The market has been in its true glory since late August, but it has never been so glorious as this month. For example, last Saturday at the market you could buy -- in addition to the usual squashes, jams, meat and root vegetables of autumn -- green beans, watermelon and strawberries.

Imagine that: Local strawberries in mid-October, courtesy of the hard work of Scott Green and Suzanne Young, the Singing Cedars couple.

Things have reached the point where, in a couple of years I expect to be able to go the winter farmer’s market in the Town Hall Theater and buy fresh local lettuce.

It makes sense that we think a lot about food. Everybody has a tummy and we all get hungry several times a day. What could be more natural?

But it’s that very naturalness - -and the threats to nature in the form of environmental degradation and climate change – that have now also made food into a political and social concern.

This Saturday, Oct. 24, we’ll put some of the recent rethinking about food into action around climate change and feeding the hungry, as part of the International Day of Climate Action (www.350.org).

In Addison County, throughout the U.S. and in more than 100 other nations around the planet, hundreds of thousands of people will participate in activities that will create a global awareness of the number 350 -- the most important number in the world.

Most important because 350 parts per million carbon is, over time, the maximum sustainable level of carbon in the earth’s atmosphere.

We’re now at 387, and climbing.

Ahead of the coming December negotiations in Copenhagen to come up with an
international treaty of climate change, it’s fitting that the main events in Addison County this weekend will focus on food.

In addition to the “Food for 350” drive to collect 350 donations to the local food
shelf, on the Middlebury Green at noon on Saturday, hundreds of hearty and hungry souls will gather around what they hope will be 350 potluck dishes (www.350.org/middlebury).

It’s a fine way to celebrate the increasingly important role that local food production plays in Vermont culture. What better way to honor the bounty of earth’s autumnal fecundity – and to note how climate change would imperil that bounty – than to gather and eat?

Of course the world won’t change just because we have a good meal. As the core organizers of Saturday’s actions put it:

“Make no mistake—getting back to 350 means transforming our world. It means building solar arrays instead of coal plants, it means planting trees instead of clear-cutting rainforests, it means increasing efficiency and decreasing our waste.

“Getting to 350 means developing a thousand different solutions—all of which will become much easier if we have a global treaty grounded in the latest science and built around the principles of equity and justice. To get this kind of treaty, we need a movement of people who care enough about our shared global future to get involved and make their voices heard.”

Eating well, and locally, is a sly, fun way to get people involved.

The food movement, and the clever political uses to which food is now being put in service of admirable aims, have been an eye-opener for those us who cut our political teeth on the civil rights movement and ending the Vietnam War.

We came of age in a time when effecting change meant waging a kind of war – against racism, against the tragic arrogance of America’s wars in Southeast Asia. Combating those evils, we had reasons to be angry even when our primary weapons were nonviolent organizing.

To be sure, there’s plenty to be angry about when it comes to global warming and the changes in climate that threaten the very balance of nature. For starters, there’s mindless consumption (we can look in our closets and living rooms for evidence of that), corporate greed in the coal and oil industries, and enduring cowardice on the part of our elected leaders.

Organizing around food, though, changes the conversation.

When we talk about food we’re less likely to be pointing fingers at what the other guys are doing wrong. Instead, the conversation starts with our common interest in what tastes good. And what tastes best is often what’s been grown close to home.

From the standpoint of our increasingly unstable climate, it matters where the food we eat was grown. Transporting edibles from distant markets – peaches flown on 747’s from Chile to the U.S. in January, then trucked hundreds of miles to supermarkets – consumes a lot of fossil fuel. Burning fossil fuel is a primary cause of climate change and the overheating that threatens life on earth.

All of this has a special resonance for Vermont, home of the original back-to-the-land movement. After all, that movement was first spurred by Scott and Helen Nearing and their compatriots, then by Sixties and Seventies refugees seeking a simpler life in the Green Mountains.

In this century, it was a group of Middlebury College students, inspired by Ripton writer Bill McKibben and Jon Isham, an economics professor, who created the model for Saturday’s International Day of Climate Action.

Their first big effort to get our political leaders to address climate change, back in 2006, was a week’s walk from Robert Frost’s old stomping grounds in Ripton, up to Burlington. Then it was the first national day of climate action, called Step It Up.

Now here we are on the verge of the first day of actions all over the planet.

It all started with a bunch of local dreamers. As Margaret Mead famously said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

Irreversible global warming will drastically alter where and how we can grow our food. It will displace millions of people and potentially cause widespread hunger on a global scale.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. It’s not too late to act, and to eat.

I hope this Saturday, you’ll come become a part of that (not so small) group of thoughtful, committed citizens. Bring a small dish to the Middlebury Green (RSVP at middpotluck@gmail.com). Drop a can in the “Food for 350” bin at the co-op.

And be glad for a full belly, and a day full of hope for the planet.

- 30 -

In This Rain, Even Herons Are Rusty

I’m not saying it’s been raining a lot this summer.

But five Addison County farmers just announced they’re selling their cows and going into rice farming.

I’m not saying it’s been raining a lot this summer, but local realtors have announced they’re now selling newly created waterfront property on the shores of Lake Champlain.

In Lincoln.

I’m not saying it’s been raining a lot this summer, but Kevin Costner just announced he’s chosen Vermont as the shooting location for Waterworld II.

I’m not saying it’s been raining a lot this summer, but:

* FEMA is preparing to evacuate Addison County residents to the ice hockey arena at Middelbury College.

* Climate activists have switched their focus from global warming to global wetting.

* As confirmed by countless sitings along the Lemon Fair, cows can in fact swim.

* I’ve been getting sympathy cards from my friends in Seattle.

* They’ve renamed the White River and are now calling it the Brown River.

* J.K. Rowling has announced that she’s writing another Harry Potter book. This one will feature a Vermont-based form of Quidditch. It’s underwater and requires not broomsticks, but submarines.

