37,000 Vermonters Favor Secession!:
New Statewide Poll Shows Vermont Independence Movement Leads The Nation

by Thomas Naylor

The 2006 Vermonter Poll recently conducted by the Center for Rural Studies of the University of Vermont indicates that the percentage of eligible Vermont voters who favor secession from the United States of America - 8% of those polled - could very well be the highest in the nation.

Secession is nothing new to Vermonters. On January 15, 1815, less than twenty-five years after Vermont became the fourteenth state, it joined other New England states in signing the report of the Hartford Convention in opposition to the proposal of the Secretary of War to implement a military draft for continuing the badly mismanaged War of 1812 with England. This report was nothing less than a declaration of the right to secede.

Start with the Land

By Peter Forbes

I am wary of talk of independence that doesn't start with the willingness and knowledge of how to grow healthy food. I am wary of calls for secession that don't include mention of what will succeed our maples.

Forget politics, let's talk about soil.

Are we really loyal to our own soil? Let me make a straightforward proposition: all talk of the future of nations and states that doesn't start with the fundamentals of soil, and our relationship to it, is the domain of armchair revolutionaries.

Soil and land is the foundation of our cultural house. It isn't the roof, or the walls, or the windows, or the plumbing, but land –and our relationship to it—supports and defines all the characteristics that we call humanity and community. And from this awareness comes a glimpse of another truth: our true wealth and security comes from that

The Renewed Activist

BY Megan Quinn

As an environmental activist at the peak of industrial civilization I've always felt like the underdog. I've imagined myself as a street-protesting, petition-signing, door-to-door knocking David trying to bring down a money-wielding, corporate-clad, government-shielded Goliath.

With such long odds of victory, many environmental activists have either lowered their expectations or just burned out. We may have succeeded in convincing Goliath to paint himself green, but he still goes on destroying the planet and the collective future of humanity. And being thoroughly exhausted and frustrated at the daunting task before us, we have ended up defeating ourselves.

Free Vermont: Going Back To The Future

230 years ago this month, a small group of men and women living in a loosely-knit group of colonial frontier communities at the edge of what Europeans called “the known world” produced a document announcing their intention to secede from the most powerful empire on the planet.

You may remember.

We call it the 1776 Declaration of Independence.

A declaration that, at its core, is about secession.

Close collaboration between the British Empire's political and economic elite – King George, the Parliament, and proto-corporations like the British East India Tea Company - ran London's 18th century Empire.

Beyond Organic: Investing In Vermont's Local Food Economies

By George Schenk

Think of a farm and what image comes to mind? A house and barn surrounded by fields and woods. A few chickens in the yard, a big garden, a pen of pigs and a small herd of cows in the pasture. This, or something similar is what most of us think of because for about as long as we can remember this is what farms looked like. They called them family farms and they functioned within the content of nature and their communities. Although far from perfect and often difficult, at a fundamental level family farming produced both delicious and nutritious foods, conserved open space and were a durable foundation upon which democracy and civil society flourished.

The Tapeworm's Triumph?
Confronting the Parasitic Corporate Underpinnings of U.S. Empire

By Catherine Austin Fitts

Former Bush (I) administration HUD employee Catherine Austin Fitts is now the President of Solari, Inc, an investment advisory firm.

The other day, a natural healing practitioner explained the strategy used by a tapeworm to prosper. A tapeworm, she said, injected a chemical into its host that triggered a craving by the host for what the tapeworm wished for its dinner. By managing its host's desire, a tapeworm manipulated its host to set aside self-interest and please its parasite. And so the tapeworm proceeded to consume its host's energy and health, with the host doing most of the work.

Republicanism and Size - Part 3

By Donald W. Livingston

Let me first sum up the argument from the first two parts of this extended essay on “republicanism and size.' From the Greeks on, it was held that a republic had to be small (somewhere in the range of 50-200 thousand people or fewer). Rousseau's The Social Contract (1761) was modeled on his beloved Geneva, a city that had a population of 25,000. And it was commonly believed that a large polity demanded monarchy (which in the eighteenth century was a code word for a centralized unitary state). After achieving independence, Americans faced a dilemma. They were determined to be republicans, but the vast political boundaries they inherited were drawn by the British Crown, and so seemed to demand monarchical government as both John Adams and Alexander Hamilton said.

Growing A New Food Paradigm: Vermonters Plant Localvore Chapters

By Robin McDermott

Previous issues of Vermont Commons have questioned whether our state has the agricultural resources to feed itself. Now, groups of people throughout the state are learning firsthand just how easy (or difficult) this might be. It all started last August when a small group of people from the Upper Valley area of the state decided they would try to go for one month eating only locally grown and produced foods. They got the idea from a group of like-minded people in the San Francisco Bay area who did just that and called themselves “Locavores.” The Upper Valley group decided to call themselves Localvores (with an “l”) and signed pledges promising to eat food grown and produced within a 100 mile radius of their homes during the month of August.

Living Post-Carbon: Vermonters Begin Grappling With Global Peak Oil

By Dennis Derryberry

During the past several months, as the ominous phrase “Peak Oil” has begun appearing on the U.S. public's collective radar screen, hundreds of forward-thinking Vermonters already have decided to look for new ways to live which do not rely upon the use of fossil fuel energy, and not least among their reasons is the simple fact that oil fields don't exist in or anywhere near Vermont. Just a few months since its creation, the Vermont Peak Oil Network (VPON) website www.vtpeakoil.net has networked at least nine local and regional groups who have rallied around the possibility of creation an alternative energy future in the face of dramatically increasing fossil fuel energy and shrinking production capacity globally.

200 Years Is Long Enough!
An Interview With Vermont Fiddler Pete Sutherland

Q. How did you come to write a song about Vermont seceding from the
United States?

A. The song and the recording (with the Clayfoot Strutters) date from 1991, Vermont's bicentennial. There was actually a bumper sticker I saw that year that said "200 Years is Long Enough!" So, in grand Yankee fashion, I stole it. It was a good excuse, as is all my ballad-making, to bone up on some specific historical stuff - names, details. I love that part of the work, and the appropriation or coming up with hooks, like:

" It's Vermonters to the lifeboats! This is a sinking ship!