This commentary is by Neil Ryan, a third-generation Vermont farmer and consultant helping brands and nonprofits in Corinth.
A cross-partisan grassroots movement of many thousands rises from nowhere, forces the reversal of large parts of a gargantuan law months before its rules take effect, and offers a hyper-articulate set of underrepresented economic, cultural and policy interests. In an objective newsroom, that is the story of the year. At Vermont Public, VTDigger and Seven Days, coverage of that movement has often felt perfunctory.
Vermont Public framed the just-concluded session as a “retreat” — from what, and for whom, wasn’t clear. Implicit, however, was that rural Vermonters got in the way of certain priorities. This structural conception seems biased in favor of institutional interests over the lives of regular people.
Vermont Public and VTDigger’s shared reporter, Carly Berlin, has described Act 181 as “wonky,” as if monumentally consequential land-use changes are little more than obscure policy minutiae, which suggests to me a profound disconnect with rural Vermont in Vermont’s most popular media.
To understand why the grassroots story keeps getting demoted, you only have to look at the type of story that gets promoted in its place. Three days after adjournment, VTDigger published a feature on Vermont as a corridor in a continental migration, quoting staff at The Nature Conservancy. TNC is the largest nonprofit environmental organization in the Americas, with net assets of around $8 billion, and it operates a sophisticated, tax-advantaged land acquisition business.
When TNC’s state director explains that Vermont is “on the cusp of a large-scale transfer of lands to younger generations, so the state and local groups are seeking out willing landowners to place land along these corridors into conservation,” the article presents it as stewardship. The generational land transfer that ought to be the central drama of rural Vermont’s survival is advanced as a pipeline for easements.
The feature dedicated just one sentence to a countervailing point of view in support of rural working landscapes.
This is the stark asymmetry at the heart of so much media coverage. Environmentalism that steers money and influence toward institutional and corporate stakeholders is taken at face value. Meanwhile, regular people in rural Vermont who have a different vision for their communities are framed as conservative and ignored.
What ink has been spilled this year on the evidence that well-managed woodlots are more diverse than neglected ones, that edge habitat and silvopasture are ecologically richer than closed-canopy forest? What of human needs? Vermont is a state with explicit, legislated commitments to feed itself, but you would never know it from a season of Statehouse coverage. Vermont’s own food strategy identifies the same farmland affordability and land access crises that Act 181 would exacerbate. Yet Vermont’s dominant media rarely explore the friction point.
Vermont’s landscape is discussed constantly by the media. But it is mostly only framed as sensitive ecosystem or a recreational amenity. Food security, farm viability, the right of a new generation to get onto land and grow something on it — these topics are barely reported.
Vermont is the second-oldest state in the country, losing population faster than any other state. Its dairy farms are disappearing. Its hill farms have become second homes, its prime agricultural land given over to solar installations.
These are the conditions the Act 181 movement is describing. This entire universe of concern has been presented mainly as a property-rights tantrum.
The narrative is one of bias in favor of credentialed institutional stakeholders. It is a story of a lack of imagination, as too many mentions of this topic reduce a heterodox grassroots movement to “conservative.” It is a story of insufficient attention to Vermont beyond Chittenden County. It is a story of these outlets failing to forewarn Vermont about the impacts of Act 181. While regular Vermont citizens analyzed the GIS datasets, the mapping and the rulemaking that definitively proved disproportional impact on Vermont’s rural working class, Vermont’s press corps was filing process stories from Montpelier. Many journalists are no longer part of the culture they cover, and that informs what they choose to report on.
Vermont’s rural grassroots movement is not being conservative or liberal in its orientation, even in the face of initial dismissal, hearty resistance and ample condescension heaped upon them by a large segment of Democratic lawmakers this past session.
Rural Vermonters are asking for landscapes that include the people who work them. They are asking for barriers to viable rural lifeways to be lifted. They are asking for greater access to farming and homesteading for everyone who would take it up. They are asking that Vermont’s crises of affordability, livability and opportunity be central to the work of its institutions. Above all, they are asking to be treated as full participants in their own democracy, with stories worth telling and arguments worth engaging.
Rural Vermont defeated the road rule and Tier 3. A press that spent the session misrepresenting those aspirations or ignoring them has shown rural Vermont exactly where we stand in their imaginations. The answer is to expand those imaginations, or to do the job they won’t do instead.