* I saw a blue heron yesterday that had rust on it.

* The Mt. Abe high school athletic department has announced it will be creating a surfing team.

* * *

It almost goes without saying that, for those of us who worry about global warming, this soggy summer is a sign of the apocalypse.

The computer models, after all, have long predicted that sudden, drenching cloudbursts would be one mark of climate change in New England. The kind of downpours we had last Sunday when it rained an inch an hour and the kind we had last summer, which turned Ripton roads into 10-foot-deep ditches.

As my friend Barbara, a college professor and Midwestern transplant, pointed out to me, you know things are changing when Vermont is being pelted with rain and it’s dry and 105 degrees in Seattle.

But maybe things aren’t changing as much as some of us relative latecomers might think.

As my other friend Barbara, who has lived here for 80 years, told me, “There’s nothing the weather in Vermont can throw at us that we haven’t already seen here before.”

* * *

So what’s a Vermonter to do in the face of all this rain?

Even as wet as things have been, it’s still worth getting out in the Vermont summer.
One bonus to all this rain, for example, is that the tubing is still terrific on the White River.

Several friends and I recently went tubing down the White and found it to be flowing quite nicely. We twirled our way down several miles of the river, stopping for a swim and a swing on ropes suspended from a riverside birch tree.

Last weekend, we trekked into far northern Vermont to camp at the state park along Maidstone Lake. It’s one of those places that make you glad your tax dollars are being put to a good use, to preserve a remote shoreline for lean-tos and tent sites.

The rain held off as we pitched our tents, and at dusk and again the next morning, we swam in the silky Maidstone waters.

As we made our way Sunday morning across the top of the state and past the blustery shores of Lake Willoughby, we dropped down into Glover.

There, of course, we had to make the requisite stop at the general store, to see the stuffed moose that occupies a place of honor inside the store.

“Second largest moose ever shot in Vermont,” a plaque informed us. Around the moose was a moldy menagerie of stuffed bears, foxes, raccoons, and minks. The kind of thing you’d see only in the Northeast Kingdom.

The real point of the trek, though, was to see Bread and Puppet.

Some four decades after its founding, this hearty theatrical troupe offers free performances at its Glover headquarters every Sunday. They’ve scaled way back from the annual circus that brought out 20,000 people, seemingly half of them stoned-out Phish heads.

But the pageantry goes on, combining broad humor with populist political messages that are again frightennly relevant, as the banks are bailed out and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan rage on.

Bread and Puppet’s performances take place in a spacious outdoor amphitheater, weather permitting.

But it was little surprise last Sunday that the weather did not permit. The show was moved to a large indoor barn.

The band played “Won’t You Come Home, Bill Bailey.” We booed the banker puppets and cheered when The Mountain puppet triumphed over the money men.
Outside, it poured.

And I’m not saying it’s been raining a lot lately, but instead of driving home from Bread and Puppet, we had to swim.

And when the electricity went out this week, instead of emailing this column in to the paper, I had to get in the kayak, paddle upriver, and deliver it by hand

At Reunion, the Comfort of Old Friends

At reunion, the comfort of old friends

By Gregory Dennis

We Baby Boomers were born in the wake of World War II, out of our parents’ desire for abundant normalcy.

Our parents’ world had been torn apart by depression and then war. In the wake of those traumas, their kids were going to be safe from harm – riding their bicycles down the sidewalks of perpetually tranquil neighborhoods.

And when it was time for their kids to go off to college, if they were lucky enough they were going to matriculate at places like Middlebury College.

We reveled in the abundance our parents created, the opportunities for summer camp and travel and good schools. And when we began to mature and our parents’ "normal" got dumb, murderous or boring, we changed the paradigm. No one was going to tell us what couldn’t be done.

But in the subsequent decades, we have learned, the world isn’t always a kind place.

Life doesn’t work out as we’d hoped. Friendships fade. We aren’t the heroes we’d planned to be. Careers go south or stall out. Our parents and children and spouses disappoint us.

The world, we now know, can be a lonely place.

So it was oddly comforting last weekend, at my 35th Middlebury College reunion, for my classmates and I to be reminded that we’d gone to college with an especially nice bunch of people.

It seems that each subsequent reunion – and I’ve been to all seven of them since our 1974 graduation – brings forth more of my classmates’ gentler side.

We spent the first two or three reunions trying to impress each other. Then we bragged at the next few gatherings about our kids and adventures.

These days we just have a good time in the company of friends and equals. We know enough about the world’s unkindness that the company of old friends is that much sweeter.

Inevitably, having a good time at reunion means retelling tales of our ignorant youth.
Launching off the 30-meter ski jump at the Snow Bowl on jumping skis during a Winter Carnival competition, without ever having been off a jump before.

Stoned, narrow-miss encounters with Campus Security, who came to tell a classmate that the car he’d reported as stolen was in fact down by the dining hall, right where he’d parked it the night before.

Drunken dares that prompted two beer-fueled classmates to ride naked, in February, atop a car that was crossing the bridge on the way home from a booze trip to Plattsburgh.

Geez, we were stupid.

It’s amazing we ever made it to graduation.

Beyond these stories of oft-wasted youth, though, lie more interesting tales of life since we left college.

Pretty much everyone there had been successful on his or her own terms. After all, people who feel like losers don’t go to college reunions.

To explore some of what our experiences have taught us, we pulled together a panel of five classmates, under the rubric of ”It’s All About the Journey” -- unofficially titled “What a Long Strange Trip It’s Been” (launch Frisbee and cue the Jerry Garcia guitar solo).

On the panel were survivors of divorce, cancer, Wall Street, parenting, and heterosexuality.

One classmate talked about being diagnosed with prostate cancer. He described his tortuous odyssey through the medical industrial complex to get the treatment that was best for him, as doctors bid for his insurance dollars with confusing, competing claims and treatments.

