The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman

You never know where you will hear chamber music in Vermont. You could encounter a string quartet performing in a bookstore. In a café. At a bar. Or a retirement community.If it’s July, the musicians are likely to be participants in the Green Mountain Chamber Music Festival. Started in 2005, the festival attracts more than 200 young string musicians from high school to graduate school. The program is based at St. Michael’s College for a monthlong intensive of coaching, rehearsing and performing with a faculty of experienced teachers and performers. Then they take their talents on the road and perform classical music at venues all around downtown Burlington in a series they call Classical Encounters.The Vermont Conversation spoke with three of the musicians about their musical journeys and their hopes for the future. Andrés Celis is a 19-year-old cello player from Venezuela whose family fled his home and moved to the U.S. so he and his brother could pursue music. Jalayne Mitchell, 22, took refuge from a tumultuous home life by teaching herself cello. She then landed a scholarship to study at a conservatory in Scotland. Layla Morris, 19, is a cello player who grew up in Hinesburg and is now attending the renowned Oberlin Conservatory in Ohio. The Vermont Conversation also spoke with Elizabeth Chang, the artistic director of the Green Mountain Chamber Music Festival.For Mitchell, playing cello is about more than just music. “It meant safety to me. It meant … not having to survive,” she said. “A lot of my life I felt unsafe. The cello gives me that sense of safety that I have not experienced anywhere else. I can just explore what I want. … I can see what I’m capable of.”Podcast includes musical excerpts.

As countries around the world, including the U.S., confront rising authoritarianism, one country may offer insight into how democracy can triumph over minority rule.South Africa was supposed to go up in flames when Nelson Mandela became president in 1994. White people feared that the Black majority would take their revenge on those who long oppressed them.Instead, Mandela oversaw a peaceful transition to democracy. A quarter century after that negotiated transfer of power, a multiracial democracy took root and blossomed.I witnessed this remarkable democratic transformation when I reported from South Africa in the late 1990s and wrote a book about the transition from apartheid.Evan Lieberman offers a fresh take on South Africa’s journey to democracy in his new book, “Until We Have Won Our Liberty: South Africa After Apartheid.” Lieberman is a total professor of political science and contemporary Africa at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.“At this time when the idea of democracy is under assault, South Africa shows us that (democracy) is still a really promising and probably our best political solution, particularly in diverse societies,” Lieberman said. South Africa offers “a reminder that we can solve our problems through a combination of elections, good institutions, deliberation and a public spiritedness that is intrinsic to democratic practice.”

“If the public sees judges as politicians in robes, its confidence in the courts — and in the rule of law itself — can only diminish, diminishing the court’s power, including its power to act as a check on the other branches,” retired Justice Stephen Breyer warned last year.Many Supreme Court observers, and even its own dissenting justices, are wondering if what Breyer forewarned has now come to pass. The court has just issued a series of blockbuster decisions that mark it as the most conservative Supreme Court in a century. In the past month, the court struck down the constitutional right to abortion, weakened the government’s ability to address climate change, undermined gun regulations and enabled public funding of religious schools in a case that will have a direct impact on Vermont. These decisions advance longtime goals of Republicans, who appointed six of the court’s nine justices.Rodney Smolla has been analyzing and arguing before the Supreme Court for decades. On July 1, Smolla became the inaugural president of Vermont Law and Graduate School, formerly Vermont Law School. A longtime constitutional law professor and civil liberties litigator, Smolla has participated in a number of famous first amendment cases, including Hustler vs. Falwell, which was the subject of the 1996 movie, “The People Versus Larry Flynt.” He is the author of a textbook on defamation, numerous books and more than 100 articles. Prior to coming to Vermont, Smolla was dean and professor of law at Widener University Delaware Law School. He previously served as president of Furman University and was dean of the law schools at Washington and Lee University and at the University of Richmond.“I honestly never thought I would see (overturning Roe) happen in my lifetime.” Smolla said. The decision will be “enormously disruptive to women across the nation that are now going to be severely hampered in those states that have immediately banned abortion.”Smolla is concerned with “the willingness to overturn such a settled clinical precedent and to do it so quickly once there was a solid five justice conservative majority, to do it in the face of all of these various statements that some of the more recent appointees made that seemed to signal that they had respect for settled precedent.”Have the justices become politicians in robes? Smolla replied, “We’re perilously close to that.”

In the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade and end the constitutional right to an abortion, half of women in the U.S. live in states where they are at imminent risk of losing abortion access.Against this backdrop, Vermont is moving to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution. In November, Vermonters will vote on Proposal 5, the Reproductive Liberty Amendment, which states in part that “an individual’s right to personal reproductive autonomy is central to the liberty and dignity to determine one’s own life course and shall not be denied or infringed.” California voters are also considering a constitutional amendment to protect abortion rights this year.How will overturning Roe v. Wade change the landscape of abortion rights in Vermont and New England?For answers, we turned to two people who are on the front lines of the reproductive rights movement locally and nationally: Lucy Leriche, vice president of public policy for Vermont at Planned Parenthood of Northern New England, and James Duff Lyall, executive director of the Vermont chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.“It's pretty devastating to go to bed feeling like a person and wake up the next day and all of a sudden discover that your country does not consider you a person anymore,” Leriche said. “That you are a vessel. That your function is kind of analogous to livestock in terms of the kinds of rights that you have over your own body. It's very personal. It's devastating, and it's infuriating.”“We can't normalize any of this," Lyall said. Fighting for reproductive rights is "going to take voting. It's going to take organizing. It's going to take local, state and federal activism and engagement, and sustained political engagement. "That's what the right has done for a very long time and very successfully. … That's the only way forward.”Disclosure: David Goodman is a board member of the ACLU of Vermont.

