Looking Back, Looking Forward

Editorial by Ian Baldwin

Vermont Commons incorporated itself in December 2004. We figured out our publishing plan in February 2005 and assembled the team to make it possible that same month. In a breathtakingly short time we launched a website with an active (even hyperactive) blog and produced three monthly issues of our print journal, in which some of the nation's best writers have made contributions. We did all this for less than $10,000, relying on the volunteer time of just about everyone listed on the masthead, as well as our contributing writers. As someone experienced in the difficulties and hazards of publishing, I find myself stunned into a kind of wonderment.

How did this happen, so much accomplished so soon, a birth of such swiftness that it must have been eased by the gods of the hills? Perhaps, because the time is right.

When my wife and I first moved to Vermont we settled for a year in Vershire. I remember one day walking by an old cottage on a climbing rutted class 4 road when the old lady of the house sprang out and accosted me with her collection of photographs of the area, taken more than 120 years earlier. I was stunned by what she showed me. All the land for miles and miles had been cleared, and grazing sheep had kept it that way. The landscape had been completely transformed—not once but twice.

I shall never forget the impassioned testimony of my deceased friend, Scott Hastings, a native Vermonter who more than any other person was responsible for the displays found today in Woodstock's Billings Farm Museum. Scott exclaimed that the towering, epic work of those who cleared the land of stone and tree for the first farmsteads and made endless handmade walls snaking through the daunting hills and forests of the winter-fast frontier of Vermont accomplished the equivalent of what those pioneers' ancestors had when they built Chartres, Rheims, Amiens, Salisbury, and the other great cathedrals of medieval Europe. Scott was a gentle man, but he spoke of this with passionate, utter conviction, as one who knew, as others did not.

Vermont went from subsistence farming to export of beef and grain, for decades to sheep and wool, and after the Civil War, to dairy, where we stayed for a century, so that even today Vermont and milk cows are locked together in the public imagination, imagery effectively exploited by Ben & Jerry's and many others of lesser fame. In the mid-19th century sheep outnumbered humans six to one. Then they were gone. Later other Americans could be amused by the fact that cows outnumbered humans in Vermont. Vermonters made hay. The tourists poured in with their dollars.

While many homesteads pursued the tough livelihood of dairy farming, many other Vermonters spawned a roller-coaster ride of innovative farms (hemp was experimented with as a commercial crop from 1828–30), factories, quarries, lumber and mill towns, exemplified by gritty places like Rutland, Springfield, Barre, St. Johnsbury, and once upon a time, Burlington. It seems there have always been two groups of Vermonters, economically speaking.

One historian claims that in the early 19th century Vermont, “lacking an aristocracy of wealth,” was “the most democratic state in New England.” The Jeffersonian ethos held political sway in the state. To some extent it still does. Remember, much of Vermont wasn't electrified until 1950. Agrarian values held firm. Despite the turmoil of the last quarter century or more, during which time even latecomers such as myself have witnessed the demise of the small dairy farm, Vermonters as a whole are still innovating, even as farmers. The land itself speaks to us; it is bountiful, but contrived toward the small-scale.

So what of the future? From where I stand—and I am a decentralist who has spent most of his adult life as witness to the profligate growth of humanity's footprint on the back of a lonely but gorgeous biosphere—great changes are coming. Last month a Bush Administration insider, a powerful oil investment banker from Houston named Matthew Simmons, published a book called Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy. This is no potboiler. Simmons was inside the room when Vice President Cheney convened the secret “energy task force” meetings of January 2000, whose proceedings are now sealed from public view forever.

In a word, Simmons says the twilight of the petroleum age is upon us. As one reviewer puts it, with the eclipse of Saudi Arabia's handful of big fields “the world will face an energy crisis of unprecedented scale.” Oil is not merely cheap (up to recently); it is ubiquitous. James Howard Kunstler has written about its meaning in these pages (May 2005). Wal-Mart and other “big box” shopping villages encased in four walls will perish. Quickly. Reflect on Bill McKibben's remarks (April 2005) about what happens to towns when they invite such absentee-owner enterprises into their communities.

Now pause and consider reversing these trends that have so sapped us of our native spiritual vitality, our gumption. Food locally grown (eventually without chemicals) and locally consumed. Energy locally produced and consumed. Less car and truck traffic (but more foot traffic). Less non-biodegradable waste: less plastics, the wonder material of yore. More conviviality? More fractiousness? Who knows? It will be interesting for those of us willing to find it so.

The question each of us must ask her or himself is do we have it in us to respond? Wendell Berry has said in these pages (July 2005) “The great obstacle [to change] is simply this: the conviction that we cannot change because we are dependent on what is wrong. But that is the addict's excuse, and we know that it will not do.”

Indeed it will not “do.” And we know it, or soon shall. We will have to do what we have always done: reinvent ourselves. In this issue contributing editor Rick Foley's “Imagine: Vermont in 2015” reaches forward and imagines just how we might, in fact, reinvent ourselves as a people, as a community, now, right here in Vermont.

Imagine.

—Ian Baldwin