This commentary is by Miriam Voran, who practices psychoanalytic psychotherapy in Montpelier and West Lebanon, New Hampshire. She is on the clinical faculty at Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth.
Two years in a row, devastating floods slammed Vermont. Last year brought unprecedented drought. The 2025 drought alone cost Vermont farmers more than $15.9 million. The 2023 and 2024 floods cost tens of millions more.
Nature is screaming: You’ve blown past environmental limits!
But we only hear the drumbeat of business-as-usual. Gov. Phil Scott tried to dismantle wetland protections, as if the floods never hit. The Vermont Futures Project wants to add more than 150,000 people and at least 50,000 homes by 2035. Even the opposition to growth can miss what’s really at stake. The debate becomes about Vermont’s rural character, willingness to change, and whether we want to look like New Jersey.
This trivializes what’s really a debate about our survival. Back in 2014, Vermonters for a Sustainable Population published a first-in-the-nation report: “What is an Optimum/Sustainable Population for Vermont?” One answer considers the number of people that Vermont’s land and water resources can support. The number is shocking: 150,000 people. That’s the number the Vermont Futures Project wants to add by 2035. But, nodding to the palatable, the population group proposed a target population of 500,000 to start the conversation. More recently, a board member of the group — renamed Better (not bigger) Vermont — cited 433,000 as the limit.
Now, Vermont’s population is almost 650,000. We can’t keep sustainable population in the conversation. We abhor limits. We hate helplessness. We try to remember ecology, but then we evade its hard truths. In the corners of our soul, we all cling to human exceptionalism, the fantasy that we’re exempt from the laws of nature. That’s why we forget the link between floods, drought and nature’s limits.
Ecology shows us the big picture. Take the example of water. Since last summer’s drought, more than 360 Vermonters’ wells have run dry and an additional 240 faced water shortages. This summer’s rains have replenished water levels, so we want to breathe easy. But we’re still living way beyond our means. Most of us rely on supermarkets. Supermarkets rely on agribusiness, and agribusiness is draining the Colorado River basin and sucking water from our southern neighbors. So, by participating in a global food chain, we export our water footprint and deplete water in other regions.
Globally, we’re now water-bankrupt. In January 2026, a U.N. report said that more than two-thirds of major aquifers worldwide show irreversible long-term declines. Humanity is drawing out more groundwater, our savings account, than surface water from rivers and lakes, our renewable income. We’re running out. It’s not fixable.
Water’s not the only bankruptcy we’re facing. On July 30, humanity hits Earth Overshoot Day, the annual day on which we exhaust all the resources that Earth can regenerate that year. For the next five months, we’ll be running a deficit, stealing resources from future generations and spewing waste that Earth can’t absorb. Back in 1970, when we hit overshoot on Dec. 30, we lived almost within our means. Since then, we’ve slid further and further into overshoot. Even if every one of us abstained from eating, drinking, expelling waste, heating homes, driving, etc., it would take more than 20 years for Earth to replenish itself. We’ve irrevocably overshot Earth’s finite resources. That’s simple physics, simple math, simple ecology.
Earth Overshoot Day’s message is clear: We’ve got to adjust our economies for a future of climate disruption, resource scarcity, collapse of global supply chains and reliance on local resources. The sooner we make this adjustment, the longer we’ll survive.
So, Earth Overshoot Day is the most important day of the year. It’s our road-to-Damascus moment; it’s our ecological reckoning; it’s the day we peel the scales from our eyes and change our ways. Business-as-usual is fatal. It’s time we think about survival.
What makes it so hard to relinquish business-as-usual? Business-as-usual makes us feel good; the alternative, not so much. So, we have to disavow. Disavowal is willful cluelessness, self-gaslighting. It’s the worst kind of denial. It believes two incompatible ideas at the same time. For example, we believe both the evidence of overshoot and the public narrative that we can do business-as-usual. Disavowal thrives when we quibble, minimize our peril, fantasize salvation through technology or submit to defeatism. Using a thousand self-deceptions, disavowal negates the disturbing thoughts and feelings that would flow from truly seeing our plight.
How might we counter disavowal? Let’s commit to keeping ecology and population limits in the conversation. Let’s retune our ears. Let’s hear every conversation that omits ecology as bedlam, tinkling brass, a protest against facing ever-humbling threats.
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Development for growth is obsolete and self-destructive. Development for survival is our only rational policy. Development for survival means transitioning to a steady-state economy that keeps money in the community. It means creative housing solutions for an economically diverse population. It means feeding Vermonters with local food. It means reducing population to a level that fits, rather than destroys, the natural world.
Earth Overshoot Day, July 30, says: Respect ecological limits, Vermonters. Let that be your loving legacy to posterity.
