The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman

On this "Best of The Vermont Conversation," we re-broadcast an interview from 2015 that traced the roots of the marriage equality revolution. The interview was recorded live in the studios of WDEV Radio. The interview marked the first time that Vermont marriage equality pioneers State Rep. Bill Lippert and former Vermont Supreme Court Chief Justice Jeffrey Amestoy discussed their roles in the marriage equality fight. On June 26, 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4, in the landmark case Obergefell v. Hodges, that same-sex couples could wed throughout the country. The avalanche that swept America actually began as a snowball high up in the Green Mountains in the late 1990s.In 1999, the Vermont Supreme Court ruled in Baker v. Vermont that the Vermont state legislature must craft a law granting all of the rights and privileges of marriage to same-sex couples. In 2000, Vermont legalized civil unions, the most sweeping grant of rights to same-sex couples up to that time.In 2009, the Vermont state legislature legalized same-sex marriage, making it the first legislature to do so. On this Vermont Conversation, we discuss Vermont’s role in the marriage equality revolution with some of the pioneers of that effort: former Vermont Supreme Court Chief Justice Jeffrey Amestoy, author of the groundbreaking Baker v. Vermont ruling; former State Representative Bill Lippert, who led the fight for passage of civil unions in 2000 and same-sex marriage in 2009; Susan Murray, attorney with Langrock Sperry & Wool, who represented the plaintiffs in Baker v. Vermont along with attorney Beth Robinson (now a Vermont Supreme Court judge); and Stacey Jolles and Nina Beck, a lesbian couple who were one of three same-sex couples who sued the State of Vermont in the late 1990s in Baker v. Vermont, catalyzing the fight for marriage equality in Vermont and the U.S.Chief Justice Amestoy said in this 2015 interview, "I didn't expect to see (marriage equality) throughout the United States in my lifetime. ... I don't think it ever crossed my mind that we would reach a point, only six years later, that the United States Supreme Court would echo the analysis that Vermont used in the 1999 decision."Plaintiff Nina Beck said, “I feel incredibly proud to have been part of this moment… (and) that I live in a state that wants to create equality for everyone. “I’m very, very pleased that marriage — our marriage — has been recognized everywhere in the United States. It's an amazing, amazing thing.”

The inauguration of President Joe Biden generated many memorable images. There was the inauguration of Vice President Kamala Harris, the first woman of color to hold the office. Young poet Amanda Gorman gave a mesmerizing reading of her poem, “The Hill We Climb.”And Sen. Bernie Sanders became an internet icon for his mittens.A photo captured Sanders bundled against the January cold, sitting alone on a chair, cross-legged, wearing a Burton ski parka and looking cozy in a pair of fuzzy wool mittens. The image instantly became a viral meme depicting him on the throne from Game of Thrones, on Mike Pence’s head and sitting in a row of ironworkers high above New York City.This viral sensation led reporters to seek out the mitten maker. They quickly found Jen Ellis, a second grade teacher at Westford Elementary School. She sewed the mittens for Sanders after he lost the 2016 Democratic nomination to Hillary Clinton. She hoped it would cheer him up.Ellis’s sudden fame turned her life upside down. She was flooded with interview requests and thousands of mitten orders that overwhelmed her. She ultimately struck a deal with Darn Tough, which made the “Jenerosity” socks, which sold out in a day and resulted in thousands of meals being donated to the Vermont Foodbank. She partnered with Vermont Teddy Bear which continues to make the iconic Bernie Mittens.Jen Ellis has written a book, Bernie’s Mitten Maker, which tells a deeper back story. Ellis is a survivor of childhood sexual abuse. It was in an elementary school sewing class that Ellis “started to develop the skills I needed to save myself.”Ellis told The Vermont Conversation that she shared this story in her book because “the longer people remain silent about this, the more it is able to spread as an epidemic.” “The world might have learned about me because of some mittens I made,” she said, “but there's a whole intricate backstory that people don't know, that is interesting. And that has a theme of empowerment and generosity and kindness, and it has a path in the end to joy.”

The U.S. Surgeon General warned earlier this month that “there is an epidemic of loneliness and isolation."Champlain College professor Sheila Liming has a cure for this social disease. In “Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time,” Liming writes that the simple act of hanging out offers connection, intimacy and meaning. It is an act of resistance, she said, against the relentless pull of consumerism, individualism and the encroachment of digital culture in every aspect of our lives.Hanging out with others does not just make you feel good. It can save your life.The surgeon general warned that loneliness can increase your risk of premature death to levels comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. It increases your risk of dementia by 50%.Sheila Liming is an associate professor of professional writing at Champlain College. She previously taught at the University of North Dakota. She is the author of three books, and her essays have appeared in The Atlantic, McSweeney’s and other publications.Liming described loneliness as “a quiet crisis.”“It's one that's difficult to diagnose and to see and sometimes even to notice in our own society … (the) things that are sometimes preventing us from just hanging out and making social relationships and building connections with each other that strengthen ourselves in our community," she said.Liming defined “hanging out” as “daring to do very little and daring to do it in the company of others.”The “radical” part of killing time, Liming said, is that “you have to say no to something that already exists on your calendar that would be standing in the way of you and this casual social connection. ... Saying no to some things means saying yes to hanging out and spending time with each other."

A war on doctors is underway in Republican-led states, and numerous physicians are fleeing for safer ground.Thirteen states have criminalized all abortion care. Over 500 bills have been proposed targeting LGBTQ+ care, including many that criminalize gender affirming care. Obstetricians and gynecologists, or OB-GYNs, who routinely perform abortions and provide health care to LGBTQ+ people, have been a particular target of these laws and bills.Idaho is a case in point. Soon after the US Supreme Court passed the Dobbs decision that ended the constitutional right to an abortion, Idaho passed a law allowing family members of a patient to sue providers who perform an abortion for at least $20,000. Doctors also face suspension of their medical license, felony charges, and prison.The fallout has been swift: five of the nine maternal fetal medicine specialists in Idaho who deal with high risk pregnancies will leave the state by the end of 2023, several hospitals have closed their labor and delivery units, and 40 percents of Idaho’s OB-GYNs said in a recent survey that they were considering leaving the state.As doctors leave, maternity care deserts are expanding. According to the March of Dimes, nearly 7 million people who can become pregnant who are of childbearing age now live in a county with either no maternity care services or with limited services. One-third of US counties qualify as a maternity care desert, more than half of them classified as rural, including parts of Vermont. On this Vermont Conversation, we speak with physicians on the front lines of providing abortions and gender affirming care. In the first part of our program, we talk with three physicians at the UVM Medical Center who are midway through their four-year OB-GYN residency. Along with caring for patients, Drs. Mackenzie Delzer, Gnendy Indig, and Sarah McShane have already been to the Vermont State House to testify in defense of reproductive rights.In the second part of the program we speak with Dr. Lauren MacAfee, associate professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology and Complex Family Planning at University of Vermont Larner College of Medicine and the UVM Medical Center. She has been an outspoken advocate for reproductive rights.For young physicians who are deciding where they will practice medicine after completing their residency, they must each decide whether they are willing to go to states with abortion bans. “I feel the pull of patients in those areas and the huge deficits and care that are going to be created,” said Dr. Sarah McShane, who attended medical school in North Carolina, which this week banned abortion after 12 weeks. “Part of the moral pull is to also be a part of still fulfilling care, even despite this horrible legislation.”Dr. Gnendy Indig plans to specialize in health care for LGBTQ+ people. “My mentors in very progressive liberal institutions and cities have been dealing with death threats and doxing to the point where some of them have had to hire full time security to protect them,” she said. “Watching their bravery and watching them use that fear as a motivating factor and …keep pushing on, and still saying I will treat a population that needs me … is what keeps me on the path.”“We all are trying to do everything we can …in a safe state like Vermont to be a beacon of light and hope for other states,” said Dr. Lauren MacAfee.

Vermont is experiencing an unprecedented housing crisis. Vermont has among the lowest rental vacancy rates in the country and among the highest rates of homelessness. Gov. Phil Schott has announced that he will not extend the pandemic-era emergency hotel housing program now that federal funds for it have run out, and state lawmakers are currently wrestling over its fate. The emergency housing program could end as soon as June, pushing out several thousand people from the hotels and leaving them at high risk of being homeless.On this Vermont Conversation, we hear from people at the center of the housing crisis.“What's going to happen right now is we're going to have a catastrophic fallout that's going to be …a humanitarian crisis,” asserted Brenda Siegel, a housing advocate and former gubernatorial candidate. “We're expecting our small communities, who do not have the resources, to pick up all these pieces.”“People think homeless people don't work, and it's not true. They work so hard,” said Brittany Plucas, 29, who spoke to me at the Hilltop Inn in Berlin. Plucas works two jobs, but lost her housing in April. She is frantically looking for affordable housing but has discovered that waiting lists are months and even years long.“The housing crisis is so bad. There are families here that have lost housing and they are working to provide for the children and for themselves. They're working to keep their kids safe. People just aren't understanding it. Right now, it’s a hard time for everyone.”Gary Winslett is an assistant professor of political science at Middlebury College. His own challenge in buying a home motivated him to investigate and write about the roots of Vermont’s housing crisis. Vermont “spent a long time just kind of not building any new housing,” he said. He argues that Act 250, Vermont’s land use and development law passed in 1970, has had the unintended consequence of blocking affordable housing and must be significantly reformed. “In the Vermont context, the pro-environment thing to do is to build housing near where jobs are so that people can drive less. It's to build those new homes with modern insulation, so that they're using far less greenhouse gases when they heat their home in Vermont winters. The environmentalism that we need today is not about blocking everything in sight. The environmentalism that we need today is about building things,” he insisted.Brittany Plucas is now confronting homelessness if the emergency hotel housing is not extended past June. Being homeless “terrifies me. I didn't think it was something that was possible,” she said, choking up. “Because I've worked so hard in my life to try to provide for myself and make myself something. I've worked since I graduated high school. I've tried to keep a roof over my head for years. And I failed. I feel like the state failed me [and] the government failed.”“I'm not giving up,” she said through tears. “I'm still gonna try my best at making my life better.”

LGBTQ+ rights are under attack throughout the country. Nearly 500 bills targeting LGBTQ+ people have been proposed in the U.S. to date, including in every state in New England. Eighteen Republican-controlled states have so far passed laws banning gender affirming health care, affecting 1 in 4 transgender youth.In Montana, State Rep. Zooey Zephyr, who is transgender, was ousted from the Republican-led House of Representatives last week for her passionate statements objecting to a ban on hormone treatments and surgical care for transgender children. Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte signed the bill into law last week, despite pleas from his son David, who identifies as nonbinary.In Nebraska, state Senator Megan Hunt is being investigated for allegedly having a conflict of interest for her opposition to a law that would ban gender-affirming health care. Her supposed conflict? She is the mother of a transgender child.The American Academy of Pediatrics and other leading medical organizations support gender affirming care and warn that bans pose serious health risks to young people.Rep. Taylor Small, 29, is among just 8 out transgender state legislators in the country, and is the first out trans legislator in Vermont. She was elected in 2020 to represent Winooski. A graduate of Colchester High School and the University of Vermont, Small is also education program manager at the Pride Center of Vermont, where we had this conversation. Small was named a 2022 Politician of Year by One Young World, an international youth leadership organization based in the U.K.Small said that anti-LGBTQ+ laws – from barring trans and nonbinary youth from participating in school sports, to book bans, to criminalizing gender-affirming health care – “are killing our youth. They are showing them that there is no hope for their future where they can be thriving trans adults.”By contrast, she said that she and Montana Rep. Zooey Zephyr “are trying to show that beacon of hope that you can still be involved, that you do have leadership qualities, and not only can you participate, but you can have a fulfilling life.”“This is nothing new that we've seen in politics…going after and targeting specific groups of people,” Small asserted. “What group does the general public have a lot of ignorance around and have a lot of questions? That is the trans community. As we see this growing recognition and visibility, it also comes with that backlash of ‘That is not what I grew up with, that is not my understanding of gender.’”As other states restrict access to reproductive and gender-affirming health care, the Vermont legislature has passed two reproductive “shield bills,” S.37 and H.89, which protect doctors and patients who give and receive this care, respectively.“Vermont is saying that we're putting this shield around our border, that as long as you are in our state, as a provider or as a patient, that you are protected by our laws and recognizing that gender affirming care and reproductive health care are legally protected,” she said.Small cautioned that vigilance is required to stop anti-LGBTQ attacks in Vermont. “It absolutely could happen here,” she said, citing anti-trans incidents in Randolph and Burlington.“As long as we continue to engage as leaders and engage in these difficult conversations, I think we can prevent what is happening in Montana, what is happening in Oklahoma and in Tennessee, from happening right here in our own state.”

