6/08/98

KUFM / KGPR

T. M. Power

Travels in Vermont: Echoes of Possibilities

I have spent the last two weeks traveling, studying, speaking, and listening in Vermont. After thirty years of doing the same in Montana, it is hard not to be making comparisons and looking for lessons.

Vermont, like Montana, is a very small state in terms of population: It too has only one representative in the US House. It is also largely non-metropolitan, having only one city, Burlington, that makes the grade as an official "metro" area. It also has some similarities in its economic past: Vermont once provided a major portion of the nation’s copper. In the 1870s copper production from the town just north of where I am staying was about the same as the production in Butte. Timber harvests once stripped away almost fifty percent of the state’s forests. But it was agriculture that originally settled the state and determined many of the geographic patterns still found. Copper, timber, cows, and farms: It all sounds quite familiar.

Strangely enough, Vermont, old, staid, New England, settled a century and a half before Montana, remains much more rural than Montana. Montana, like most of the West, prides itself for its close connection with the land and its ranching and cowboy heritage, but the fact is that the West is the most urbanized area of the nation. Most of us inhabit cities, small and large, or their surrounding suburbs or exurban areas. The majority of the West’s land base remains unsettled or was settled early in this century and then unsettled as agriculture and other natural resource industries shrank as the primary sources of employment.

Agriculture, of course, declined even earlier in Vermont as first the Ohio River Valley and then the midwest’s cornbelt developed. But Vermont’s population did not abandon the rural setting as employment shifted to non-agricultural activities. The rolling forested mountains continue to be inhabited by families living on old homesteads. Up almost every creek valley, along almost every mountain ridge, across each upper basin can be found the homes of both the poor, the upscale yuppies, and those who still mix agriculture with other livelihoods. Spaced about a loud shout apart, Vermont’s families maintain their independence and physical distance while remaining involved in the larger community built around their tiny town centers, schools, and churches.

Vermont, of course, like Montana, has drawn or bred its own set of angry misfits. Just last week headlines were grabbed by someone calling for the formation of local "militias" to stockpile weapons and ammunition because, he said, that was the only way to intimidate the Vermont legislature and force it to back off of its "communist-like" agenda. This particular communist plot was action mandated by the state supreme court that school funding be equalized. That, too, sounded familiar.

But what is most interesting about Vermont is that it actually seems to be resisting the corporate imposed commercial sameness that has cursed most of the West and, actually, most of the nation. Strip-mall development and convenience stores are not the dominant feature of all crossroads and interstate highway exits. Sprawling subdivision developments and prominent trophy homes do not dominate the landscape. The population and a lot of commercial activity are decentralized, but that decentralization has not taken the form of landscape eating sprawl.

This all may simply be an accident of history in Vermont. It was originally settled by Europeans on small farmsteads that covered almost the entire landscape. There was no federal land limiting settlement. There were no huge ranches or farms. Almost all of the Vermont landscape was once rather intensively settled and worked. Now the forest canopy has begun to close back over the clear-cut mountains and pasture lands. But Vermont’s citizens continue to inhabit those mountain lands. The result is an interesting combination of new economic patterns and old habitation patterns.

The citizens of Vermont know that the path they have thus far taken is different and are struggling to keep it that way. They are even mobilizing economic arguments to try to make the case that their future lies with them maintaining those differences rather than allowing outside patterns of business development to homogenize them in with the rest of ugly commercial America.

As one leader recently put it: "We still have livable downtowns in Vermont, but that’s not true in all New England States. There’s an piece of our economy that is tied to the Vermont mystique. Our colleges, our travel industry, the manufacturing producing unique Vermont products, all of these plus the people who have chosen to live here are a major part of our economy. If we lose our small towns, our downtowns, and allow sprawl on our countrysides, we run the risk of losing our edge over the rest of the country."

For a very small rural state trying to survive and prosper in an increasingly metropolitan nation, clearly identifying just who it is and what it stands for may turn out to be very important. Just as that is true for Vermont, it is also true for Montana. Unfortunately, we in Montana do not have the confidence or true conservatism that goes with having inhabited an area for centuries. Most of us are newcomers who are willing to accept a good part of that from which we originally fled. As a result, our communities and landscapes are being consumed by commercial forces over which we feel we either cannot or should not attempt to exercise any control. And so, the churn of the homogenizing machine goes on, gobbling up all that is unique and special. If only we had roots that went just a little deeper and that tapped a conservatism that actually sought to conserve things of value rather than surrender them up to the highest bidder. If only....