Another man, attending with his boyfriend and “out” for the first time at a reunion, described how ignorant he, and all of us, were about homosexuality as students. How he’d come to learn of his own homosexuality after college, and how important the battle for true equality remains.

If someone you love comes out to you as gay, he told us, the only right answer is “I love you.” And if you can’t give that answer, take a long hard look within yourself and find out why.

A couple of parents told of watching their children struggle with cancer and mental illness. Having experienced things no parent should have to, they told us that love and connection were what had pulled them through, and what still matter most to them.

One panelist talked of his greatly satisfying conversion from investment banker to organic beef farmer. Another observed that she was good at many things but had never excelled at the one pursuit that would make her a true achiever, someone worth an article in the paper.

She volunteers in the court system as part of what she calls the “liberal arts life.” She dances, does yoga, reads, and hangs out with her children. Even when you were schooled among a bunch of Middlebury College overachievers, she reminded us, you don’t have to be a star to live a worthwhile life.

But she added that she had lived for a long time with the tension that many women our age have felt, to be both Super Mom and a worldly success. “We still don’t have the balance right,” she said.

Was there a common theme there among the panelists? Something we could sum up as “our” identity, “our” experience?

Definitely not. Among a group of privileged, almost exclusively white people, the perspectives and experiences were about as diverse as they could be.

In truth, my class and any college class – and especially any generation, Baby Boomer or other – can’t be categorized by a few words or even by the era in which we came of age. To some of us, for example, Vietnam and the first Earth Day were the defining events of the day. For others, they were just distant headlines.

I spoke to several classmates after the reunion who said they’d had long and meaningful conversations with classmates to whom they’d hardly ever spoken when we were college students. Today, they have a lot to say to each other.

Their present-day connection was born largely out of what we shared at that campus on the hill, and how those four years have shaped the 35 years since then.

We’ve all made it through the same crucible. We’ve survived and mostly thrived. We’ve shared the experiences of coming to the same college in exactly the same year, entering the work world at the same moment, raising children in the same decades, making our lives out of much of the same raw material.

It’s the bond of a common journey we share with our classmates, the kind of ties one doesn’t share even with a sibling or spouse.

And when we gather every five years to tell the same old stories and reflect again on what it’s all meant, it makes the world seem a lot less lonely.

- 30 –

Getting to 350 Amid All the Carbon

With the beginning of the end in sight for this most recent economic crisis, Big Thinkers are turning their focus back to even bigger problems – climate change chief among them.

Again here, Vermonters can lead the way to a better life, as we have done historically on independence and abolition, and more recently on child healthcare and marriage equality.

This time around the stakes will be a lot higher than they were in one Vermont Republican senatorial primary, when the key question was how many teats there are on a cow.

In the U.S., Congress is struggling with a “cap and trade” bill that might slightly cut carbon emissions, which come primarily from burning oil and coal. Yet few leaders are ready to vote for what is truly needed: a tax on carbon to drastically cut emissions, with a corresponding dividend regularly paid back to every American.

Internationally, the focus is on a meeting of the “G20” leaders in July. After that, everyone is gearing up for the December meeting in Copenhagen that will supplant the Kyoto goals on global warming.

And in places as far flung as Lebanon, India and South Africa, an intrepid band of activists, who have their roots in Addison County, is organizing a planetary effort to place in every thinking person’s mind the number 350 – that is, 350 parts per million of carbon.

Scientists have concluded that 350 ppm is the maximum amount of carbon the atmosphere can hold and still support human life as we know it.

Here’s the bad news: We’re already above 380 ppm and rising. There is so much carbon already loaded into the atmosphere that many levelheaded experts think we can’t avoid at least some of the drastic impacts.

Left unchecked, climate change will melt the icecaps, flood our coastlines, imperil our food supply, bring us Katrina-level hurricanes on a regular basis, and drive many species into extinction. Nature’s rich beauty will fade to deserts, dead seas and autumnal maples that are a drab brown.

Against that backdrop, a tribe of climate-change activists gathered earlier this month at Middlebury College to contemplate “getting to 350,” achieving a better life organized around sustainable communities rather than unsustainable consumption.

(For more on the basics and to see what you can do, see www.350.org.)

Organized by the steadfast professor Jon Isham, the conference drew native Vermonters, a few hangers-on like myself, and Midd grad activists who, like our president, are proud to call themselves organizers. They spend their days and nights lobbying Congress and the G20 nations, impressive young adults who earned their climate stripes as students here.

We heard top NASA climatologist James Hansen lay out the irrefutable evidence that unless we act now, catastrophe awaits us. We contemplated the frightening gap between the destruction that the science says is approaching, and the public’s heedlessness of this threat.

One recent national survey on the top issues found Americans don’t even rank “the environment” in the top 20. Indeed, many conference participants confessed in private that they feel humanity will only take meaningful action to curb climate change once the inevitable catastrophes and “die off” begin to occur.

Looking battle-hardened and prophetic, Ripton resident Bill McKibben was Skyped into the conference from New Zealand. He’s been there and in many other nations as part of the 350 campaign, organizing surfers and scuba divers, mountain climbers and ordinary citizens, to gather in hundreds of events on Oct. 24.

On that day six weeks before the Copenhagen conference, we’ll convene in iconic natural settings and simple parks and squares around the glob, in hopes of impressing those three simple digits –3-5-0 -- upon the world’s consciousness.

Surprisingly, the mood at the conference was a hopeful one though we contemplated the most dire of fates.

The younger activists reminded us that climate change is both peril and opportunity, because it is forcing us to rethink how we organize our communities and our economy. And in this movement as in so many past ones, the youth have a lot to teach their elders.

Gatherings like this one inevitably focus on Big Ideas and Big Projects. Lew Milford from Clean Energy Group pointed to the need for “distributed innovation” around the globe to developing carbon-free energy. Charles Baron from Google, a Middlebury College grad, mapped out the search giant’s commitments to help meet its energy needs by developing massive geothermal energy production.