Why does the U.S. — the richest country in the world — have the most poverty of any advanced democracy? Why are homeless encampments popping up from Seattle to Burlington?The answer is that, knowingly or unknowingly, many of us benefit from keeping poor people poor.That is the argument made by Matthew Desmond in his bestselling new book, “Poverty, by America.” Desmond won the Pulitzer Prize for his 2016 book, “Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City," which was named by Book Riot as one of the 50 best nonfiction books of the last century. He is a professor of sociology at Princeton University, a recipient of a MacArthur “genius” fellowship, and was named by Politico in 2016 as one of “fifty people across the country who are most influencing the national political debate.”He argues that regulations ranging from zoning to environmental laws are being used to block affordable housing, a key factor that is driving the homeless crisis. He says that this problem is often especially acute in communities known for their otherwise progressive politics. Low wages are kept low for the benefit of the more affluent.“In most residential land in America, it's illegal to build anything except a single detached family home,” Desmond told The Vermont Conversation. “That little regulation buried inside of our zoning codes really means that the only place poor families can live are neighborhoods of concentrated disadvantage, concentrated poverty, and that creates a level of disadvantage of a whole other order. I think that we need to think about our role and our complicity in maintaining those walls around our communities.”Desmond intends his work to be “a call to action. It means that we need to get our tails down to that zoning board meeting on a Thursday night at eight o'clock and stand up and say, Look, I refuse to be a segregationist. I refuse to deny other kids opportunities my kids receive living here. Let's build [affordable housing].”Matthew Desmond’s work is grounded in his own experience growing up in poverty. He started studying housing, poverty, and eviction in 2008, when he lived among poor tenants and their landlords in Milwaukee. He now directs the Eviction Lab at Princeton, and is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, where “Poverty, By America” was recently excerpted.Desmond wants to inspire a new abolitionist movement. “Poverty abolitionists view poverty not as a minor social issue or an inevitability, but as an abomination,” he said. “It shares with other abolitionist movements -- the movement to abolish slavery [and] prisons, for example -- the recognition, the conviction, that if my gain comes at someone else's loss, that's corrupting in a way." "A poverty abolitionist divests from exploitation even if it benefits us. We try to shop and invest in solidarity with poor workers," he said. "We want a government that has a balanced and sensible welfare state, a government that does much more to fight poverty than to alleviate the tax burdens of the affluent. And we are for integrated communities and open, inclusive neighborhoods.”Poverty abolitionism “is a political mission,” said Desmond, “but it's also a personal stance.”

Editor's Note: This Vermont Conversation with Ed Koren was recorded at his home in Brookfield in October 2022. Koren died on April 14, 2023 at the age of 87.When the New Yorker published Ed Koren’s first cartoon 60 years ago, it marked the beginning of a relationship that has come to define both the magazine and the artist. Koren’s cartoons feature hairy, long-nosed characters that poke fun at issues from the serious to the mundane, ranging from rural life, to politics, consumerism, climate change, to encounters on the street — or in his case, on the dirt road where he lives in Brookfield, Vermont, his home since the 1970s with his wife, Curtis. He has been a volunteer firefighter in his community for over three decades.Koren, 86, is one of America’s most celebrated and beloved cartoonists. He has contributed some 1,400 cartoons to the New Yorker over the past six decades. He was Vermont’s Cartoonist Laureate from 2014 to 2017, and his cartoons have also appeared everywhere from the New York Times to Vanity Fair to Sports Illustrated to numerous books. His latest collection of cartoons is Koren in the Wild.Fellow New Yorker contributor Bill McKibben says of Koren, “Sometimes one thinks of the cartoonist as 'making fun.' But though Ed's drawings have long been the funniest thing in the New Yorker, it's because they're essentially kind, filled with the understanding that we're all trying hard. And that kindness, of course, is what makes him such a remarkable neighbor to all of us in Vermont.”The Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction recently launched the Ed Koren Scholarship Fund to support “an emerging cartoonist who is also looking to enrich the cultural and civic life of Vermont.” Koren’s work is also featured in an exhibition about the climate crisis at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass., “Down to the Bone,” which includes his cartoons and the images of nature photographer Stephen Gorman.Ed Koren continues to make people laugh even as he faces a serious predicament: He has incurable lung cancer, which he was diagnosed with in 2020. Koren, who I’ve known for many years, has long politely declined my interview requests, protesting that he didn’t think he was that interesting. I begged to differ, and finally, last week he agreed to talk. I found him in his studio at his home doing what he loves, drawing cartoons for the New Yorker.“I'm an inhabitant of two worlds,” he tells me, sitting in a wheelchair in front of his drawing table in a room that overlooks a lush autumn forest. “My early work was based on the Upper West Side.” By contrast, “Vermont has always had its own milieu that I've drawn from, and I oftentimes mix and match.”I ask him why he draws hairy creatures. “It makes it funnier. There's some cartoons that I've done that just aren't funny enough without hair. And I love hair. I love to draw hair. I can't suppress my hand. … The hand really is the key instrument here. It keeps working and keeps flying along.”Koren’s advice to young people is to “find your own voice. It's what I tell young cartoonists. Don't accept situations where you have to work for so many decades of your life in something you really don't like. …Don't hesitate to change if it's not what you want.”Koren has been a brilliant chronicler and satirist of the human condition. “I'm irrepressible when it comes to seeing other people's folly and missteps and kind of haplessness. So I just kept doing it because I love to do it," he said.“I love my life. I love my work. I would hate to say goodbye to it.”

Author Tracy Kidder has been described as a “master of narrative nonfiction.” Kidder won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award for his 1981 book, “The Soul of a New Machine,” about the development of cutting edge computers. He is the author of more than a dozen books including the acclaimed 2003 New York Times bestseller, “Mountains Beyond Mountains,” about the late global health pioneer Dr. Paul Farmer, co-founder of Partners In Health. The book is often assigned as required reading in colleges.The Washington Post says that Kidder writes about “the moral value of small victories in a world of big problems.”Homelessness is the focus of Kidder’s latest bestselling book, “Rough Sleepers: Dr. Jim O’Connell’s Urgent Mission to Bring Healing to Homeless People.” Kidder spent five years following Dr. O’Connell as he worked the streets of Boston. Kidder was moved by the people he met who were experiencing homelessness in Boston and wanted to tell their stories. “If you get to know them, to really look at them — and a lot of people never do — you realize that they're every bit as human as you and I, and that old adage, There but for the grace of God go I.”“The engine of every good story is human character,” said Kidder. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, Atlantic, and the New York Times but he insisted, “I'm a storyteller more than I am a journalist.”“I stopped thinking of myself as a journalist around the time of the Iraq War. I didn't want to be associated,” he explained. “Because there were so many lies told and so much bad reporting… it starts to taint the term. And then you have Fox News. …It's a wonderful profession, journalism. I believe in it utterly. But I want to see it practiced better.”Kidder says of his craft that “the techniques of storytelling don't belong exclusively to fiction.” Good writing should “be like a pane of glass. The writing itself should be interesting but it doesn't have to be flashy. I believe in immersion in the story that I've discovered.”

On April 3, social worker Leah Rosin-Pritchard was working at a Brattleboro shelter for people experiencing homelessness when she was killed, allegedly by a shelter resident.The brutal murder of the 36-year old shelter coordinator shocked the state. It struck especially close to home for Rick DeAngelis, co-executive director of Good Samaritan Haven, which operates shelters and transitional housing in Barre and Montpelier. In February, DeAngelis’s son Gabe was stabbed multiple times while working at a Montpelier warming shelter. He is recovering from his wounds.Vermont’s system of care for people who are unhoused or in need of mental health services is in a perilous state. This fragile system will be further strained as pandemic funding for emergency housing is about to end for about 3,000 people who are currently living in motels. Affordable housing is in critically short supply, psychiatric beds are scarce, an opioid crisis rages, and homelessness is rising. Vermont has the second-highest per-capita rate of homelessness in the country, behind only California, according to a recent government report. Rick DeAngelis began working with people who are experiencing homelessness in Boston in the 1980s. DeAngelis went on to work at the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board and was the first executive director of what is now Downstreet Housing and Community Development before becoming co-director of Good Samaritan Haven in 2020.DeAngelis said “there is a perfect storm of factors that have come together over the last couple of years to create this crisis situation.”Anne Sosin, interim director of the Vermont Affordable Housing Coalition, insists that the shortage of affordable housing is the primary driver of homelessness. “The vast majority of people who are experiencing homelessness can be successfully housed.” She said that a strategy “that combines housing with a supportive service model [has] made really dramatic progress” in other cities.DeAngelis, a lifelong advocate for people experiencing homelessness, said that despite the current challenges, “we have an opportunity in every moment, to try to rebuild, to heal, to start again.”

Vermont journalist Sue Halpern reports on national issues for the New Yorker magazine, where she is a staff writer. Her recent reporting has included stories about the 40-year effort to ban abortion pills, the promise and peril of artificial intelligence, and threats to democracy. One topic that she has covered in depth is the effort to subvert elections. She has written about candidates for secretary of state who deny that Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election, attempts by election deniers to access electronic voting systems and the Republican war on voting. Halpern was recently shocked to discover that Vermont is currently considering allowing internet voting, which experts have described as “a security nightmare.” The provision, which is supported by the Office of the Vermont Secretary of State, is tucked into legislation, H.429, that was approved last month by the Vermont House and is now being considered in the Senate. Among those arguing against Vermont’s internet voting provision are the watchdog groups Common Cause, Public Citizen, Free Speech for the People and the Brennan Center for Justice.Halpern is the author of seven books, including the best-selling “A Dog Walks into a Nursing Home” and “Four Wings and a Prayer,” which was made into an Emmy-nominated film. She was a columnist for Mother Jones, Ms. Magazine and Smithsonian Magazine, and has written on science, technology and politics for the New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, The New Republic and The New York Review of Books. She is a scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College, where she directs the program in narrative journalism. Halpern is also a board member of the Vermont Journalism Trust, the parent organization of VTDigger.Based on her reporting on internet voting, Halpern insisted that “every computer science expert who has looked into internet voting is against it because it is insecure.”Halpern has recently reported on artificial intelligence engines such as ChatGPT. “My biggest concern is that it's going to be used for disinformation and misinformation as we go forward in our very fractured political life,” she said.Halpern’s reporting shines a light on the fragile state of democracy in the U.S.“We have people who are trying to undermine the two parts of our public life that are central to the preservation of democracy, and those are public schools and public libraries,” she said. “I'm deeply worried that the people who are trying to maintain this democracy are kind of working on the case a little bit too late, and they're not quite as wily as the people who are trying to undermine it.”

