CRAFTING NATIVENESS

By Jeff Bickart

I know some native Vermonters, all residents here for quite some time, all with a deep understanding of this place, all able to make their lives here perfectly, without excess and without waste, from the materials and resources they find around them, using only the tools given to them by birth. You know them too: sugar maples, black spruces, and Green Mountain maidenhair ferns; moose, deer, and fisher; the common whitetail dragonfly and the eastern tiger swallowtail; boreal chickadees, ravens, and Bicknell's thrushes; spring peepers and painted turtles. And a few hundred others. There are even more I haven't met yet. All these native Vermonters have likely been here for tens of thousands of generations, notwithstanding some long stays in the south when their home ground was buried in thick ice or still warming up after a few millennia of arctic weather. I don't know any Vermont people who are native like this.

Book Review:

Rob Williams on Thomas J. DiLorenzo's The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War

“The Union was formed by the voluntary agreement of all the States; in uniting together they have not forfeited their nationality, nor have they been reduced to the condition of one and the same people. . . . If one of the states chooses to withdraw from the compact, it would be difficult to disapprove its right of doing so, and the Federal Government would have no means of maintaining its claims directly either by force or right.”

Alexis de Tocqueville

Subverting Power with Complementary Currency

By Jim Hogue

“Give me control over a nation's currency and I care not who makes its laws.”
Baron M.A.Rothchild

If Vermont, or any other society, is to survive in an age of diminishing resources, it needs to move toward a system of polycentrism, in which there is little centralized authority and in which rules and institutions work toward the improvement of the commonweal. The was, of course, the state of events when Vermont was an independent republic from 1777 to 1791. For more than two hundred years, that polycentrism has slowly eroded.

A Constitutional History of Secession

By John Remington Graham

On November 27, 1688, King James II met in London with the House of Lords, which then sat as a Magnum Concilium, -- i. e., a council of titled nobility and reverend bishops summoned to give advice the Crown in a season of grave crisis. England was in a state of upheaval against repeated acts of royal misgovernment and repeated infractions of fundamental law. William of Orange, a prince of royal blood, marched his troops forward, and the King's armies melted without offering resistance. The lords temporal and spiritual advised the King to grant pardons with liberality, to meet for negotiations with the William of Orange, to call a free Parliament, and to endorse constitutional reforms which were by then long overdue. The King failed to act upon this advice. He fled from the realm, and joined his Queen and royal heir, Prince James Edward Stuart, at the Palais de St-Germain in France.

Small is Powerful

By Kirkpatrick Sale

When you have a bunch of crushed grapes and introduce yeast cells, you produce one of the most energetic and successful events in biology. The yeast eats up the sugar of the grape and produces alcohol as a waste byproduct, and keeps on eating and eating, happy as a, well, yeast in juice—until there is no more sugar to eat, or the alcohol content gets close to 14 percent, at which point the yeast can no longer survive. It chokes, more or less, in its own waste. And the wine is made.

This is a process ecologists call drawdown. The next steps are bloom, crash, diedown, and dieout. That is the process of many species. It is the process through which industrial civilization is going today—only we are still in the first two phases of it. Drawdown of the world's resources at an alarming rate—to the point where the distinguished Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson has declared that “Earth's capacity to support our species is approaching the limit.” Bloom, though of course not for everyone, but about a fifth of the world's population, and at levels of grandeur never before known to the earth.

Word and Flesh

By Wendell Berry

Toward the end of As You Like It, Orlando says: “I can live no longer by thinking.” He is ready to marry Rosalind. It is time for incarnation. Having thought too much, he is at one of the limits of human experience, or of human sanity. If his love does put on flesh, we know he must sooner or later arrive at the opposite limit, at which he will say, “I can live no longer without thinking.” Thought—even consciousness—seems to live between these limits: the abstract and the particular, the word and the flesh.
All public movements of thought quickly produce a language that works as a code, useless to the extent that it is abstract. It is readily evident, for example, that you can't conduct a relationship with another person in terms of the rhetoric of the civil rights movement or the women's movement—as useful as those rhetorics may initially have been to personal relationships.

The Cultivation of Our Own Tradition

Those of us who lived in Vermont in decades past, and flew in and out of the state periodically, have all had a certain airport experience. No matter where your connection was for your flight to Burlington—Newark or Philadelphia or Cleveland—as you approached the gate for the flight home, you knew it was the Vermont gate without checking the Departures screen. There were still overalls and white beards. The dental care was spotty. There was no sheen to the crowd. You might have been flying to Albania.
This isn't as true as it once was. In some ways, Vermont has caught up with the rest of the country, or, rather, the country has infiltrated Vermont. But it still holds. I still have no trouble distinguishing the Vermont gate from the others. There's a little less makeup, lower heels. People are more likely to be clutching books, more likely to wear their gray hair with pride.