But in this inevitable focus on Big Ideas, a couple of them were overlooked.
Along with Native American climate activist Kandi Mosset of the Indigenous Environmental Network, I gently reminded the conference that the local food movement is already making a difference well beyond the conference rooms. (For more on how this is happening in Vermont, see “On the Importance of the Local” by Suzanne Richman, at www.vtcommons.org).

Another idea that was overlooked, as it usually is, was the ever-unpopular topic of population control.

Hansen for example, proudly showed us photos of his young grandchildren, as he called for a moratorium on new coal-fired plants and outlined the carbon-reducing virtues of “fourth generation” nuclear power.

Yet that kind of nuclear won’t come online for decades. And during that time the human population is exploding toward 10 billion – a number that itself portends unending climate change.

There was nary a word from Hansen or anybody else about taking the pressure off the planet in the coming decades by reducing our numbers.

As urgently as we need to get to 350, in my view we also need a “getting to 4 billion” conference. The goal: Figure out how we can, by reducing our numbers from the present 6 billion-plus, take full advantage of the challenging opportunities that climate change presents us.

Climate Conference Day 2

"Getting to 350" conference participants answer the question, "what does climate change mean to you?"

More info: http://blogs.middlebury.edu/350workshop/

www.350.org

Making friends online and off

I knew things were getting out of control when I got a Facebook friend request from Patricia Lopez of San Francisco..

I’ve never known anyone by that name in San Francisco or elsewhere, so at first I thought she must be a grade-school classmate using her married name. Yet it was clear from her photo on Facebook that she was at least 20 years younger than I am. I couldn’t see a single thing in her background that might have connected us.

If you haven’t yet discovered the gigantic time suck that is Facebook, first of all count your blessings that you still have a smidgen of free time. Second, suffice it to say that this online site does an uncannily good job of liking old friends, by cross-referencing demographics such as hometown, high school and college experiences.

Along with Twitter – a “microblogging” site that allows people to “follow” each other electronically through messages and Internet links limited to 140 characters – Facebook has almost instantly become one of the Web’s must-see sites. Along with Second Life, a site I have so far resisted, it’s become a kind of second life.

Sometimes it seems that we don’t talk to our friends anymore, we Facebook them. We don’t discuss a topic with a colleague, we Google it or we youtube it.

Addison County hasn’t escaped this phenomenon, rurally bucoloic though it may seem on the surface. In fact, our distance from the rest of the world seems to encourage these disembodied ties to the rest of the ether-world.

In a scene eerily reminiscent of the movie “Wall-E” where interaction with machines has supplanted human interplay, Carols’ Hungry Mind Café in Middlebury is populated every morning with people such as myself who are staring into our laptop computers.

Our interactions seem to be almost exclusively focused not upon our physical environment – the few actual conversations around us, the friendly folks behind the counter and the humans sitting next to us -- but on the pixels on our screen, transmitted through distant web servers, transoceanic cables and the invisible electrons of the wireless connections that beam to our eyeballs someone else’s electronic, online simulacrum of reality.

(And for the record, I just went online – where else? -- to be sure that I was using the word “simulacrum”correctly.)

Anyway, it’s all got me to wondering: Are we rocketing down the slippery slope to a sort of netherworld in which we will have replaced our normative, usually comforting physical reality with a cold, disembodied and wireless reality?

So hooked are we on our gadgets that we might even be losing touch with what’s right in front of us. As Greg Brown says in one of his songs, everyone else is walking around, “talking on cellphones and walking into doors.”

When I stand waiting in line at the co-op or Greg’s Market, I don’t stare off into space anymore or look around me to see if there’s anybody whom I might know. I pull out my Blackberry to see if I have any new e-mail.

They don’t call it a “Crackberry” for nothing.

If this is where we’re headed – into a world where we find our new friends on Facebook living on the other side of the continent while ignoring the person next to us – that would be a very sad outcome for Vermont.

Why Vermont in particular? Because we’ve built our life here on the social and economic connections that hold us so satisfyingly together in physical community.

We shop locally. We eat food that’s grown here. We know our neighbors and our neighbors’ kids and what team they play on at the high school or the rec league. We know who used to own that farm down the road, who lives there now and maybe even how many cows they’re milking.

We watch the weather together and relish it as a topic of conversation. We have an identity that’s deeply drawn from the sense that we’re all in it together, here in this lovely little mix of idiosyncratic bioregions and webs of human connection.. Not a worldwide web. The web of Vergennes and Ripton and Leicester, Otter Valley and MUHS and Mt. Abe, the Farm Bureau and Ducks Unlimited.

But is that irrevocably changing?

Because of my personal and professional interests and the way Twitter.com has insinuated itself into my life, I now know more about certain people who live in Australia and San Diego, and who “tweet” (post messages on Twitter) about healthcare and climate change, than I know about the nice couple that lives next door.

Indeed, Twitter is in the process of becoming so ubiquitous – exploding in two years from a few thousand users to several million – that for its aficianados, life seems to occur in bursts of 140 characters.
It used to be said back in the 1960’s that the revolution will not be televised.

Maybe not. But it might well be tweeted.

Yet when you dive into the new media – smartphone in one hand, laptop in the other, a wireless headset stuck in an ear as you navigate the neighborhood using a portable GPS – you begin to learn something strange.

Rather than cutting ourselves off from others, much of this technology is about the old tried and true human instinct to connect more widely and, better yet, more deeply.

Many of us have had the experience of finding a lost old friend by tracking his online presence through Yahoo or Google. I’ve shared secrets in email that I might never have revealed in face-to-face conversations, and those shared secrets have often brought me closer to others.

My business partner and I run a 10-person firm together, connected by the umbilical cords of cheap phone service and broadband connections, though we live on opposite sides of America. The process has enriched our nearly 20-year partnership, and I swear we get along better – and are no less creative -- than when we lived just a couple miles apart and saw a lot more of each other.