It’s a tough time for books. A wave of book bannings is occurring throughout numerous states. Last school year, more than 2,500 books were banned, according to PEN America. The vast majority of the targeted books feature LGBTQ+ themes or characters of color. Meanwhile in Vermont, the state colleges announced in February a plan to close their libraries and sell off their books.Against this backdrop, Duncan McDougall has quietly crusaded to expand literacy and give away books to underserved children and communities throughout Vermont and New Hampshire. Twenty five years ago, McDougall, a former management consultant and wilderness guide, founded the Children’s Literacy Foundation, or CLiF, and ran it out of his home in Waterbury Center. To date, CLiF has donated $10 million worth of books to more than 350,000 children in 85% of the towns in Vermont and New Hampshire. CLiF now runs more than 1,000 programs per year in schools, rural libraries, prisons, and other locations where children and parents are at risk of low literacy.The literacy gap is wide. Nationally and in Vermont, more than two-thirds of fourth graders read below grade level, according to the Literacy Network.For children with low literacy, “the probability of them getting through high school is much lower, the probability of them going beyond high school is lower,” McDougall said. “It's a vicious cycle. So what we do at the Children's Literacy foundation is we try to inspire those kids and give them experiences and resources that can help them change that cycle. … For a child who's never had that opportunity to choose a book that's really on a topic that they love, it’s life changing.”This week marks a milestone in New England's literacy efforts. After a quarter century at its helm, McDougall is stepping down as executive director of CLiF and handing the reigns of the organization to Laura Rice, a nonprofit leader and former CLiF board member. And the organization is moving from McDougall’s garage to a 3,000 square foot new headquarters on Route 100 in Waterbury Center.“Books can be mirrors and windows,” McDougall said. “What we want to do is for those kids who don't see anyone like them in their world to see a book that reflects characters just like them. For people who have never had a chance to leave their town, or go more than three or four towns away, to see the tremendous variety and magical diversity of this world.” “Literacy is really a social justice issue,” he added. “We are opening books, opening minds, opening doors, and there are just a lot of folks who have doors closed to them. Helping young kids develop a love for reading and writing can open so many doors for them and for their kids and grandkids too.”

VTDigger is re-releasing some of our favorite interviews of the past decade to mark the 10th anniversary of The Vermont Conversation.This Vermont Conversation with Congressman Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland) was originally published in May 2022.Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin was expecting trouble after the November 2020 presidential election. Raskin and his Democratic colleagues in Congress anticipated that former President Donald Trump would try to subvert the results and try to derail Congress’s normally pro-forma certification of President Joe Biden’s election. But Raskin was blindsided. On December 31, 2020, Raskin’s only son, Tommy, a promising young student at Harvard Law School, took his own life after a long struggle with depression. Seven days later — and just a day after burying his son — Raskin returned to Congress to cast his vote to certify Biden’s election. That’s when Trump supporters mounted a violent insurrection in the U.S. Capitol, egged on by the defeated president. Speaker Nancy Pelosi then tapped the grieving Raskin to be lead manager in Trump’s second impeachment trial. Since the summer, Raskin has been a member of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the Capitol. Raskin tells his intensely personal and political story in his new book, “Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy.”

If there is a conspiracy theory or far right group, Jeff Sharlet has probably hung out with its followers. Sharlet is an investigative journalist and correspondent for Vanity Fair. He is one of the country’s leading experts on religion, fundamentalism and American politics. He is the winner of the National Magazine Award for Reporting, and numerous other awards.In 2019, Netflix released "The Family," a five-part series based on Sharlet’s reporting about the secretive fundamentalist group that includes among its members a number of the country’s leading politicians. He has attended countless Trump rallies around the country, chronicled people preparing for armed insurrection, and attended gatherings of QAnon followers.Sharlet is a professor of English and director of creative writing at Dartmouth College. He has a new book out this week, “The Undertow: Scenes From A Slow Civil War.” Sharlet believes that averting civil war will take concerted and sustained action. "We don't think of democracy as something we have, but as something we do. You get up and you do it every day," he said."We haven't achieved democracy once yet. But we're going to try again tomorrow."

Are ski bums an endangered species?The iconic “ski bum” is a romantic character who has forsaken ambition and material comfort for something purer: high mountains, big adventure and the pursuit of the perfect ski run. Vermont is filled with ski bums past and present who live for powder days. Ski bums have had a tough go lately. Climate change and economic hardship have taken a toll. New England just endured the warmest January in history. Powder days are fewer and farther between. Airbnb and Covid-19 have dealt a blow to many of the affordable crash pads and couches that ski bums once surfed.Then there is the matter of white privilege. “There is only one subset of the population who can safely, comfortably, and consistently pull off this lifestyle: white, cis-gendered skiers, usually middle class or wealthier, usually men,” wrote racial equity advocate Mardi Fuller in an essay for SKI Magazine entitled, “Let’s Stop Celebrating the White Male Ski Bum.”Journalist Heather Hansman explores the modern reality of ski bumming in her book, “Powder Days: Ski Bums, Ski Towns, and the Future of Chasing Snow.” She journeys from Vermont to Colorado and back to tell the stories of people who have built their lives around snowy mountains. Hansman is the environmental columnist for Outside Online and has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic and other publications. She is also the author of “Downriver: Into the Future of Water in the West.”Hansman writes that ski bums are “part of an ecosystem of skiing which encompasses everyone from celebrity vacationers to the undocumented lifties.” A decade after her own ski bum journeys, she hits the road again, this time with existential questions.“In the face of climate change, economic upheaval, and so much more, I’m trying to figure out if skiing as we know it will survive,” she said.

Ryan DeLena was a “problem child.”He had frequent emotional outbursts, and his parents’ efforts to control him proved futile. Mental health professionals and teachers said Ryan should be removed from the public schools in suburban Boston where he lived and placed into therapeutic schools. While there, he was subjected to physical restraints and heavy medication.Nothing helped. At age 9, he landed in a psychiatric hospital. His problems only got worse.In a desperate attempt to connect with his troubled son, Ryan’s father Rob took his son skiing at a small Massachusetts ski area. That was the beginning of a transformation for young Ryan. He channeled his energies into skiing and climbing, and now nurtures a dream to become a professional ski mountaineer. Ryan and Rob DeLena have continued to ski together around the world, including in Antarctica. Ryan finished high school and enrolled at Northern Vermont University, where he is a junior studying outdoor education.Ryan and Robert DeLena co-wrote a new memoir, “Without Restraint: How Skiing Saved My Son’s Life.” It is a harrowing and heartwarming story told by father and son about a misunderstood and troubled boy, and the bond the two forged as they found Ryan’s path.“Through skiing and the adventures we experienced together, I learned everyone was wrong about Ryan, especially me,” wrote Rob, an attorney who runs a legal staffing agency in Boston.Ryan, now 21, concluded with an improbable sentiment. “If I was offered the chance to have my childhood over again, growing up like a normal kid, I’d say no thanks,” he wrote. “Despite all the pain and hardship, I now appreciate that I’m strong enough to handle anything,” he said.

VTDigger is re-releasing some of our favorite interviews of the past decade to mark the 10th anniversary of The Vermont Conversation.This Vermont Conversation with professor Timothy Snyder was originally published in September 2020.Timothy Snyder is a professor of history at Yale and a world renowned scholar of authoritarianism. His 2017 international bestseller, “On Tyranny: 20 Lessons from the 20th Century,” is a roadmap to how autocrats rise and democracies fall.Snyder has frequently appeared in the news to discuss the Ukraine-Russia conflict, and he recently met with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Rep. Jamie Raskin consulted with Snyder during President Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial in 2021."Post-truth," Snyder wrote, "is pre-fascism."In 2020, Snyder published “Our Malady: Lessons in Liberty from a Hospital Diary.” He described his near-death experience following a missed medical diagnosis the previous year, and he eviscerated America’s failed coronavirus response.Snyder calls on us to rethink the fundamental connection between health and freedom. "Other countries look at us and for the first time ever, they sincerely pity us but also wonder, how can you have so much wealth ... and kill so many people?” Snyder asked."We're at a tipping point,” he said. “To say that it can't go on like this is an understatement. Things could get much worse than they are — and they might."

When Laurie Patton became president of Middlebury College in 2015, it marked the beginning of a quiet transformation at one of the nation’s top liberal arts colleges. Patton is the first woman to lead Middlebury in its 223-year history.Patton is changing the face of Middlebury. In more than a decade, Middlebury has roughly doubled the number of domestic BIPOC — Black, Indigenous and people of color — students, who comprise almost 40% of the class of 2026. The number of first generation college students at Middlebury has also nearly doubled, and now represent about 1 in 5 students admitted to the school.Patton has also led Middlebury to make an about face on fossil fuel divestment. For years, the Middlebury administration rejected student divestment demands. But in 2019, Patton announced the Energy 2028 plan, in which Middlebury would divest its $1 billion endowment from fossil fuels and commit to having the college be completely powered by renewable energy by 2028.“I feel (it) is something good I did for the world,” Patton told The Vermont Conversation when discussing the divestment and sustainability plan.Environmental activist and author Bill McKibben, who is a distinguished scholar at Middlebury, tweeted at the time that this move placed Middlebury “among the very greenest institutions in the world.”Patton is now confronting a future in which diversity initiatives at Middlebury at other colleges face significant headwinds. A conservative Supreme Court is expected to end or curtail affirmative action later this year.How will Middlebury maintain its diversity if affirmative action is struck down? “I feel deeply confident in Middlebury’s commitment to the principles and its savvy in figuring out how we move forward in a new environment,” Patton said. “As we continue to read applications, can we say that this student brings that diversity and can tell a story with us … about their experience that will enrich all of us?”Soon after Patton became president, Middlebury found itself the focus of a national debate about free speech on campus when a talk by a conservative political scientist was shouted down by protesters, including students. Some five dozen Middlebury students faced disciplinary action after the incident, and the punishment further roiled the campus.“Holding each other accountable is important,” Patton said, adding that in hindsight, “there are times when we probably could have taken a pause to reflect and talk to each other.” Last year, Middlebury received $25 million, the largest programmatic grant in its history, to launch a program on conflict transformation.Patton is deeply concerned about censorship of school curricula — such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s rejection of an AP African American studies course on the grounds that it had a “political agenda.” Asked whether students coming from schools with censored history classes are well prepared for a college such as Middlebury, Patton replied, “Absolutely not.”“There's so much hope in inclusive storytelling, and I really wish that the frame of an uncensored way of thinking about history was about hope. And that is what I deeply believe the power of an education should be,” she said.Patton is a scholar of South Asian history, culture and religion. In addition to being president of Middlebury, she is a professor of religion. Patton came to Middlebury from Duke University, where she was a professor and dean. She has also been on the faculty of Emory University and Bard College. She is the author or editor of 10 books and has written three books of poems.Patton has advice for high students who are applying to college. “Think about the place where you want to be next truly as a form of community and of place. And as you are choosing the college, think about the ways in which that community thrives and what makes that community thrive. And then you'll find that when you end up at a college, you will have a sense of belonging that will really drive you and help you ask the most important questions of your life, because that's what college should encourage you to do,” she said.

The anti-communist Red Scare of the 1940s and 1950s spared no corner of the country or the culture. The FBI combed the Green Mountains looking for communists, and the University of Vermont ousted a suspected faculty member. In Hollywood, 10 screenwriters and directors refused to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee, or HUAC, which led to a highly publicized hunt for supposed communist sympathizers and “subversives” throughout the entertainment industry.The Hollywood 10, as they came to be known, used the HUAC hearings in 1947 to condemn the committee. Among them was Dalton Trumbo, one of Hollywood’s highest paid writers. His credits included “Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo” (1944). As result of their defiance and principled stands, Trumbo and other members of the Hollywood 10 were convicted of contempt of Congress, fined, imprisoned and blacklisted from working in the film industry. Trumbo was unable to make a living under his own name for more than a decade, though he continued to write scripts under pseudonyms and use other writers as a front. He won an Oscar for “The Brave One” (1956), which he wrote under the name Robert Rich.In 1959, former President Harry Truman denounced HUAC as the “most un-American thing in the country today.” The Hollywood blacklist ended in 1960, when Trumbo was publicly credited with writing two films, “Spartacus” and “Exodus.” In 1975, the Academy Awards officially recognized Trumbo as the writer of “The Brave One.”“Trumbo: Red White & Blacklisted” is a two-person play featuring Trumbo’s letters that was written in 2003 by Trumbo’s son Christopher. The play is being performed in Vermont beginning Feb. 11 in Plainfield, Waterbury Center and White River Junction. It is directed by Monica Callan, narrated by Nick Charyk, and actor and former State Rep. Donny Osman plays Trumbo. Rick Winston, author of “Red Scare in the Green Mountains: Vermont in the McCarthy Era 1946-1960,” is an adviser to the play.Trumbo served 11 months in prison for contempt of Congress. “As far as I was concerned, it was a completely just verdict. I had full contempt for that Congress,” he wrote.

