Vermont
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Building a green community in the Green Mountain State
At 9:30 at night the phone rings. It is my neighbor Lorie, who asks me if I’d mind stepping out onto my porch for a minute. I think I know what this is about. Up the hill on Tom and Lorie’s porch there are candles burning on tables covered with the scattered remains of dinner. […]
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How can we make environmental laws work better?
Now that I’ve suffered under one firsthand, I can understand why people hate environmental laws. On a map of our farm filed away at the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources is a fateful dot. It stands for an endangered Siberian Chive, observed by someone decades ago. This dot popped up when we applied under Vermont’s […]
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It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World
Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (known familiarly as CJD) is something you do not want to get. Your brain degenerates, piece by piece. First you feel depressed, then you have trouble coordinating. You lose sight, speech, motor control, as the disease travels through the brain. When it reaches the control centers for breathing or heartbeat, you die. Medical […]
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Stay Funky, Chunky Monkey
So Unilever has gobbled up Ben & Jerry’s. The $45 billion mega-company that rose from the British and Dutch colonial empires (turning palm and coconut oil into soap and margarine) has acquired Vermont’s outrageous little ice cream maker for $326 million. The American dream at work. A couple of hippies invent wild new ice cream […]
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This Land Is My Land, This Land Is Your Land
Last week the Vermont Environmental Board denied a permit to a developer for a project in Hartland. It was a typical interstate-exit gas-and-food stop — the kind of place no one likes to look at but we’re all glad to find when we’re on a long trip and running low on fuel. Hartland’s I-91 exit […]
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A gardening guru gives new meaning to a golfing green
In a world beset with environmental and economic horrors, a golf course is a disturbing sight. Okay, it’s not as disturbing as an oil slick on Prince William Sound, or the Cuyahoga River bursting into flames, or the coral reefs off Sri Lanka bleaching and dying. Evil green monster (a traditional golf course). But the […]