There’s a reason that Twitter and Facebook and MySpace and dozens of other new forms of communication are called social media. The juice is not in the isolation of a keyboard and computer screen. It’s in the heartfelt connections they bring.

And if it’s love you want, the old-fashioned touching and looking deeply into one another’s eyes, well, the number of happy marriages traceable to online dating sites must by now be in the hundreds of thousands.

I don’t mean to say, however, that there’s any substitute for face-to-face communication and the pleasure of others’ company.

Even in the café where the row of us spends hours staring into our laptops, the web of friendship blooms. I’ve become friends with several people because we like to write and do our email at tables near one another. At some point you look up you’re your screen and the deeper instincts reassert themselves.

“Only connect,” wrote the British novelist E.M. Forster. “That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will bee seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect…”

And as for Patricia Lopez, the woman who contacted me and wanted to be my friend on Facebook?

I was right to think that she and I have never met. She contacted me because she saw on my Facebook profile that I’m interested in environmental issues.

We’re friends now.

Sort of.

Gregory Dennis’ column appears here every other Thursday. Connect with him through email at GregDennisVt@yahoo.com, or in person at the nearest café with a wireless connection. He blogs at http://middleburyvt.blogspot.com.

Come Back, Howard Dean

With his stinging defeat at the hands of the Vermont Legislature, which last week overrode his veto of gay marriage, Gov. Jim Douglas has got to be wondering if this is just a temporary setback -- or the beginning of the end of his political career.

Douglas squeaked into office in 2002 thanks to the stubbornness of the Progressive Party, which ran its own gubernatorial candidate and split the liberal vote – giving Douglas the governor’s seat even though he fell short of a majority.

The regressive Progressives, proving they’d learned nothing about the folly of being a third party in statewide elections, pulled the same move in last year’s election.

But by then Douglas had become such a steady vote-getter that Democrat Gaye Symington and Progressive Anthony Pollina couldn’t even get 45% of the vote between them.

Douglas has faced increasingly large Democratic majorities in the Legislature. In the Senate, Republicans are nearly as hard to find as the Lake Champlain Monster.

But the governor has used his veto pen to great effect. He’s cut down legislation approved by the Legislature that would have improved energy conservation, widened access to healthcare, forced the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant to plan adequately for its decommissioning, and placed stricter donation limits on political fundraising.

As recently as last summer Douglas could brag, to his Republican cohorts at the national convention that gave us Sarah Palin, that while he was New England’s only Republican governor, Democrats had never overridden one of his vetoes.

He can’t make that claim anymore.

With this precedent, as the Legislature grows increasingly Democratic and increasingly liberal, the governor has got to feel just a little more vulnerable.

It remains to be seen whether Democrats can field a gubernatorial candidate with enough name recognition, personal popularity and fundraising ability to defeat Douglas. Vermont may be among the most liberal of states, but the voters still like Douglas. And until his veto of marriage equality, the canny governor had rarely put himself in a position to be steamrollered by an angry opposition.

In that sense, the Legislature did him a favor.

If the House and Senate had not been able to overcome his veto of marriage equality, there would have been a small army of gay-marriage supporters ready to defeat him next year. But the anger that marriage-equality supporters now rightly feel toward Douglas will have dissipated by next year’s election season.

So even if the Progressives finally wise up and stay out of the governor’s race, is there any chance the Democrats can muster a candidate with a snowball’s chance in hell of defeating Douglas?

Secretary of State Deb Markowitz seems likely to run, and State Sen. Doug Racine – who would have been governor but for the Progressives’ intervention in 2002 – has already said he’s running.

But what if the Dems could find a candidate who’s not just popular and well known in Vermont, but who’s also known on the national stage? Someone who has enormous name recognition, leadership experience at the national party level, and the political savvy to rally Democrats and independents of all stripes?

Better yet, what if that candidate had already been a successful Vermont governor?

Enter, stage left, the Hon. Howard Dean.

Dean capped his successful run as Vermont’s governor with a groundbreaking presidential campaign that gave the national Democratic Party some backbone on Iraq, the environment and other core issues. His campaign pioneered electronic, online campaigning that proved critical to Barack Obama’s ascendancy eight years later.

As the surprise chairman of the national Democratic Party, Dean staked his reputation on remaking the party into a 50-state force. That brave effort was rewarded with a Democratic president and senatorial victories in states as unlikely as Montana and Alaska, as well as domination of the statehouses.

But the never-bashful Dean ran afoul of several powerful Democrats, most notably Rahm Emmanuel, who tangled repeatedly with Dean over issues of strategic and personality.

So when it came time to find someone to lead the charge on healthcare reform as Secretary of health & Human Services – especially after nominee Tom Daschle was buried by his unpaid income tax -- Dean seemed a logical choice.

But with Emmanuel now White House chief of staff, Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sibelius got the nod instead. (After which it was quickly revealed she had her own tax problems. Apparently some Democratic nominees believe paying your full share is for suckers. But I digress.)

The irrepressible Dean is now a part-time commentator for CNBC. He spends the rest of his time barnstorming the country for healthcare reform.

Fun stuff, I’m sure, for a guy who is accustomed to the adrenaline of hearing thousands of admirers scream his name.

But -- and indulge me in this, I realize it’s just a dream – what if HoJo decided he wanted to come home again?

A seemingly silly idea at first blush. I’ll grant you that. That’s certainly what I thought when Middlebury’s Victor Nuovo suggested it to me.

But then I mused, well – why not?

The state has made an international reputation for its progressive politics. Maybe we’re just getting started.

First on civil unions and now on gay marriage, Vermont has led the way on 21st-century civil rights. Why stop now?

Throughout American history the states have been the laboratories of democracy. From welfare reform to clean-air legislation, they’ve led the way to innovative solutions in recent years.