When white supremacists launched a campaign of racist and misogynist attacks against former State Rep. Kiah Morris, they hoped to silence her.They failed.Morris has continued to fight back and speak out since resigning her seat as a state representative from Bennington. She stepped down out of concern for the safety of her family, but she has not stepped back. Her story is told in a new documentary, “Backlash – Misogyny in the Digital Age,” which has its U.S. premiere in the Vermont Statehouse on Feb. 7, during Black History Month. Morris is among four women profiled in the film who fight against cyberviolence. The women include “the most harassed politician in Italy” Laura Boldrini, French YouTube personality Marion Seclin and an Montreal elementary school teacher Laurence Gratton. All four women pursue their tormentors and demand accountability from those who are responsible, ranging from the tech giants, to the state, law enforcement and the perpetrators.Morris says that the backlash is against women. “As women are stepping into our own power, as we are continuing to move with a society that's supposed to move with us, there are many who cannot handle that level of progress. There are many who actively want us to retreat back into subservient roles,” she said.The backlash is also about race. When Morris was elected in 2014, she was the second African American woman to serve in the Vermont Legislature. In January 2019, Vermont Attorney General TJ Donovan announced that he would not bring criminal charges against the white nationalist who was harassing Morris and her family, insisting that racially offensive speech was protected. Civil rights groups denounced the decision. Morris has continued to pursue justice.In 2021, an investigator with by the Vermont Human Rights Commission found grounds that the Bennington Police Department violated the human rights of Morris and her family and endangered their safety by withholding critical information about the white supremacist who had been targeting her. As part of the settlement, the Bennington Selectboard paid $137,000 to Morris and formally apologized to her.Was justice done? “Not really,” Morris said. “Nothing has changed in Bennington at all … to this day, not a single sanction, not a single call for resignation.” By contrast, she had to sell her house in Bennington and move to the Burlington area. She describes the settlement as “paltry.”Morris says her case — and the documentary “Backlash” — have “raised the profile in a way that other people knew that they should try to fight back. And the system is so stacked against anyone who deserves to have justice and who deserves to have peace.”“We have to continue to fight. I must not leave that legacy to my son to know that we said it was OK because it's not OK,” she said.

Erika Nichols-Frazer was like many kids growing up in the resort town of Stowe. She loved to snowboard and play hockey. But Erika hid a dark secret: She was at war with food. By eighth grade, she had anorexia, an eating disorder. She was starving herself, and her weight dropped below 80 pounds.Erika ended up in a psychiatric institution as her family worked to help her with her eating disorder. But she continued to face other mental health challenges. Depression and anxiety was a constant. At the age of 29, Erika was finally diagnosed with bipolar disorder.What Erika guarded as her deeply private struggle is actually common. One in five adults and one in six youth experience a mental health disorder every year, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness. Only around half of people with mental illness receive treatment, and the average delay between the onset of symptoms and treatment is 11 years.“There's still a huge amount of stigma around mental illness, and many of us are afraid to tell people that we're not doing okay and that we're having a hard time,” Nichols-Frazer said.Nichols-Frazer, now 34, is a writer, editor, and poet. She is a journalist for the Valley Reporter, a weekly newspaper that covers the Mad River Valley, where she lives. She shares the story of her journey to save herself in a new memoir, “Feed Me: A Story of Food, Love and Mental Illness.”Opening up about her struggles, she said, has been “really important for my own healing process, as well as for others who need to hear that they're not alone in their struggles.”Nichols-Frazer has transformed her relationship to food. Instead of food being a source of isolation and pain, it is now a way to connect with the world. “It's been a yearslong process of really coming to a place where I love food. I appreciate it. I appreciate the nourishment and sustenance it gives us, and I think that it really is a way to build community,” she said.

For this 10th anniversary Vermont Conversation, we invited back our first guest. Bill McKibben was on the inaugural broadcast of the Vermont Conversation on Jan. 16, 2013. As a journalist, he has eloquently chronicled the impact of the climate crisis across the globe and put a human face on what too often is cast as a political or scientific problem. He is the author of some 20 books, including “The End of Nature,” which was the first book to warn the general public about the climate crisis. He writes regularly for the New Yorker and his Substack site, The Crucial Years. His latest book is a memoir, “The Flag, The Cross, and the Station Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back at His Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened.”McKibben acknowledges that most of his dire predictions about climate change have come true since he first started writing about it three decades ago. And yet he insists “we are actually at a moment of extraordinary opportunity, the convergence of this big mobilization of people around the world.”McKibben has been a key figure in that grassroots mobilization. He founded the global grassroots climate campaign 350.org, and is the recipient of the Gandhi Peace Award, and the Right Livelihood Award, known as “the alternative Nobel.” He is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College. His latest project is Third Act, which is organizing people older than 60 for progressive change.“The remarkable fall in the price of renewable energy has left us in a place where it's possible to imagine, for the first time, really rapid change. Now, whether it'll come or not will depend on how hard we push. But there's nothing far fetched about it. In fact, it's very clear that 40 years from now, we'll run the world on clean energy, because it's cheap.”Reflecting on key developments of the past decade, McKibben singles out the role of Sen. Bernie Sanders. “I just want Vermonters to be aware and proud of the fact that Bernie (Sanders) played an absolutely pivotal role in the transformation of how this country or large parts of it thinks about itself,” he saidMcKibben believes that the failure of a “red tsunami” of Republican electoral victories last fall is an important signal. “It feels to me like there's people standing up for common sense, for the idea that science is a useful tool, that vaccines were a good development of the 20th century,” he said.He concedes, "Yes, we're living in a country that still is riven, where there's people constantly trying to foment unpleasantness at all times. But that election result was kind of a quiet testimony to the quiet sanity of a fair number of people in this country. So one takes hope where one can find it.”

The past week has been filled with images of high conflict. There was the shocking violent right-wing attacks on government institutions in Brazil, which appear to be a copycat of the Jan. 6, 2021, attacks on the U.S. Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters.Then there was the chaotic election of Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a madcap four-day, 15-round epic in which a small far-right faction of the GOP held the rest of Congress hostage to its demands.How do we break out of this cycle in which disagreements quickly spiral into good-versus-evil, us-versus-them battles? And how did we get here?Journalist Amanda Ripley tackles these questions in her bestselling book, “High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out.” Ripley was an investigative reporter for TIME Magazine and writes regularly for The Atlantic and Washington Post. She is also author of the bestselling book, “The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way,” and she hosts the Slate podcast “How To!” for which she interviewed then-candidate and now Vermont Rep. Becca Balint in a piece called, “How to Run for Office Without Being an A**hole.”In "High Conflict," Ripley writes about “how good people get captured by high conflict — and how they break free.”Ripley said there is a time-tested method for generating conflict. “When I look at mob activity like we just saw in Brazil, what I think most about is the climate of fear and threat and blame that has allowed this to happen,” she said.Ripley cited the power of “conflict entrepreneurs,” such as Tucker Carlson of Fox News, to incite people. “Influential voices in the media and in politics (utilize) the same kind of recipe: … generate a feeling of threat, that there's a crisis, identify a villain and then proclaim yourself as the hero who can save the day. That is how, again and again, again, politicians and pundits have managed to cast a sort of spell of high conflict over people.”She tweeted this week about how to avoid another Jan. 6, based on her conversation with security and democracy expert Rachel Kleinfeld: “For [journalists]: 1. Amplify non-extremists. 2. Report out disagreements within parties/groups, not just between. 3. Correct your audience's mistakes about the other side. They are vast. For Politicians: Call out your own party more — and the other party less. One works, the other doesn't. For Regular People: Don't share violent memes. It might sound kind of funny & not important, but in fact, jokes are one of those things that go beyond our rational brain & allow us to do things we would never normally say or do."Ripley has also criticized the media for how it has helped stoke conflict. She confessed in the Washington Post that she often avoids the news because it can be depressing and “paralyzing.” She cites studies showing that 4 in 10 Americans do the same thing.“Almost no one is really happy with the way politics is happening, the way the news is covered, the way we are treating each other,” she said. “I think there's a huge opportunity there.”From politics to news, “most Americans are yearning for something different. Widespread dissatisfaction is what we need to change this,” Ripley said.

On Tuesday, Sen. Patrick Leahy ended his remarkable 48-year career as the senator from Vermont.Leahy was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1974 at the age of 34. He is now 82. He was the first Democrat elected to Congress from Vermont, and until this week, the only Vermont Democratic senator, since Sen. Bernie Sanders is an independent. Leahy was also the last of the Senate's "Watergate Babies" elected in the wake of former President Richard Nixon’s resignation after the Watergate scandal.Leahy is the third longest serving U.S. senator in history, after Sen. Robert Byrd, D-WV (51 years), and Sen. Daniel Inouye, D-HI (49 years). He has served with nine presidents and has cast more than 17,000 votes as a senator. As a key member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, he participated in some 18 Supreme Court confirmation hearings. His memoir, “The Road Taken,” was published in 2022.Leahy’s last day as a U.S. senator was historic in another way: It was the first time in a century that the House of Representatives failed to elect a speaker on the first ballot. Leahy reflected on the political impasse, “This is hurting the United States. It is hurting our sense of democracy. When you have people from the former President (Trump) on say, ‘Well maybe we should just suspend a few of these parts of the Constitution because they're inconvenient for what we want to do’ — they weren't made to be convenient. They're made to hold a country together. And I fear for the country if it continues like this.”The Vermont Conversation asked Leahy who of the nine presidents he served with were the most consequential. He replied, “It would probably be Trump because of all the things he did that we're still paying the price for.”During the Jan. 6 insurrection, Leahy was evacuated to a secure room with other senators while police battled with the mob of Trump supporters who had invaded the Capitol. A Senate colleague suggested that the Senate finish its business in the secure room. The suggestion infuriated Leahy. He declared to his fellow Senators, “I'm the dean of the Senate. I'm the longest serving person here. I’m the president pro tem. And I'll be damned if I'm going to meet in secret.”“Let us go back where the American people can see what we're saying, how we're voting, what we're doing. Don't hide,” he said. He received a standing ovation.“I leave with pride in what I've done,” Leahy said. “I cast more votes than all but one person in history. I've actually served with 20% of the senators who have been elected in the history of this country. … I felt that gives me a responsibility to do what I think is right. And that's what I've tried to do.”“But I gotta tell you,” the Vermont senator said after nearly a half-century of service, “Marcelle and I are just looking forward to coming home now.”

As one news outlet after another downsizes and closes, who is going to do the journalism in the future?That’s the question asked by Ken Tingley, the former editor of the Post-Star, the newspaper in Glens Falls, N.Y. Over the last decade, Tingley watched as his newsroom went from a staff of about 50 to just 7 people today. He chronicles what has happened to local news in his new book, “The Last American Newspaper: An Institution in Peril, Through the Eyes of a Small-Town Editor.”Tingley’s experience in Glens Falls, a city of 15,000 located near the tourist centers of Lake George and Saratoga Springs, is part of a national trend. From 2005 to 2020, about a quarter of local print newspapers ceased publication in the U.S. Half of over 3,000 counties in the U.S. had just one local print newspaper. Only a third had a daily newspaper, and over 200 counties had no newspaper at all. Vast swaths of the country have become news deserts.The Post-Star was founded in 1904. The daily newspaper in Glens Falls won a Pulitzer Prize in 2009 for the editorial writing of Mark Mahoney, who wrote about government secrecy and the public’s right to know.Tingley and his colleagues have reported on the rise of a local Republican member of Congress, Elise Stefanik, who was elected to Congress in 2014 at age 30. Stefanik ran as a political moderate but has since become a staunch acolyte of former President Donald Trump. Stefanik is a rising star in the party who became the third-ranking House Republican after Liz Cheney was pushed out by Trump loyalists in 2021.The Trump era has been marked by increasing threats against journalists. A pro-Trump protester in Glens Falls pointed a toy gun at one of Tingley's reporters and declared, “We’ve got one coming for you, Post-Star!” After the newspaper reported on the incident, Rep. Stefanik invited the protester to one of her town halls, and her staffer sent him an appreciative message.An outraged Tingley contacted Stefanik’s communications director. “I asked her to immediately denounce this man, that he had threatened our reporters, he had threatened our editors, he had threatened people at our newspaper and put their lives in danger.”“Never heard anything,” he said.Tingley urges people to subscribe and support local news. If local news outlets don’t survive, he said, “the number of people who vote will be less [because] they don't know who's running for office, and …there's going to be less community engagement.” He also predicted that without local watchdogs, “You're gonna see your taxes go up.”In addition to democracy taking a hit, Tingley predicts that without the public accountability that local media provides, “It's going to cost us all more money.”

