Editor’s note: Don Peterson is a longtime resident of Lowell and one of the village’s carpenters.
Six days a week, hundreds of trash trucks, 20 tonners, go up Route 100 from the more prosperous parts of the state, turn right on Route 58 and drive to the dump in Coventry. There is now a mountain on the Airport Road in Newport; I call it Mount Casella, and you can see it plainly from a great way off. On Sundays the motorcycles come and make the same turn. They’re louder if anything. Some weekends it seems like there are hundreds of them too.
That’s the NEK: dumping ground for the rest of Vermont most of the week, and then a racetrack on Sunday.
That’s the NEK: where rich people dump things, and poor people live with it. We’re even poor enough to be grateful.
I live near that corner, where the trucks and motorcycles turn, and on days when it got under my skin to listen to the racket, I consoled myself with the knowledge that I didn’t have to live where all that trash and all those motorcycles came from in the first place. And besides, I could take to the ridge south of the house and lose myself in the ridgeline spruces and ledges and swales. I always felt safe up there.
Then the wind towers came. They came so that the people of Vermont could have rechargeable phones and wired security systems and underground pet fences. Electric toothbrushes and 84-inch TVs and Christmas lights all year round. Whole house air conditioning. And never feel guilty about any of it. Besides, there was lots of money to be made, for lots of people. So Green Mountain Power took to the ridge, and dumped a bunch of turbines on it.
That’s the NEK: where rich people dump things, and poor people live with it. We’re even poor enough to be grateful. When Lowell voted to accept the towers, it was a referendum on statewide property tax much more than it was a vote for anything sustainable. And as far as I know, Coventry loves being Vermont’s favorite dump.
When the state suddenly discovered a mountain of tailings in Lowell a few years ago, the powers that be engineered a study that would have made the problem a federal one. There was no evidence to support their claim, just a wish to not have to pay for the problem. It’s a problem that has been growing for 50 years, and is visible from the freeway exit to the Agency of Natural Resources when they were in Waterbury. A concerted effort by a single citizen at the end of a dirt road drove the bureaucrats back into their cubicles.
But that’s how we approach problems in this end-of-an-era country of ours — get someone else to shoulder the burden.
When I say it’s the end of an era I don’t mean “Peak Oil,” although that’s something to think about. I mean that it’s possible we are nearing a world-wide population that is more humans than the planet can support. For millions of years, humans have shared the planet with lots of other species, and were a part of the ecosystem. But we now have the ability to drive every other species to extinction. We can no longer behave like chimps moving through the woods, or pretend we’re only gathering sticks for our campfires. More development and consumption will not back us down from this mountain of too much development and consumption.
I’ve been thinking about renewable energy for 10 or 12 years now, and this is all I’ve come up with: When the human race tamed fire for the first time, we set in motion a series of discoveries that put us at odds with the rest of the planet. But no matter how many species we drive over the cliff, we are trapped by gravity in a closed system, and will either have to get along with the rest of the natural world, or perish. But being human, and possessing fire, we don’t believe that yet.