Perhaps the time is ripe for tiny Vermont to continue to show the way.
I’d set out the agenda for Dean Redux with exactly the legislation that was murdered by Douglas’s veto pen.

The financial set-asides to close Vermont Yankee – collapsing cooling tower and all – are woefully underfunded. We’ll need every cent of it and more to shut down this aging dinosaur. Douglas won’t hear of it. Dean could make it happen and lead the way to making Vermont a leader in wind power.

Climate change isn’t just a threat to Vermont’s maple syrup and ski industries. It’s a looming global catastrophe. One good place to start addressing the issue is in providing support for better energy conservation.

And wouldn’t you know it, conservation efforts were at the heart of legislation Douglas tossed in the dumper a couple years ago.

And then there is healthcare.

Dean was way ahead of the curve on this one as governor. He expanded healthcare for children to make it nearly universal in Vermont. And before he ran for president, you got the feeling he was just getting started on an issue that he knows so well, both as a physician and a politician.

Why would a man who’s been living so large “waste” his time in little ol’ Vermont?
“Small P” progressives have a lot of ideas about how to address the multiple crises that face Americans. And heaven knows the Republicans have pretty much run out of ideas beyond waving teabags and calling Obama a socialist.

But in even the most liberal of the large states, progressives face big obstacles in turning their agenda into reality.

Not so in Vermont. Save for one man and his veto pen, the doors are wide open to the kind of groundbreaking programs that brought America Social Security, Medicare and MediCal, workplace safety, the 40-hour work week, and a cleaner, more diverse environment.

This time around, Vermont could show the way to an abundant life after peak oil; true regeneration of our communities through local food production; sustainable healthcare for all; and the best adaptations to deal with our rapidly heating climate and all that portends.

Jerry Brown went from being governor of California and Linda Ronstadt’s consort in her prime to being the mayor of lowly Oakland.

So will Howard Dean give up the talking-head gig, the endless plane rides from one speech to the next, and decide to come home, roll up his shirtsleeves and show the world what can be done?

Probably not. But he’s surprised us all before. And we can always dream.

- 30 -

Marriage Equality Knocking at the Door

Watching Gov. Jim Douglas during the leadup to the Legislature’s votes on gay marriage, you could almost get the feeling that -- for once in his political life -- the governor would Do the Right Thing. Perhaps despite his personal misgivings, Douglas would step aside and let freedom to marry reign in Vermont.

That naïve optimism was dashed last week, when Douglas announced that he will veto marriage equality for gay people when the bill reaches his desk.

And so in the history books, Gov. Douglas will join Gov. George Wallace at the schoolhouse door, trying vainly to turn back the tide to a time of separate and unequal.

Thankfully, Douglas and many of Vermont’s gay marriage opponents lack the bigotry that marked Wallace’s effort to block African-Americans from equal education. But Douglas’s stance is equally benighted, unfair, and out of step with the evolving ethos of our time.

History surely will judge it that way, just as it judged opposition to the first civil rights movement. That movement has in turn inspired the drive to achieve full civil rights regardless of sexual orientation.

But history’s judgment will probably come too late to achieve justice for gay people in Vermont this year.

Despite the rousing super-majority for gay marriage in the Senate – where only four of 30 senators opposed it – it will be tough to for the House to overcome Douglas’s veto this year.

I won’t recite here all the arguments for marriage equality. But a couple observations about why this has become such an important issue for America, even as we’re being told we should all be thinking about the bad economy all the time:

First, life ain’t always just about the money.

Second, as being gay becomes more acceptable in mainstream society, we’re coming to see that equal rights and status for gays affect far more of us than we ever thought.

Third, allowing gay marriage has the potential to be transformative for America. Ultimately we only benefit when equal opportunity prevails. When we embrace diverse ways of being in the world – black and white, right and left, straight and gay -- we are enriched as a society.

As I’ve said here before, I came to fervently believe in the urgency of allowing gay people to marry – and not just civilly unite over there in some kind of open-air closet – when my close friend Dan and my teenage niece Clara came out as gay.

I might have previously thought, along with Gov. Douglas, that marriage should be “just between a man and a woman.” But having once been happily married for many years, who am I to deny that same opportunity to some of the friends and family I love -- and by extension to other people who happen to be gay?

Obviusly I’m not alone in this view.

Seemingly overnight last Sunday, a crowd of more than 300 people mobilized to gather at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church on the Middlebury Green in support of marriage equality.

The governor’s announcement also earned him a spirited crowd on his doorstep in Montpelier the morning after he launched his veto rocket.

Douglas’s pronouncements on gay marriage have been especially interesting. He’s recently proclaimed himself a fervent supporter of civil unions, though he hardly led the charge on that issue. For months he kept quiet on whether he would veto gay marriage. Then he declared he would in fact nix the bill, declaring it to be “a distraction” from the real issue of the economy.

You can look up that last statement in the dictionary under “disingenuous.” After saying for months that he never issued veto warnings in advance, the governor’s veto-warning-in-advance set off a political firestorm. It’s become the distraction of the day, as surely he knew it would.

When you’re governor and you can’t do anything about an economy that now has rocketed Vermont’s unemployment rate to 7 percent and rising, ignite a distraction on gay marriage. While insisting all along, of course, that the Legislature should focus on the economy, stupid -- and forget all this foolishness about equal rights.

* * *

Much of the opposition to gay marriage comes from people with religious concerns, of course.

But for decades in America, we’ve wisely carved out a huge space for marriages that are not conducted or sanctioned by a church. Should you happen to want to marry someone of the opposite sex without involving religion, you can easily get a piece of paper from the City Hall that will keep you tied and true.

Yet America has a funny view of marriage, wrapped in religiosity and the ridiculous. Which is a damn shame for an institution that so many of us hold sacred.