“Greed is good.”That idea was famously uttered by a fictional stockbroker named Gordon Gekko, played by Michael Douglas in the 1987 movie “Wall Street.”That line leapt out at Jon Erickson. He was an undergraduate studying economics at Cornell University in the late 1980s and he was coming to believe that the misguided priorities of conventional economics did not lead to prosperity, but to a failed and grossly unequal society and was “a path to planetary ruin.” Erickson is now an ecological economist, and he champions a new kind of economics that fosters a healthy, balanced relationship between people and planet. Ecological economics has been gaining influence both in academia and in environmental and social justice movements.“I think of it as 21st century economics. It's an economics that reflects the realities of living on a full planet,” Erickson said.Jon Erickson makes the case for a new economics in a new book, “The Progress Illusion: Reclaiming Our Future from the Fairytale of Economics.” Erickson is the Blittersdorf professor of sustainability science and policy at the University of Vermont, a faculty member of the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, and a Fellow of the Gund Institute for Environment. Erickson sees the current challenge as “taking power back from the wealthy elite and overturning the idea of a market society, returning back to democratic institutions and systems of trust and community. (It's) about social movement building.”“The challenge now is that it can't be every four years. It's got to be day to day, week to week, month to month. It's got to be overturning the kind of brainwashing that we've all gone through.”

International human rights lawyer Reed Brody has been dubbed the “Dictator Hunter.” He has helped pursue and bring to justice notorious dictators including Augusto Pinochet of Chile, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier of Haiti and Yahya Jammeh of Gambia.One dictator became a special focus of Brody’s global pursuit of justice. Hissène Habré was the former despot who ruled Chad from 1982 until he was deposed in 1990. Habré met with then-President Ronald Reagan and was armed and backed by the U.S. Habré, who was dubbed “Africa’s Pinochet,” was accused of ordering the killing of 40,000 people and the torture of 200,000 people during his reign of terror.“The saying used to be that if you kill one person, you go to jail; if you kill 40 people, you are put in an insane asylum; but if you kill 40,000 people, you get a safe haven and a fat bank account in the country of your choosing,” Brody wrote.For 16 years, Reed Brody led a team of investigators, lawyers and victims that spanned three continents as they pursued Habré. This global hunt culminated in Habré’s trial in Senegal in 2016. Habré became the first former head of state to be convicted of crimes against humanity in the courts of another country. The dictator, who had lived in seaside luxury in Senegal for 25 years, was sentenced to life in prison. Habré died of Covid-19 during his imprisonment in August 2021.Brody recounts his global quest for justice in his new book, “To Catch a Dictator: The Pursuit and Trial Of Hissène Habré.”Brody argues that the precedent of holding dictators like Habré and Pinochet to account can also be applied to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who is accused of committing war crimes in Ukraine. But pursuing tyrants requires patience. “Even assuming that he's indicted for war crimes or for aggression by a special tribunal, which is being discussed, unless there's a radical change in Russia, nobody is going to come in and arrest Vladimir Putin,” Brody said. “That said, these indictments will hang over his head all his life. And we see in other cases like Cambodia and elsewhere that you may not prosecute somebody today or in 10 years, but maybe 20 years or 30 years.”Brody is critical of the double standard in international law, where human rights abuses by western leaders go unpunished. "I spent a long time documenting crimes committed against prisoners during the so called War on Terror in Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, secret prisons," he said. "George Bush, president of the United States authorized torture. He authorized waterboarding ... There has never been accountability for that." Brody has seen the rise and fall of dictators around the world. He knows the fragility of democracy. “I am very worried about democracy in the U.S.," he said. “It's going to require all of our organizing … to preserve or at least to reconquer our institutions.”

A transgender Vermont high school student who was the target of a transphobic hate campaign is breaking her silence.“I want to be able to go out there and kind of just say, ‘I am trans, I am here,’” said the 14-year-old first-year student at Randolph Union High School, who asked to be identified as Rabbit in this interview. The Vermont Conversation and VTDigger are protecting the student’s privacy out of concern for her safety.In late September, Vermont television station WCAX aired a news story about the girl’s volleyball team at Randolph Union High School. Rabbit had recently joined the team, and WCAX featured a single student who objected to Rabbit’s presence in the girl’s locker room.The story was immediately picked up by right-wing media outlets including Fox News, the New York Post, the British tabloid the Daily Mail and the conservative Heritage Foundation. This unleashed a “wildfire of bigotry and hatred,” according to Rabbit’s mother, and a torrent of transphobic hate messages to Rabbit, her family and the school. The school district website was hacked and forced offline after the site was flooded with transphobic messages. Rabbit temporarily left school in fear for her safety.In fact, Rabbit was being bullied by a small group of students, her mother said. WCAX soon removed the story from its website.But the damage had been done. “I was in danger,” Rabbit said. “And not only me, but the trans youth community of Randolph and of Vermont due to this disgraceful and defaming news article.”This incident comes as transgender people are under unprecedented attack, especially in Republican-led states. Four states have enacted a partial or total bans on gender-affirming care, and 20 other states are trying to pass such bills. Texas Gov. Greg Abbot declared that parents and health care providers who provide gender-affirming care to trans youth can be investigated for child abuse. Some 85% of trans or nonbinary youth say their mental health has been negatively affected by these laws, and more than half have considered suicide in the past year, according to the Trevor Project, an LGBTQ+ advocacy group.“So much of Rabbit’s story absolutely mirrors what is happening across the country and here in Vermont,” said Dana Kaplan, executive director of Outright Vermont, an LGBTQ+ advocacy and support organization. “There's a continuous barrage of messages that are targeting queer and trans young people telling them that they are not valued, that they're not cared for, that they're not allowed to exist, that they're not allowed to access their joy, and really typical things that all young people need to be able to do to develop self confidence (and) to thrive.”At the same time, there has also been an outpouring of support for Rabbit from everyone from her volleyball teammates to strangers who sent her letters.“I just want you to remember that we’re children,” volleyball team captain Lilly Patton said to a crowd of about 350 people who attended a public meeting in Randolph in October. “It’s one child on the receiving end of all this hate. You’re saying all these things to a child who is already at high risk, who already doesn’t feel accepted. This child didn’t do anything to anyone, especially you adults. I was there. She was where she was supposed to be.”Rabbit said she appreciates these allies. “Any message of support that you can give to trans youth or trans people in general…make it known because, oh my god, it helps so much,” she said.“My hopes and dreams are to show people that they can just be who they are and that they don't need the approval of others or the approval of even their family members,” Rabbit said. “You just need to be you.”

Santa Claus is coming to town. But the person shimmying down the chimney may not be the rotund, bearded white man who has long played the role of St. Nick. “Santa Camp” is a new documentary from HBO Max about an effort to diversify who represents Santa Claus. The story begins at the annual summer camp of the New England Santa Society, which represents more than 100 Christmas performers. The Santas realized that they need to look more like some of the communities that they serve. So they welcomed three new Santas: Chris Kennedy, a Black Santa from Arkansas; Levi Truex, aka Trans Santa, from Chicago; and “Santa Fin” Ciappara, a Santa with spina bifida who communicates via an iPad, joined by his mother Suki Ciappara. Santa Fin always dreamed of being Santa in a parade. The movie captures the day in December 2021 when his dream came true and he sat in a sled pulled by elves in the River of Light parade in Waterbury. “Believe in your dreams and don't give up,” he said. "Be kind to people who are different." For some, diversity is a threat. Kennedy set up an illuminated, inflatable Black Santa Claus display in his yard. Soon after, he received a racist letter. That motivated him to become Black Santa. “You're not going to steal my joy,” he told The Vermont Conversation. "I'm appealing to families who want diversity and want to see themselves represented or their adoptive kids want to see themselves represented. That's what I'm here for. I'm not here for the naysayers,” Kennedy said said. The documentary showed the “Proud Boys” protesting Trans Santa Levi Truex outside the Chicago church where he was greeting children last year. Truex talked about violence directed against LGBTQ+ people, including the killing of five people at a Colorado Springs gay bar this week. “We've always experienced hate. It's what makes us resilient. It's what makes us get louder and push harder,” he said. “The more that we feel the pressure from the hate, the more we're just going to be even more visible and more open. It's just what needs to happen.” Truex believes that Trans Santa makes a difference, especially for the LGBTQ+ children who visit him. “I don't have an agenda to make your kids trans or whatever. My agenda is purely to spread joy and just be a good person, to be a good human. And to treat people with respect and dignity and just spread the love of Christmas,” he said.

When a young Illinois state senator named Barack Obama addressed the 2004 Democratic Convention, he vaulted onto the national stage through the power and grace of his words. In that speech, he challenged Americans to have “the audacity of hope.” President Obama went on to become one of the greatest political orators of our time.Obama has had a silent partner in crafting his oratory. In 2006, a novice speechwriter named Cody Keenan joined his team. Keenan wrote alongside Obama for 14 years, rising to become the chief White House speech writer. He continued collaborating with Obama, spending four years helping the former president write his memoir, “A Promised Land.” Keenan now runs a speechwriting and communications firm and teaches a popular undergraduate course on speechwriting at Northwestern University, his alma mater.Obama’s silent partner is now telling his story. Cody Keenan has a new book, “Grace: President Obama and Ten Days in the Battle for America.” The book focuses on a fraught period in 2015 during which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on marriage equality and the Affordable Care Act, and a white supremacist murdered nine people in a church in Charleston, South Carolina. Obama delivered the eulogy at the church following the massacre, famously singing Amazing Grace.The power of Obama’s oratory, Keenan said, is his ability to reach “into the American people and just talking to folks where they are. That's something too many politicians don't do.”Keenan described writing for Obama as “f-ing terrifying.” “I was never nervous being around the most powerful man in the world,” he said. “I was nervous being around a damn good writer, especially when it's your job to write for him when he is on record saying I'm a better speechwriter than my speechwriters.”Obama’s presidency ended with another famous presidential speech, President Donald Trump’s inaugural “American Carnage” address, which laid out a dark vision of crime and white grievance. “What a way to set the tone for the next four years, not only just with a president who kind of picked at our wounds until they reopened, but then a pandemic that was mismanaged to the point where it killed more than a million Americans,” Keenan said.“President's words matter,” Keenan continued. “If you ever need evidence of that, President Trump's probably your best evidence because his words unleashed something primal … and created a permission structure for political violence — to the point where sitting elected officials are advocating for it. It opened up the floodgates to something like Jan. 6. You had people marching with torches in Charlottesville with their hoods off. All this stuff is only possible because of the president's words.”

