This commentary is by Seth Steinzor of South Burlington, a poet, woodworker, and former assistant attorney general.
Lately we have been hearing a lot about the purported need to increase Vermont’s population by several hundred thousand in order to solve all the problems we have and additional problems as well that the proponents predict we will suffer if we don’t get bigger, fast.
A recent example this commentary in VTDigger. But they’re singing an old, old song, a sirenic tune that has led us collectively to the brink of destruction, not closer to utopia.
The hymn of unceasing economic growth has given us the climate crisis, the despoliation of our natural environment, the depletion and pollution of much of the resources we depend on for survival. Just recently in The New York Times, we read about the possibly irreversible, drastic, ongoing shrinkage of America’s groundwater supplies due to overpumping for agriculture and unsustainable population growth. This is the anthem to which Mr. Jalili and others would have us march.
The gospel of “Grow, Build, Grow” embraced by the commentary writer arises from a vision so severely blinkered as to amount to blindness regarding the actual circumstances of the world we live in and our impacts upon it.
Belittling the well-founded trepidation that crowding a couple of hundred thousand more people into our small state would be excessive, the writer says, “You just need to take a plane ride over Vermont or a boat ride on Lake Champlain to see that Vermont barely has a visible human presence.”
Wow. Perhaps that would be true, if you were to close your eyes to the E.coli and cyanobacteria that so frequently close our beaches, the livestock waste, human sewage, chemicals, oil and gas that increasingly frequent flooding sweeps into the lake, the excess phosphorus load that the lake carries, reducing its water quality below EPA standards and contributing to algal blooms, obnoxious odors, harm to aquatic life, and reduced recreational use.
It would be even harder to miss the human impact on Vermont’s landscape from that airplane, since there are very few acres that are not almost entirely evidence of human activity. It’s not just the towns, cities, roads, farms, quarries, industrial facilities, reservoirs, altered river courses and wetlands, logged woodlands, acre upon acre of trees diseased or dead due to acid rain, and so on, all easily visible no matter how high up you’re flying.
A hundred forty years ago, Vermont was mostly deforested. Those trees that the commentary writer mistook out of the window of his airplane for some primeval pristine wilderness are new growth, reflecting the changing patterns of human economic activity that produced them. Currently, our forests are receding once again, victims of agricultural and residential development.
My point is not that we have more trees than we need; far from it! We need every tree we’ve got. But the statement “Vermont has a barely visible human presence” betrays an almost total ignorance of Vermont’s reality.
The commentary writer dreams that adding another 200,000 or so people to the 648,000 who already live here — an increase of 31% — would somehow magically equate to adequately funded government services at all levels, “higher tax revenues, lower taxes, improved services, higher economic growth, industrious people and businesses seeking to come to Vermont, and an improvement in the quality of life for everyone.” Because, I suppose, he imagines that to be the state of affairs in places with higher population density, like New Jersey or Texas. As Ernest Hemingway might say, “Isn’t it pretty to think so.”
He’s right about one thing. People do want to come to Vermont. It’s because we few, we proud, we Vermonters have managed, because our numbers are relatively manageable and not entirely disproportionate to the environment we inhabit, to build and maintain a damn fine place to live, much better in so many ways than the places from which we draw our migrants.
Leaving Vermont for other parts of the U.S., one has a sense of entering a foreign and mostly less desirable country. One is always glad and relieved to return home, here. Vermont has its problems, to be sure, but they are not to be solved by jettisoning our sense of balance, humility and realism, in exchange for the hallucinatory, self-destructive hubris of “Grow, Build, Grow.”