Americans sanction unions between straight people that are conducted by “ministers” who bought their holy credentials through an ad in the back of Rolling Stone. We honor ceremonies for male-female couples that are conducted by Elvis impersonators inside chapels in Las Vegas and, for all I know, Barre, Vt.

But heaven help you if you would prefer to marry someone of your own gender, inside a church or down at the town clerk’s office.

Fortunately, the misplaced religious barriers to gay marriage are eroding, and this is thanks in part to the satirists. As comedian Jon Stewart pointed out during a raucous show at UVM last weekend, the Bible has passages against homosexuality, and the Bible also says you shouldn’t eat shellfish. Forget gay marriage, Stewart advised. What religious conservatives should do is try to close down Red Lobster restaurants.

You know things have begun to change in Vermont when even the Burlington Free Press has done an astounding and courageous turnabout to support gay marriage, less than a decade after it opposed even civil unions.

We see transitions like that because debate about marriage equality is in part a debate about what we are as a society, and how compassionately we can live on this planet.

Why not just settle for civil unions? As writer Steve Silberman muses in the current issue of Shambhala Sun about the decision he and his longtime partner Keith made to get married:

“Certain words have alchemical power. A humble noun or verb can become a transformative mantra. Embracing the word ‘marriage’ had a subtle but profound effect on our relationship, like unlocking a door to a secret garden that only other married people know about.”

It’s time we unlocked that door for everybody.

Whether it’s this year or at some point in the future, Americans will sweep aside the governors blocking that door. We will unlock that door.

Love will find a way.

With peak oil, farming needs to be cool again

Drive through Hinesburg and parts of Monkton these days and you’ll see one feature of Vermont’s new economy: suburban-style houses for people who work in greater Burlington.

Drive the opposite direction, through Orwell and Whiting and Leicester, and you’ll see the state’s old economy: ancient dairy farms, so long-abandoned that there’s not even a rotting barn in evidence. Fields so long neglected they’re transitioning to third-growth forest.

The paradox – and one of the great challenges of the next half-century – is that if Vermont is to prosper as we transition away from oil, the new must become old, and the old must again become new.

With gas at $4 a gallon and surely heading higher, the “new economy” -- based on long commutes from country to city -- simply won’t hold up. At some point, living in Monkton and driving every day to Colchester just becomes too expensive.

The same high prices for oil will be reflected in what we pay for food.

Instead of costing, say, $5 a quart, January strawberries that are shipped from Modesto, Calif. to Middlebury, Vt. will cost double that – and who’s going to pay a ten-spot for fresh strawberries when you can grab homegrown berries out of the freezer for free?

As for the “old” Vermont economy in those seemingly barren stretches of southern Addison County --- well, that’s where our food’s going to have to come from. We won’t be able to rely anymore on produce flown in on 747’s from Chile.

Which is where my niece Clara comes in.

Just out of high school and headed for college, Clara has been spending her summer volunteering at two local farms. Having been raised in the burbs of Boston, she’s an unlikely candidate to get up at 5 a.m. and feed the chickens, weed a long row of carrots, and harvest garlic.

But like a few Baby Boomers before them, Clara and some of her contemporaries have come to see that farming and living closer to the land can be cool.

And if there’s any hope that Vermont can again grow much of its own food once it’s too expensive to import it – well, then, farming is once again going to have to been seen as a cool thing to do.

Clara started out at Singing Cedars Farm in Orwell, the expanding enterprise run by Scott Greene TK and Suzanne Young. Like organic farmers in many countries, Scott and Suzanne rely in part of WWOOFers – young people volunteering through World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms, or WWOOF.

The organization began in Britain in 1971. Now, under the banner of “living, learning, sharing organic lifestyles,” WWOOF affiliates host volunteers at farms on six continents. (Similar programs are sponsored by the Northeast Organic Farmers Association, www.nofavt.org).

Earlier this month, Clara joined several WWOOFers at Singing Cedars, which lies near the end of several miles of dirt road in Orwell. The farm encompasses organic vegetables, chickens, turkeys, a few cows, and Scott and Suzanne’s two healthy young children.

This summer Scott and Suzanne had so much demand from WWOOFers that they were able to accommodate Clara as a volunteer for only 10 days.

She loved every minute. She even seemed to relish sleeping in the haymow, in a tent that protected her from the mosquitos, where she read herself to sleep each evening by the light of a headlamp.

From Singing Cedars she transitioned to Blue Ledge Farm, in Leicester along another lengthy stretch of dirt road. There she’s been learning to milk goats, feed pigs, and help make nine varieties of cheese.

The result of years of hard work by Hannah Sessions and Greg Barnhardt TK, Blue Ledge is a relatively small but impressive operation – especially the new “cave” where the cheese is made, in a cool, partly underground setting that is wired for the good rock music that reverberates from an iPod through its several rooms.

Both Blue Ledge and Singing Cedars say a lot about how to make the new economy of local agriculture work.

Except for a little bit of cow’s milk bought from another farm for one of their cheeses, Blue Ledge doesn’t rely on the dairy industry that is so rapidly dying in Vermont. (Organic milk holds great promise, but that’s a subject for another time.)

Instead, Blue Ledge has created especially tasty niche products that sell not just locally but also to urban outlets in southern New England. Moreoever, Blue Ledge helps preserve open space by grazing their goats while also respecting the nearby wetlands.

And as attested to by a unique beer and cheese tasting event that was held three years ago at Otter Creek Brewery, lots of other mom-and-pop operations are also making terrific Vermont cheeses.

Blue Ledge itself relies on mom and pop, too. Hannah’s mother, Abi, works the Rutland Farmers Market every Saturday and milks the goats on Sunday morning. Bill Sessions is a fixture at the Middlebury Farmers Market -- which surely makes him the only federal judge who sells cheese in his spare time.

Singing Cedars, too, uses grazing to preserve a bit of bucolic farmland. Like Blue Ledge, they’ve reclaimed old farmland and put it back to use in a part of the county where land is more affordable.