Abortion was on the ballot in this week’s midterm elections and the results were emphatic: Voters, even in conservative states, want abortion rights over abortion bans.This election featured the most ballot measures on abortion in a single U.S. election. Vermonters voted by a more than 3-to-1 margin to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution. California and Michigan also approved constitutional protections for abortion. Voters in Kentucky and Montana defeated anti-abortion ballot measures. And in August, voters in Kansas rejected a ballot measure that would have amended the state Constitution to say it contains no right to an abortion. “Abortion won,” said Oren Jacobson, co-founder and co-executive director of Men4Choice, a national prochoice advocacy group that organizes male allies.Politicians “who attempted to mess around with people's intimate decision making in that way should really take a message here … that people do not want their lives to be interfered with,” said Felicia Kornbluh, professor of history and gender, sexuality and women’s studies at the University of Vermont and vice chair of Planned Parenthood of Vermont Action Fund.“They want to be able to choose when and whether and under what circumstances to have children. And that means access to abortion. It means access to contraception. It means access to vasectomy procedures if people want that. It means access to a full range of reproductive health care no matter who you are — if you're in a same sex relationship, no matter what your gender identification is. We want that freedom. It's a bedrock freedom, and I think it's time that everybody in the political system recognizes that and take it as the kind of high value that it really is.”Jacobson argued that it is essential to enlist men and other allies to protect reproductive rights. One in five men in the U.S. have impregnated someone who has had an abortion. "About half of these men already had children and supported ending the pregnancy to better provide for their existing family," according to one report. Jacobson said that men are typically passive supporters of reproductive rights, and that has to change. “The mere act of men speaking up and lending their voices will normalize the idea (of abortion). This is to shift the culture and bring the majority of men who are pro-choice more actively in this fight. So I think it's really important that guys do share their story and do raise their voices.”Three Vermont men shared their abortion stories on this episode of the Vermont Conversation.Carl Werth of Waterbury Center recalled when his college girlfriend became pregnant. “She did not want to carry a baby, and neither of us wanted to be responsible for one. … If we had had to have the child, if it was a forced birth as they say, I think it would have dramatically changed the path of both of our lives.”Werth said of the role that men should have in an abortion, “100% they should be supporting what the woman wants to do. Because it's her body. Period.”Jon Williams, a grandfather in Waterbury Center, said he and his wife decided to have an abortion when they were in their 20s. He said the U.S. Supreme Court overturning Roe vs. Wade is “absolutely nuts.”“A lot of women and families are in the position where an unplanned pregnancy could be absolutely devastating to the family. It's just such a fundamental right,” Williams said.David Bolger, a school teacher from Moretown, is unapologetic about the abortions that he and his girlfriend had in college. “I don't feel regret it at all,” Bolger said.He and his girlfriend Amy broke up after college but got married 20 years later. “That was when we were really so ready and able and capable to do a good job … at raising a family,” he said. “And we have.”“It was Amy's right to choose, and we talked a long time about it. And I absolutely supported her in that decision, and I'm glad. I still have no regrets about that whole thing,” Bolger said.

When Rue Mapp goes for a hike, she does more than smell flowers and enjoy vistas. She breaks barriers.Mapp is challenging the idea that the outdoors are just for white people. In 2009, she founded Outdoor Afro, a blog to “reconnect Black people with the outdoors through outdoor education, recreation, and conservation.” Today, Outdoor Afro is a national nonprofit operating in 60 cities with more than 100 volunteers leading 60,000 participants on everything from strolls in the forest to bird walks to climbs of Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania.“It was not a part of our national narrative to just even think about Black people and their connection to the outdoors, and so I set about trying to change the narrative of who we imagine gets outside,” Mapp told the Vermont Conversation.The problem does not lie with nature. “The outdoors are welcoming. The trees don't know what color you are. The flowers are gonna bloom no matter how much money is in your account. The birds are gonna sing no matter who you voted for. So the outdoors is not at fault. It's just people and policies,” she said.Mapp referenced the Jim Crow era when public swimming pools and recreation areas had “whites only” signs. One consequence: Black children did not learn to swim and die from drowning at up to 10 times the rate of white children.“Alongside that exclusion, alongside that blatant racist reality, was a perseverance among Black people to find their places of purpose in nature,” Mapp said. In 2019, Outdoor Afro launched an initiative to teach 100,000 Black children and their caregivers to swim.Mapp’s efforts have brought her national attention. She was invited by the White House to participate in America’s Great Outdoors conference and took part in the launch of former first lady Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” initiative. She has taken Oprah Winfrey hiking and canoed with the interior secretary. Mapp was named a National Geographic Fellow, Heinz Awards Honoree and is a recipient of the National Wildlife Federation Communication Award.Rue Mapp has a new book, “Nature Swagger: Stories and Visions of Black Joy in the Outdoors.” It is a collection of essays and photos of Black people intended to “inspire Black communities to reclaim their place in the natural world.”When confronting a challenge or just in daily life, Mapp wants Black people "to recognize the power of nature as both a healer and a connector." "Nature never closes," she said.

In 2016, Sky Yardley, then 66, was diagnosed with early stage Alzheimer’s disease, an incurable and fatal condition. Sky and his wife, Jane Dwinell, decided to face Alzheimer’s in their own way. The Vermont couple began blogging and speaking about Sky’s increasing dementia in an effort to reduce stigma about the disease. Their blog was called Alzheimer’s Canyon, which was Sky’s term for a place with “no trails, no landmarks, nothing.” Yardley and Dwinell talked about their Alzheimer’s journey on the Vermont Conversation in 2017.Alzheimer’s disease is the sixth leading cause of death in the U.S. and the leading cause of dementia. One in three seniors dies with Alzheimer’s or another form of dementia. According to the Vermont chapter of the Alzheimer’s Association, more than 13,000 Vermonters have Alzheimer's disease or another form of dementia, and more than 25,000 friends and family are providing care.Yardley and Dwinell, who were together for 36 years, movingly chronicled Sky’s decline until his death in February 2021. Jane Dwinell has now published this real-time journal in a new book, “Alzheimer’s Canyon: One Couples Reflections on Living with Dementia,” posthumously co-written with her late husband.Jane Dwinell is a retired nurse, freelance writer and Unitarian Universalist minister. Her 1992 book, “Birth Stories: Mystery, Power and Creation,” described her experience as a labor and delivery nurse at Gifford Hospital in Randolph. Sky Yardley was a family mediator.Dwinell said that publicly chronicling his illness “was all Sky's idea. He wanted to do what he could to erase the stigma of dementia. … He wanted to meet other people with dementia to be able to talk about it.”Friends and family often do not know how to respond when a loved one receives a life-changing diagnosis. “Don't give them advice. Don't leave them, and just be a good listener,” Dwinell said. “Some of our friends and family kind of fell away, and I'm grateful for the ones who stuck around.”Sky Yardley said on The Vermont Conversation in 2017 that Alzheimer’s taught him to “pay attention to the present. The only thing we have is the present, which is something that I think all humans could benefit from.”

John Irving, widely hailed as one of America’s greatest novelists, is back, and he has a lot to say.John Irving, 80, is the author of 15 novels, including the international bestsellers “The World According to Garp,” “The Cider House Rules” and “A Prayer for Owen Meany,” which is his top-selling book. Irving’s latest novel, “The Last Chairlift,” was released Oct. 17. It has been seven years in the making and at 900 pages, it is his longest work. He says that “The Last Chairlift” will be his last long novel.John Irving wrote his first novel at age 26. He competed as a wrestler for 20 years and coached wrestling until he was 47. He was inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame. Irving has won a National Book Award, an Oscar and a Lambda Literary Award, among numerous other recognitions. His books have been translated into more than 35 languages.John Irving was born in Exeter, New Hampshire. He lived for many years in Vermont, first in Putney and later in Dorset. He sold his Vermont home in 2014 and now lives in Toronto. He is a dual citizen of Canada and the U.S.Irving has long tackled controversial issues in his novels. “The World According to Garp” (1978) has a transgender character, “The Cider House Rules” (1985) deals with abortion and “A Prayer for Owen Meany” (1989) confronts the fallout from the Vietnam War. His books have periodically been banned.“What are they banning? They’re banning books about abortion and they’re banning books on LGBTQ subjects,” he told The Vermont Conversation. “What they're saying to young, gay, lesbian, trans kids, they want them to feel even more alone and isolated than they already feel. They don't want those kids to have access to material that will let them know they're not alone. They already feel alone. There's a cruelty to that that is unspeakable.” Irving is a sharp critic of American politics today. Speaking about the recent Supreme Court decision striking down abortion rights, he said, “What they did is more in step with the Vatican than it is with the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.”Irving’s advice to young writers: “You can't let outside factors get under your skin. You have to stick to your purpose and be a kind of horse with blinders on. … You also can't get down on yourself after somebody's just kicked your tail. You've got to do it again and get better.”

When the New Yorker published Ed Koren’s first cartoon 60 years ago, it marked the beginning of a relationship that has come to define both the magazine and the artist. Koren’s cartoons feature hairy, long-nosed characters that poke fun at issues from the serious to the mundane, ranging from rural life, to politics, consumerism, climate change, to encounters on the street — or in his case, on the dirt road where he lives in Brookfield, Vermont, his home since the 1970s with his wife, Curtis. He has been a volunteer firefighter in his community for over three decades.Koren, 86, is one of America’s most celebrated and beloved cartoonists. He has contributed some 1,400 cartoons to the New Yorker over the past six decades. He was Vermont’s Cartoonist Laureate from 2014 to 2017, and his cartoons have also appeared everywhere from the New York Times to Vanity Fair to Sports Illustrated to numerous books. His latest collection of cartoons is Koren in the Wild.Fellow New Yorker contributor Bill McKibben says of Koren, “Sometimes one thinks of the cartoonist as 'making fun.' But though Ed's drawings have long been the funniest thing in the New Yorker, it's because they're essentially kind, filled with the understanding that we're all trying hard. And that kindness, of course, is what makes him such a remarkable neighbor to all of us in Vermont.”The Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction recently launched the Ed Koren Scholarship Fund to support “an emerging cartoonist who is also looking to enrich the cultural and civic life of Vermont.” Koren’s work is also featured in an exhibition about the climate crisis at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass., “Down to the Bone,” which includes his cartoons and the images of nature photographer Stephen Gorman.Ed Koren continues to make people laugh even as he faces a serious predicament: He has incurable lung cancer, which he was diagnosed with in 2020. Koren, who I’ve known for many years, has long politely declined my interview requests, protesting that he didn’t think he was that interesting. I begged to differ, and finally, last week he agreed to talk. I found him in his studio at his home doing what he loves, drawing cartoons for the New Yorker.“I'm an inhabitant of two worlds,” he tells me, sitting in a wheelchair in front of his drawing table in a room that overlooks a lush autumn forest. “My early work was based on the Upper West Side.” By contrast, “Vermont has always had its own milieu that I've drawn from, and I oftentimes mix and match.”I ask him why he draws hairy creatures. “It makes it funnier. There's some cartoons that I've done that just aren't funny enough without hair. And I love hair. I love to draw hair. I can't suppress my hand. … The hand really is the key instrument here. It keeps working and keeps flying along.”Koren’s advice to young people is to “find your own voice. It's what I tell young cartoonists. Don't accept situations where you have to work for so many decades of your life in something you really don't like. …Don't hesitate to change if it's not what you want.”Koren has been a brilliant chronicler and satirist of the human condition. “I'm irrepressible when it comes to seeing other people's folly and missteps and kind of haplessness. So I just kept doing it because I love to do it," he said.“I love my life. I love my work. I would hate to say goodbye to it.”

