This commentary is by Ben Falk, a land planner and the founder of Whole Systems Design. He lives in Moretown.
Vermont is the most rural state in the country, yet state policy seems to be increasingly designed for something else.
Act 181 was intended to “provide a regulatory framework that supports the vision for Vermont of human and natural community resilience and biodiversity protection in the face of climate change.”
Most Vermonters would agree with those goals. The problem isn’t the vision — it’s how it is being implemented.
Vermonters have long recognized that working lands can support biodiversity and that agricultural landscapes can contribute to ecological health. That’s a critical point: farms and managed landscapes are not outside the conservation framework — they are a key part of it. But those benefits were not meaningfully valued in Act 181.
Instead, Act 181 focuses primarily on protecting large forest blocks and limiting fragmentation. These are important goals — but they are only part of the ecological picture, especially in a state that is already about 80% forested. Vermont, with two-thirds of us living outside urban areas, is a place where land-based livelihoods and working landscapes are uniquely central to our culture, economy and ecology.
Large, contiguous forests are essential for certain species. Birds like wood thrush and ovenbird, along with forest salamanders and mammals like fisher, depend on deep interior habitat. These forests also store carbon, protect water quality, and maintain landscape-scale connectivity. Protecting them is a necessary foundation of conservation.
But forests alone do not maximize biodiversity, carbon storage, or flood resilience in Vermont. Integrated systems like silvopasture — the centuries-old practice of integrating trees, livestock and forage on the same land — can outperform both forests and open pasture in carbon sequestration, demonstrating that the most ecologically beneficial landscapes are often the ones that combine them.
Many species depend on open land and edge habitat — the places where forest and field meet. Field–forest mosaic landscapes, often created and maintained by farmers and rural landowners, support species that cannot survive in closed-canopy forests. These include bobolink, eastern meadowlark, Savannah sparrow, American woodcock, and a wide range of pollinators. Amphibians, small mammals and many plant species also rely on this mix of habitats.
In a predominantly forested state, these actively managed landscapes often support the highest overall biodiversity. They are also where we can most actively improve other key ecological functions: planting diverse perennial systems like silvopasture and hedgerows, increasing water infiltration through ponds and swales — buffering extreme stormwater events, and building soil and carbon through agroecological practices. These are not theoretical benefits — they are happening now on working lands across Vermont.
Yet Act 181 provides no clear framework for supporting or incentivizing these systems. Instead, it expands regulatory burdens in rural areas, making it harder for the very people managing these landscapes to continue their work. Small farmers, homesteaders and land-based entrepreneurs — those maintaining fields, woodlots, wetlands and edge habitats — face additional permitting requirements in an already challenging economic environment.
At the same time, corporate projects and wealthy second and third homeowners are positioned to navigate complex, time-intensive permitting processes. The result is a structural imbalance: those doing the most ecologically beneficial, small-scale stewardship face greater barriers, while those with more means are better able to absorb the costs.
This runs counter to the stated goals of Act 181.
Working landscapes are not just ecologically important — they are economically and culturally essential. Farms and land-based livelihoods sustain rural communities, support local economies, and keep land in active stewardship across generations. They are also crucial to food security and community and regional resiliency, and support housing and economic opportunity.
Vermont does not need more regulatory barriers — it needs to incentivize more regeneration. That means recognizing that biodiversity is produced not by forests alone, but by whole working landscapes: forests, fields, pastures, orchards, wetlands, gardens and the wild margins between them — along with the people who actively manage them. It means defining what biodiversity-supporting working lands actually look like, and directly incentivizing those systems through policy.
Act 181 prioritizes forest protection without adequately addressing the role of working landscapes.
If Vermont is serious about biodiversity and resilience, Act 181’s Tier 2 road rule and Tier 3 need a complete overhaul.
Working lands and the people who live within them are not secondary considerations. They are essential — ecologically, economically, and culturally. Policies that fail to support them — and introduce new hurdles — risk accelerating the very problems they are trying to solve.