These operations rely heavily on farmers markets, community-supported agriculture arrangements, the organic and “slow” food trends, and the emerging localvore movement. (The outta-state media has taken to referring to them as “locavores,” but to me, that sounds too much like a bunch of crazy binge eaters.)

We eat as partial localvores because it tastes so good, of course.

But – and here’s the coolness factor again -- we also eat this way because of the romance of local food, its resonance of simpler times, an expression of honest values and hard work. Eating locally, we also savor the knowledge that our neighbors have labored through the overly warm, dry spring and an epically wet summer to bring these salad greens and garlic scapes, this venison stew meat and cheese and goat chops to our table.

Do we pay a premium for this food? You bet we do. It’s often cheaper to buy blueberries trucked in from North Carolina than those grown on Lower Notch Road.

But more and more of us are willing to pay that premium.

It’s a form of investing in a future of partial food independence, as Ripton’s Bill McKibben pointed out in his excellent article in the July 23 Seven Days.

Unless we support the new back-to-the-landers and their altruistic WWOOFers, we’ll never create a sustainable infrastructure of local and regional agriculture, for that inevitable day when the oil runs out.

And in the meantime -- as we contemplate how and what we will eat when it will have to be loca -- the process of buying and eating locally is also a wonderful way of that saying we love this place, along with the young people who have staked their farm future here and the bounty they produce.



a

Middlebury's Edifice Complex

The layman wanders with some trepidation into the minefield of architectural commentary – but I'll take a few steps anyway.
Anyone traveling traveling into Middlebury via Route 30 has no doubt taken notice of the new Axinn Center. That's the large complex rising on the Middlebury College campus on South Main Street near the college's new library.
Along Court Street/Route 7 stand the beginnings of South “Village,” a multi-use project that is suburban in all but name.
And the Marble Works Residences are at last being occupied, after a dramatic year of rock blasting, giant cranes and the ascendance of what must be downtown's tallest non-church structure.
So what's to be made of all this new building, and how will it reshape the county's shire town? Only time will tell for sure, but it's not too early to offer some preliminary conclusions:
* Middlebury really needs to rethink its guidelines for how far buildings must be set back from the road. In its proximity to Court Street, the bank building at South Village will block one of the town's finest views, of the Green Mountains as they sweep south of town. And the college's Axinn Center all but sits in the west lane of S. Main St. Didn't anyone look at a map when these things were sited?
* The college has the economic wherewithal to build “green” while other don't. The Axinn Center will have a much smaller environmental impact – at least on a square-foot basis -- than did the old library it supplants. The South Village and Marble Works buildings, by comparison, seem to be pretty standard construction where cost takes precedence over environmental concerns.
* We're still small enough that even one new project brings with it significant changes to the areas around it. Three projects coming into use at about the same time will alter how the town looks at its center and on its edges.
The Marble Works Residences first catch the eye because of their imposing size. That fourth, top story probably represents whatever profit there is in the project for the developers. But to the eyes of many, the building is at least one story too high.
Nonetheless, credit the developers with a design that's in keeping with the setting and the vernacular, echoing the long-gone mill buildings that stood along Otter Creek, as well as the existing Marble Works itself. The downtown location is the project's most eco-friendly aspect – and a welcome relief from the Route 7 sprawl that now reaches, with a few interruptions, from East Middlebury all the way to New Haven. The project is in exactly the right kind of location, one that encourages walking and community life.
The college's Axinn center takes the prize for Project with the Longest and Most Incomprehensible Name: "The Donald Everett Axinn '51 Center for Literary and Cultural Studies at Starr Library." (The college website says it will be “informally known” as the Axinn Center at Starr Library. Presumably everyone who speaks this “informal” name must also pronounce it in a snooty British accent.)
Apparently wary of angry alumni who fondly recall falling asleep in the old Starr Library, the college is talking up the Axinn center as if it were a minor makeover of the library, which it refers to as “an historic campus icon.” In truth, though, Axinn remakes the entire area within several hundred yards, even adding a building at the southern end of the sainted Old Stone Row.
The college has proven to have quite an edifice complex, and this project is no exception. Though it is still under construction, it's safe to say Axinn will be stylish, massive, and very expensive. We can only hope it will prove more durable than the Ross Commons building repaired this summer due to the danger of falling stone or, say, the bizarre Center for the Arts building, where the southeastern exposure was patched up last summer because it was leaking.
And then take South Village – please.
I recognize that many people have worked hard to bring this project to reality and make it a credit to Middlebury. Again here, it's too soon to say what its final impact will be, yet the early signs are not good. Hopefully its commercial elements will generate stable new jobs for Vermonters. And the project has the singular merit of providing affordable housing in a new apartment building from Housing Vermont. But did the appearance of this building really have to be neo-East German?
The 31-acre site, once owned by the college and home to the Maple Manor Motel, will greatly compound the traffic problems on south Court Street. Worse, it will shift even more of Middlebury's population and economic activity from the historic, human-scale downtown to a car-based sprawl well away from the village.
I hope the 56 houses to be built at South Village prove me wrong, but for now, the best thing that can be said about the project is that at least they didn't build a Wal-Mart.



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STEP IT UP -- We Need You Saturday,. April 14

Just a few days left to make your plans for Saturday, April 14.

That's when, in more than 1,000 different actions around the country, thousands of us will gather to do cool things -- and demand that the nation Step It Up and do something NOW about climate change and global warming.

Please join us. Find a local event just waiting for you to attend and have fun. Go to www.stepitup2007.org and use the "zip search" function to find out what's going on in YOUR backyard.

This is the best way I know to get energized and feel hopeful that we CAN do something about global warming, that we can pull back from the brink of environmental catastrophe for millions of people around the globe. That we'll leave our kids with a green living planet and not a watery, dying hulk.

It's up to each and every one of us to step it up. Learn more at www.stepitup.org. And please joins us on April 14.