Danielle Prescod is done being the “Token Black Girl.” Prescod was one of the only Black students in her prep school in Greenwich, Connecticut. She was captain of the tennis team, attended Tufts University and New York University, and went on to jobs at prestigious and influential fashion and beauty magazines including Elle, InStyle and BET, where she was style director.As Prescod grew older, she began to understand that she was molding herself to fit in a world of white supremacy. She had to be perfect — better than anyone else. That led to undergoing painful hair straightening in elementary school and developing an eating disorder when she hit puberty.The murder of George Floyd was a turning point for Prescod, who is now 34. Following Floyd’s killing by Minneapolis police, she posted a searing Instagram video that went viral in which she laid out the many ways that white colleagues and media figures had marginalized and ignored her and other African Americans all while claiming to be anti-racist allies.Prescod has a new memoir, “Token Black Girl.” She has a newly formed consulting agency 2BG (2 Black Girls), which advises fashion and beauty brands and influencers on anti-racism. Prescod writes: “The Token Black Girl is characterized mostly by her proximity to her white peers and her nonthreatening and friendly nature. She is non­threatening because she is almost never the romantic interest, and her primary function is to provide ‘attitude’ and ‘sass,’ either as humor or as an attempt to elevate the sex appeal of the otherwise all-white entity. She is a good student because she has to be. She actually feels like she has to be good at everything. She’s almost always a good dancer, and even if she’s not, it doesn’t matter because everyone will still think she’s a good dancer. She either has or can get the requisite social signifiers of acceptance—everything except white skin, of course. She will be well spoken, well dressed, and well groomed. She likes all the things her friends like, including boys, but they will not like her. She almost never acknowledges her position as the sole Black member of a group because talking about race makes white people uncomfortable. She can never make white people uncomfortable. Her most critical responsibility is providing protection against the ‘racist’ label that might otherwise be hurled at a gaggle of white women devoid of ethnic variety.”“When you are a person of color in these environments, you go into survival mode because you're very convinced that … it's assimilate or die,” Prescod told The Vermont Conversation. “You are not developing into a whole individual because you're so defensive. You're like a caged feral animal. … I don't want kids living like that. It's very stressful.”

Sixty years ago this week, author Rachel Carson published the landmark book, "Silent Spring." Carson argued that pesticides, especially DDT, were poisoning people and the environment. and that the chemical industry was spreading disinformation in order to profit from this disaster. "Silent Spring" inspired the modern environmental movement and led to the banning of DDT in 1972.Today, DDT is back, thanks in part to a new era of industry disinformation.Elena Conis argues the current science denialism movement — led by anti-vaxxers, climate deniers and Covid-19 skeptics — has its roots in efforts by industry and right-wing think tanks to cast doubt on science. Conis is a professor in the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of “Vaccine Nation” and a new book, “How to Sell a Poison: The Rise, Fall, and Toxic Return of DDT.”“Way back in the 1950s, the chemical companies had employed these PR firms that essentially began to sketch out what's now known as a playbook on how to defend your product and undermine public faith in evidence that your product might be causing harm,” Conis said on The Vermont Conversation. “This involves things like casting doubt on the scientists who are talking about the hazards of a particular chemical or technology. It involves courting journalists and encouraging them to see your side of the story and to cover your side of the story. It also involves creating scientific debate where there is none or making a debate seem consequential even though scientific consensus falls almost entirely on one particular side of the issue.”The result is the situation today where people say, “I'm only going to trust this, or I'm going to reject that. I'm going to take Ivermectin, or I'm not going to wear a mask or whatever it is. … We've lost sight of the fact that science is a process. It's about experimentation. It's about asking questions about the world we live in, coming up with answers that make sense for the moment and then adjusting those answers when the moment or the situation changes,” she said.“We've shifted from a country that appeared to trust in science and institutions of science to one that has been encouraged to question everything to the point where … you can readily find the evidence or justification you need,” Conis said.

American democracy may rise or fall on whether or not citizens succeed in preserving the right to vote. The battle to save voting rights has reached a critical phase.Following former President Donald Trump’s defeat in 2020, nearly 400 Republican-written bills restricting voting access were introduced in legislatures nationwide. Last year, legislators in every state except Vermont introduced at least one bill restricting voting access, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. By May of this year, 18 states had passed 34 laws restricting voting. These efforts are tied to the false election fraud claims that Trump and his supporters have been spreading since President Joe Biden's electoral victory.The new voting restrictions threaten to roll back the rights that were secured in the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which was signed into law by then-President Lyndon Johnson. The current tsunami of voter suppression laws was triggered in 2013 when the Supreme Court handed down the decision known as Shelby County v. Holder, which “put a dagger into the heart of the Voting Rights Act,” in the words of the late Rep. John Lewis. Shelby has been used to roll back key rights enshrined in the Voting Rights Act, and the result has been a wave of voter suppression laws targeting communities of color.Greg Moore has been a key participant in the battle for voting rights. He was the executive director of the NAACP National Voter Fund, coordinating national programs promoting voting rights and registering more than a half million voters nationwide throughout his career. He previously served as legislative director and chief of staff for Rep. John Conyers, where he helped steer the final passage of the “Motor Voter Act” of 1993. He is the CEO of the Promise of Democracy Foundation, a nonprofit organization focused on protecting democracy, voting rights and civic education. His new book is “Beyond the Voting Rights Act: The Untold Story of the Struggle to Reform America’s Voter Registration Laws.”Moore argues that because of the Voting Rights Act, “voter registration rolls swelled up all over the country … and it led to a massive turnout that elected the first African American president not once, but twice, in 2008 and again in 2012.” That sparked a furious effort by Republicans to suppress Black votes.“The Trump MAGA movement has accelerated that whole process,” Moore told the Vermont Conversation. “The emergence of the Black vote and the youth vote and low income vote created such a powerful force in 2008 and 2012 that it forced the retrenchment from this longstanding law that was 50 years strong.”Moore contends that federal action is essential to defend voting rights. “If you take away the federal government's ability to provide that undergirding support for these rights, then you leave it to states to do whatever they want … It's just like the issue of abortion: There'll be states where you can have it, and states where you can’t, states where you have the right to vote, and states where you don't have the freedom to vote.”“Jim Crow was what happened when there weren't federal guidelines,” Moore added. “If you take away federal guidelines, you return back to that. … Congress needs to put forth a bill that can pass on a bipartisan basis and be enacted in the law.

Katharine Hayhoe is a climate scientist, an evangelical Christian and a Texan. Those three parts of her identity do not always play well together. That’s why she is determined to find effective ways to communicate with people who do not agree with her.Hayhoe is an atmospheric scientist who studies climate change. She is a distinguished professor at Texas Tech University and chief scientist at The Nature Conservancy. Her latest book is “Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World.” She writes regularly for the Washington Post and other publications. Her TED talk, “The Most Important Thing You Can Do About Climate Change: Talk About It,” has received more than 4 million views. Originally from Canada, she is visiting Vermont this month to deliver the keynote address for the 50th anniversary of Vermont Public Interest Research Group.Hayhoe insists that only about 8% of people completely deny the reality of climate change. She calls them “dismissives” — and she does not waste time trying to change their minds. “A key hallmark of someone who's dismissive is they literally will not and cannot listen,” she said. “I don't think it's possible barring a miracle to have a positive, constructive conversation with somebody who won't listen.“With everybody else, there is a secret to a positive conversation. And that secret is to begin with something you agree on, rather than something you disagree on.”Hayhoe suggests shifting the conversation to asking what people are worried about. “That's often where we can find sometimes surprising amounts of agreement, or at least empathy. … What would a solution look like that would actually address that without requiring the misinformation or the denial?” she asked.What most worries a climate scientist today? “It's the way that climate change is loading the weather dice against us,” she replied. “As the world gets warmer, it's like wherever we live, we have a pair of dice and we always have a chance of naturally rolling doubles.” Now, she said, “we're rolling double sixes” all the time.“The headlines around the world this summer have just been off the charts,” Hayhoe said. “Record-breaking heat waves and droughts in Europe and the U.K. followed by record breaking heavy rainfall and floods, record-breaking drought in China, record-breaking floods in Pakistan with over 30 million people affected, the wildfires, and record-breaking heat waves that we're seeing all across the western United States. There's been five 1000-year flood events in the U.S. in five weeks, and we're still getting more of them.”“Why do they matter?” Hayhoe asked. Because extreme climate events “affect us, they affect our homes, our infrastructure, our transportation, our crops, our water supply, the city of Jackson (Mississippi) not having water to support its population. Things that we took for granted — that you turn on the tap and water would come out — you can't take those things for granted anymore. And the costs in terms of human suffering, the cost in terms of the economic impacts, the long-term costs, in terms of the supply chain disruptions and the need to rebuild all of our infrastructure and the burden on our insurance, and just the personal burden of having two people having to rebuild their homes that they've lost to wildfire, flood or even sell their land that because of drought they can't grow their crops anymore. That is very concerning because it is leading to suffering today. And we know that if we don't tackle this problem at scale, it is only getting worse.”

Ralph Nader is America’s most famous consumer rights advocate. He is a relentless critic of corporate corruption and a former presidential candidate.Nader, now 88, achieved early fame in 1965 with the publication of Unsafe at Any Speed, his exposé of auto safety problems with Americans cars. He went on to become a key leader in the anti-nuclear power movement. He has run for president several times, most famously in 2000, when critics accuse him of drawing votes from Vice President Al Gore resulting in the election of George W. Bush.Nader’s influence on Vermont can be found in the Vermont Public Interest Research Group, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this month. VPIRG was born out of a meeting at the University of Vermont in October 1971 with student activists. Don Ross, Nader’s top lieutenant, urged the students to form a campus chapter of the national citizen action movement that Nader was spearheading. Ross promised that the new group “could investigate and bring pressure in such areas as the environment, automobile laws, equal employment opportunities for minorities – any area you’re concerned about.” VPIRG was launched the following year. There are now PIRGs in over 25 states.We spend the hour talking with Ralph Nader about the citizen action movement that he inspired and about his thoughts on politics today. We also speak with Paul Burns, who has been executive director of VPIRG for 22 years.Nader says that his legacy will be measured by “how many oak trees are planted. Meaning oak trees in the forest of democracy. We can't have enough of them. They're far too few, given the corporate supremacist and the corporate control as never before in our country's history. So we can look back with pleasure as to what has been achieved. But we've got to look forward and be very displeased about how much more there has to occur to subordinate corporate power to citizen power, constitutionally, statutorily, and in the minds of the people everywhere.”The preamble to the Constitution, Nader says, did “not [say] We the corporations. It was not We the Congress. It was We the people.”

Shortly after the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, progressive talk radio host Thom Hartmann introduced a new segment on his radio show on WDEV in Vermont. He invited then-Rep. Bernie Sanders on for a segment he dubbed “Brunch With Bernie.” The program featured Vermonters calling in to pepper Sanders with questions, and the representative took on all comers and all issues. The program was a hit, and Hartmann took “Brunch With Bernie” national when he moved his show to Air America and SiriusXM. These freewheeling national town halls, which aired for 11 years, introduced many people around the country to Sanders. “When people called who were hostile to Bernie, he was like, ‘Please, put them on, I want to talk to those people.’ The only people that we ever didn't put on the air where people were just obviously intoxicated or screaming obscenities — that would happen occasionally,” Hartmann said.“Whatever small role I may have played in not just helping make Bernie a national figure and a serious candidate for the presidency, but also — and I think this is the most important part — I believe that Bernie's candidacy, particularly in 2016, altered the course of American politics as one of the most consequential events of the last two or three decades.”Hartmann has been broadcasting for the past two decades on the radio, TV, online and satellite radio. He hosts a daily radio program and writes a column at The Hartmann Report, where he recently reported on the “nightmare scenario” of how the U.S. Supreme Court could subvert the 2024 election and the business of tracking and lying to pregnant people. Hartmann is a four-time winner of a Project Censored Award and he is the New York Times bestselling author of more than 30 books. His latest books are “The Hidden History of Neoliberalism” and “The Hidden History of Big Brother in America,” which were both published this year.

Becca Balint is on the cusp of making history. On Aug. 9, Balint decisively won the Democratic primary for Vermont’s at-large U.S. House seat, defeating Lt. Gov. Molly Gray by a margin of 24 points. If she wins the general election in November, Balint will become the first woman and the first openly gay person to represent Vermont in the U.S. Congress. Vermont is the only state that has never elected a woman to Congress. Becca Balint was born in a U.S. Army hospital in Germany where her father was stationed and grew up in upstate New York. She earned a Bachelor of Arts from Smith College, a master’s in education from Harvard and a master’s in history from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She came to Vermont in the 1990s to be a rock climbing instructor at the Farm and Wilderness Camp in Plymouth, where she met her future wife, attorney Elizabeth Wohl. Balint went on to become a middle school teacher and in 2014 was elected state senator from Windham County. She served as Senate majority leader and is currently the Senate president pro tempore. She, her wife and their two children live in Brattleboro.

