This commentary is by Mark Adair, a Montpelier business owner and a resident of Worcester.
In our hearts, we know: As humanity grows, the rest of the natural world dies.
We Vermonters are riding the horns of a brutal dilemma: We want to save our habitat, and we want to grow our population and economy. But we can’t do both, so we’re pretending to do the first, while actually doing the second.
Deceiving ourselves: That’s what we’re doing, plain and simple.
Someday the deception will collapse, and we’ll rue the self-inflicted loss of our seasons, farms, forests and open spaces, the remnants of a natural Vermont, a Vermont we could have protected. And someday we’ll admit that growth has ruined us. But for now, we — our governor, mayors, councilors, legislators, voters — are dying to grow.
Don’t we deplore humanity’s self-annihilation on the global scale? Don’t we rail against Brazil’s incineration of the Amazon jungle and China’s proliferating coal plants and mega-dams? But don’t we always celebrate growth in our own backyard?
Didn’t Montpelier’s leaders and citizens, in 2017, celebrate after spending nearly a half-million dollars to bring a tony, outsized distillery to Barre Street?
Didn’t they, in 2019, build a huge transit center and in the same year give a $9,000 tax break to TimberHomesVermont to raise a factory in one of the last open pastures on North Elm Street, so that it could overspread the land with its cars, trucks and pallets, and build yet more houses to eat up yet more open land throughout Vermont and New England?
Don’t we celebrate while 5 acres of Vermont’s forests and open land disappear each and every day?
And didn’t Montpelier’s mayor, city council, and a local business family, just one year before raising the transit center, agitate for a Hilton hotel and huge parking garage? And when a guardian angel dropped a lawsuit in the path of this growth juggernaut, didn’t the city fight it, for years, and leave its taxpayers on the hook for over $1.2 million? And after Hilton withdrew in disgust, didn’t a writer for the Burlington Free Press (May 27, 2021) ask this incredible question: “Does Vermont make it too easy to stop developers?”
And pieces of central Vermont keep falling like manna into our developers’ hands. To update an old saying, it’s as though a mysterious Providence watches over drunks, fools and developers.
Sabin’s 100-acre pasture lies open to predation, waiting to be paved over and infested with houses; the 138-acre former Elks golf course too dropped into Montpelier leaders’ laps, for them to transmogrify what could have been parkland into a suburb.
Hundreds of millions of federal development dollars have also rained down upon the city and state. How much more economic growth, and how many more people can be shoehorned into this once-serene jewel of a town, or imposed upon Vermont, perhaps the planet’s last Shangri-la, a state in which the rhythms of nature grow fainter, and a human future dimmer, with each additional baby, climate refugee, and migrant, with each new building to house them, with each new infrastructure to support them?
Humanity squeezes over 183,000 more people, every day, into our bloated planet, and almost 3,500, every day, into our bloated nation. On Nov. 15, Earth became host to 8 billion humans. This thrills people like Jeff Jacoby, a Boston Globe columnist, and Elon Musk, because, like our local leaders, they’re dying to grow.
Is it really possible the Jacobys and the Musks, the Scotts, the Watsons, the Frasers among us, do not link growth to ecological destruction, are blind to decades of climate awareness, and aren’t repulsed by our morbidly swollen population?
Is it possible they don’t realize that, as we multiply ourselves and our houses, businesses and infrastructure, we eat up more energy, material and open space; that Nature, in response, has raised her temperatures, swollen her seas, and begun to exterminate the monarchs and the bumblebees, snakes and frogs, tigers and lemurs, and plants and fungi upon whose lives our own lives depend?
Yes; it’s really possible, because they’ve gone blind while dying to grow.
