How did Vermont Get to Be?: The Growth of a Regional Identity

By Daniel Gade

How our plucky little state's identity evolved from an 18th-century terra incognita is a process that reflects two basic facts: much has changed in 250 years that bodes for further change; and human decisions more than the land are responsible for regional identity. The concept of Vermont as a separate political entity fits the definition of a region as a bounded space with a perceived character of its own. This distinctiveness is the result of a set of historical contingencies acting on an undefined space. To make sense of what has occurred, we can identify four chronological periods in Vermont's past.

Nonviolent Vermont Independence

By Thomas Naylor

One of the questions I'm asked most often is, “How would the United States respond to an attempt by Vermont to secede from the Union?” Would the United States send troops to Vermont? Maybe, maybe not.

Why would anyone want to invade tiny Vermont? Only Wyoming has a smaller population. Vermont has no military bases, few defense contractors, virtually no strategic resources, no large cities, and no important government installations. Its only strategic resource is the aging Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant.

What if the Marines were to invade the Green Mountain State? Would all of the black-and-white Holsteins be destroyed or perhaps the entire sugar maple crop burned? Imagine trying to enslave freedom-loving Vermonters. Good luck!

A Brief Welcome to the Long Emergency

By James Howard Kunstler

(Excerpted from THE LONG EMERGENCY, Atlantic Press, 2005)

The world—and of course the United States and Vermont—faces an epochal predicament: the global oil production peak and the arc of depletion that follows. We are unprepared for this crisis of industrial civilization. We are sleepwalking into the future. The peak oil production event will change everything about how we live. It will challenge all of our assumptions. It will compel us to do things differently—whether we like it or not. We need to integrate these new realities into our collective worldview, in order to start making the changes our nation will have to make if we want to carry on the project of civilization.

Note: The following declaration—a team effort originally conceived for a 2004 secession conference in Middlebury, Vermont—sets the Vermont independence movement in a national and international context and suggests the agenda for a think tank that we expect to get off the ground soon, to be called, in honor of our initial meeting (what else?) the Middlebury Institute.

Let's begin with the "shout heard 'round the world."

The words of Thomas Jefferson and the first Continental Congress in 1776.

The opening moments in what has become one of the most important documents about "freedom" and "democracy" in modern world history.

The Declaration of Independence.

A document that is, at the core, about secession.

Why peacefully secede from the United States? Why create an independent Vermont Republic (again), interested in a free and unfettered exchange of ideas, goods, services, and good will with the rest of the globe? How would we actually go about doing such a thing?