In 2010, Debra Meyerson, 53, was a Stanford professor and avid skier, hiker and biker. But after dropping her oldest son off at college on Labor Day weekend, she had a severe stroke. In an instant, her life and her identity transformed. She could not speak and was partly paralyzed.Meyerson is one of 790,000 people annually who have a stroke, a leading cause of death and disability in the U.S.Deb Meyerson has regained her ability to communicate and move, both with difficulty. She wrote a book, “Identity Theft,” and together with her husband, Steve Zuckerman, a nonprofit executive, founded Stroke Onward, an organization that raises awareness and resources for stroke survivors and their supporters.This summer, Meyerson and Zuckerman took on another challenge: bicycling across the U.S. In June, they set off from California on a 4,300-mile journey that will end in Boston on Aug. 27. They were joined by other stroke survivors and people who have had brain injuries and aphasia, a life-altering language disorder that affects about 30% of people who have strokes. The group calls itself Stroke Across America, and they are riding to raise awareness about strokes and aphasia, and to call attention to the importance of emotional recovery after a stroke.Meyerson, Zuckerman and Whitney Hardy, a survivor of a traumatic brain injury, took time out during their 100-day ride to talk about their journey.Life after a stroke “requires an emotional journey,” said Zuckerman (his cousin is former Vermont Lt. Gov. and current candidate for Lt. Gov. David Zuckerman). “A big part of that is identity. It's figuring out who are you. And who do you want to be?”“This metaphor of cycling is an adaptive activity that enables us to continue to live the kind of life we want to live,” Zuckerman concluded.

Liam Madden handily won the Republican primary for Vermont’s lone U.S. House seat, defeating his two opponents by 8 points and 13 points respectively. He now faces Democrat Becca Balint in the November election.There’s just one problem: Madden has renounced the Republican party. The Vermont Republican Party has returned the favor and renounced Madden as its candidate. “The state party would not commit any resources toward (Madden’s) campaign due to his unwillingness to commit to caucusing with Republicans in Congress,” Vermont GOP Chair Paul Dame said.“I've been very upfront the entire election every single chance I get to speak to the public to say I'm an independent running in the Republican primary,” Madden told The Vermont Conversation. “The entire theme of my candidacy is to structurally, culturally and technologically create an alternative to the two party dominance of our political system, which I think is deeply dysfunctional. It's going to take a departure from this divisive, corrupt, oligarch-controlled and ultimately nonrepresentative and nonfunctional system.”Madden is a Marine Corps veteran who was a leader in Iraq Veterans Against the War. Since graduating from Northeastern University he has worked in the renewable energy field.Madden said that if elected, he will not caucus with either party. Asked how he would be effective in Congress, he said, “I would be courted quite strongly, I imagine, from both sides and I will give Vermonters an incredible amount of leverage.”Madden opposes many of the public health measures used to control the spread of covid, including mask mandates, vaccine requirements and lockdowns. “I would also question that these methods of protection that you claim are the gold standard are really as effective as this claim,” he said.Vermont currently limits abortion access. Madden said he is in favor of abortion rights but believes “it's reasonable to have the states make the decisions about what happens after 24 weeks.”Madden described his opponent, Vermont Senate President Pro Tempore Becca Balint, as “an incredibly intelligent and thoughtful, big hearted person. But she is also putting a kind face on a really broken system.”

Zayd Ayers Dohrn was born underground. His parents, Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, were leaders of the Weather Underground, the militant group that formed in 1969 to ignite a revolution in the U.S. and fight American imperialism and racism, sometimes violently. The FBI called Bernadine Dohrn "the most dangerous woman in America." The group backed bombings of the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon and the Department of State to bring attention to their cause. The only fatalities were three members of the Weather Underground who died in 1970 while making bombs in a Greenwich Village townhouse.Zayd Ayers Dohrn, 45, spent the first five years of his life on the run while underground with his parents. He tells the story of the Weather Underground in a riveting award-winning 10-part podcast, “Mother Country Radicals.” Dohrn is a playwright and professor at Northwestern University.I asked Dohrn how the Weather Underground differed from the pro-Trump insurrectionists who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. “The Weathermen were actually fighting systemic racism and a genocidal war. The Jan. 6 insurrectionists are white nationalists fighting for an authoritarian president who was literally sitting in the White House at that moment,” Dohrn replied. The Jan. 6 insurrectionists “were not a grassroots movement resisting oppressive government. They were literally a sort of a fascist putsch that was trying to keep this authoritarian president in office, contravening a democratic election. So I think it matters that one group was fighting for racism, one group is fighting against racism.”Reflecting on how his parents and the Weather Underground changed the country, Dohrn said: “In a broad sense, the American antiwar movement helped end the war in Vietnam. There are some people who think that there were the good activists — the peaceful people marching in the streets — and then the bad activists who were doing more violent actions. I don't really see it that way. I think the Black Panthers, the Weather Underground, the Black Liberation Army were on the extreme edge of a vast and powerful movement that was fighting to end an unjust war in America. And I think all of the activists involved in that, the peace activists and the radical activists, can take some credit for ending that war.”

Emi Nietfeld was like many high school seniors, dutifully filling out college applications. But unlike most other applicants, she was trying to get into an Ivy League school while writing college essays in the front seat of her Toyota Corolla, where she was living.Nietfeld’s family fell apart when her mother, who was a hoarder, could not care for her and put Emi on anti-psychotic medication rather than confront her own mental illness. Nietfeld’s other parent came out as transgender and disappeared from her life. Through a tumultuous childhood that included homelessness, foster care, eating disorders, suicide attempts, abuse and sexual assault, Nietfeld somehow kept her dream alive of attending a top college. She dreamed that it would be her ticket out of misery. She eventually attended Harvard and later worked at Google as a software engineer. She left Google after being sexually harassed by a supervisor, which she wrote about in an op-ed for the New York Times.Nietfeld — now 29, happily married and writing full time — survived against all odds. But she rejects the easy label of an “overcomer.” She wants her story to highlight the plight of others like her: 1 in 10 young adults experience homelessness, and LGBTQ+ youth have twice the risk of being unhoused.Nietfeld has a new book, “Acceptance,” which the New York Times describes as “a remarkable memoir” and “a detailed critique of the American fantasy that poverty, illness or any other adversity can be conquered through sheer grit and bootstrapping ingenuity.”“Instead of making a life that would redeem the past — an impossible feat — I sought out a life that I could live with,” Nietfeld wrote. “For the first time, I felt lucky for the little things: to wake up in the morning in my own bed, to eat breakfast, to do my work. It was no longer so important to me to achieve something great, because I was happy to be alive, which had seemed impossible and tenuous.”

When Michael Colburn was growing up in St. Albans, he dreamed of becoming a euphonium player in a band. He never imagined that the band would be “The President’s Own” United States Marine Band and that he would lead it for a decade, until 2014. As director of the nation’s top military ensemble, Colburn served as music adviser to the White House and regularly conducted the Marine Band and Chamber Orchestra at the Executive Mansion and at the presidential inaugurations of former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.Colburn is now returning to Vermont for a very different musical mission. He is taking the baton of the Me2 Orchestra in Burlington, which describes itself as “the world’s only classical music organization created for individuals with mental illnesses and the people who support them.” The community orchestra was founded in 2011 by conductor Ronald Braunstein, the first American to win the prestigious Karajan International Conducting Competition in Berlin in 1979. Braunstein was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and had to abandon his international conducting career, but he and Caroline Whiddon, co-founder and executive director of the orchestra, have created a stigma-free musical home for others with mental illness. Me2 has received extensive media coverage, including being the subject of a PBS documentary, "Orchestrating Change." Me2 now consists of two orchestras: one in Boston that Braunstein still conducts and the original Burlington ensemble now led by Colburn.Colburn has gone from conducting some of the finest musicians in the world to leading a Vermont group “that really welcomes all musicians without fear of being judged.”“Music can be an avenue of healing and a great resource for many who are struggling with mental issues,” he said.

Somewhere in America each week, two more newspapers call it quits. Some 2,500 dailies and weeklies have closed since 2005, and just 6,500 remain. In places where once there was vibrant local coverage, there are now news deserts.The Community News Service at The University of Vermont thinks it has an answer to this growing blight: student journalists. UVM’s Community News Service, or CNS, partners with nearly half of Vermont’s approximately 40 news outlets to provide them with reporting free of charge, including VTDigger.Now the Vermont model is going national. Last month, UVM and the Knight Foundation announced a $400,000 grant to launch the Center for Community News at UVM. The idea is for student reporters and other citizen journalists around the country to fill the local news void.We spoke with Richard Watts, coordinator of the Community News Service at UVM and director of the national Center for Community News; Lisa Scagliotti, founder and editor of Waterbury Roundabout, a new community news outlet; and Dom Minadeo, a UVM senior, assistant editor of The Winooski News and a reporter for CNS.Watts said that 1,300 communities around the country no longer have any local news coverage. “That's bad for democracy,” he said. “If you don't have a local news source, you don't know what's going on in your community, and it's very hard to engage … Research shows that losing local news increases divisions and polarization and undercuts all these important institutions that we believe in.”

“Children of sect seized in Vermont,” blared the headline on the front page of the New York Times on June 23, 1984. The newspaper reported, “About 140 state police officers and social service workers raided 20 homes near (Island Pond, Vermont) early this morning and took into custody 112 children of the Northeast Kingdom Community Church because members had refused to answer complaints about child abuse and neglect.” The case sparked national outrage and was quickly thrown out by a judge.Dean Pineles was legal counsel to former Gov. Richard Snelling at the time of the raid. He insists that the raid at Island Pond was justified. Pineles went on to a distinguished career as a Vermont trial judge and later presided over war crimes tribunals in Kosovo. He says that Kosovo provided a precedent that Russian President Vladimir Putin used to justify his invasion of Ukraine. He reflects on his globetrotting legal career in a new memoir, “A Judge's Odyssey: From Vermont to Russia, Kazakhstan, and Georgia, Then on to War Crimes and Organ Trafficking in Kosovo.”Pineles has traveled the world to issue justice, but he continues to grapple with the issues surrounding the infamous Island Pond case that he confronted as a young attorney in Vermont.“I would sit here with a heavy conscience if we had done nothing and had been faced with a dead child,” Pineles declared shortly after the Island Pond raid.Four decades later, Pineles stands by that decision. “I would rather be here defending what we did,” he said.

“Support our troops” is a familiar slogan heard when American troops are deployed abroad.But are returning soldiers supported when they return home? Nearly half of troops returning from post-9/11 deployments report having reintegration problems, almost double the number reported by earlier veterans. Former President Donald Trump tapped into this vein of discontent and won 60% of the veterans’ vote in 2016. Political radicalization among veterans has been a growing problem, and a shocking number of veterans were among the insurrectionists at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.Investigative reporter Jasper Craven has been exploring veterans’ and military issues for publications including the New York Times, Mother Jones, The Atlantic and VTDigger. In a 2018 investigative series for VTDigger, he exposed the toxic culture of the Vermont Air National Guard, leading to Gov. Phil Scott to call for a review of Guard policies. This spring, he wrote an expose for Mother Jones on neglect and abuse at Valley Forge Military Academy in Pennsylvania, a prestigious school that counts among its alumni Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, architect of the first Gulf War. Craven also writes a newsletter, Battle Borne, about veterans’ issues.Craven, who is originally from Vermont, has a new book, “Our Veterans: Winners, Losers, Friends, and Enemies on the New Terrain of Veterans Affairs,” co-written with Suzanne Gordon and Steve Early. The book explores the impact of military service and the challenges that veterans encounter when they return to civilian life. “The full cost of war has rarely been considered, or properly calculated, by architects of the forever warfare that continues today,” Craven and his co-authors concluded.