When the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade on June 24, it left each state to decide its own abortion laws. Many Republican-led states are reverting to the anti-abortion laws that were on the books before 1973 when Roe legalized abortion.Vermont legalized abortion a year before Roe. In 1972, the Vermont Supreme Court overturned a 122 year-old law that made it a crime for a doctor to perform an abortion, though it was not against the law for someone to have one. In practice, this meant that someone could legally self-abort at their own peril, but a doctor who performed an abortion could be arrested and imprisoned for up to 20 years.The case that legalized abortion in Vermont featured “Jacqueline R.,” an unmarried server who wanted to end her pregnancy, and an OB/GYN resident at the University of Vermont named Jackson Beecham. After New York legalized abortion in 1970, Beecham, a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War, joined a small group of women’s health advocates in Burlington who were exploring ways to legalize abortion in the Green Mountain State. Attorney Willis “Woody” Higgins, a lawyer for IBM who volunteered to argue the case, advised the group that they needed two plaintiffs: a pregnant person who wanted an abortion and “a courageous doctor.” The prosecutor they faced was a young state's attorney, Patrick Leahy, and the landmark case that legalized abortion in Vermont was known as Beecham vs. Leahy.“I didn’t even think about winning or losing,” Beecham said of the case. He just felt “this is the right thing to do.” When the Vermont Supreme Court ruled for Beecham in January 1972, Beecham said, “I was floored.” Within a few months, legal abortions were being performed in Vermont.Beecham went on to a distinguished medical career as a gynecologic oncologist and cancer surgeon. He founded two gynecologic oncology programs at the cancer centers of the University of Rochester and at Dartmouth College, and he was a longtime associate professor at Dartmouth Medical School. Beecham, who is now 80 and lives in Shelburne, retired from practicing medicine in 2008. He continues to be a champion of reproductive rights and is a strong advocate for Proposal 5, which would make Vermont the first state in the country to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution if it is approved by voters in November.Beecham reflected on his role in legalizing abortion in Vermont.“I was honored to spend four decades in women’s health as a cancer surgeon. But I think … getting this law changed is the single most important thing I ever did. I’m still moved by it. I’m very, very grateful that I could be part of helping others,” he said.He said that he is “just horrified” that the U.S. Supreme Court has returned the country to where it was before Roe vs. Wade. “I’ll be on the sidelines, fighting like everyone else that feels in support of women,” Beecham said.

Bill McKibben thought he knew where he came from. He grew up in the tidy, affluent and predominantly white suburban community of Lexington, Massachusetts. As a teenager, he gave tours on the Lexington Battle Green, regaling visitors with tales about the opening shots of the American Revolution. He thought the United States was the greatest force for good in the world.Fifty years later, McKibben, now 61, has a very different perspective. He sees a world riven by racial and economic inequality. He has dedicated his life to stopping the climate crisis, a human-caused disaster that his generation has done much to create. The big question on McKibben’s mind today is this: What the hell happened?Bill McKibben tackles this question in his new book, “The Flag, The Cross, and the Station Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back at His Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened.” McKibben lives in Ripton, Vermont, and is the author of more than a dozen other books, including “The End of Nature,” which was the first book to warn the general public about the climate crisis. He is a regular contributor to the New Yorker, writes a blog about the climate crisis called The Crucial Years and founded the global grassroots climate campaign 350.org. He was 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 over 60 for progressive change.

When Erica Heilman heard about the death by suicide of 17-year-old Finn Rooney, she initially recoiled from telling the story. It was too raw. But Heilman, an independent podcaster and the creator of Rumble Strip, lives by the credo, “good conversation takes its time.” So she patiently waited and continued talking with Rooney’s mother. The story that evolved was not about suicide. It was about how the family and the Hardwick community grieved and healed together. The podcast that she crafted is called “Finn and the Bell.” It is an intimate and unforgettable portrait of love and loss.Last week, Heilman won a Peabody Award for the podcast, the highest award in broadcast journalism. “A Peabody is like an Oscar wrapped in an Emmy inside a Pulitzer,” said Stephen Colbert, a multiple Peabody Award winner.Heilman’s award is notable because she is an independent producer who, as she likes to say, makes podcasts in her closet. Rumble Strip, which she founded in 2013, is a one-woman operation. That’s not the typical profile of her fellow Peabody winners this year, who include longtime host of NPR’s Fresh Air Terry Gross, former CBS anchor Dan Rather, and other well-known media figures and institutions.Heilman has a history of punching above her weight. Rumble Strip was named the No. 1 podcast of 2020 by The Atlantic, ahead of podcasts produced by the Washington Post and the New Yorker, to name a few.Heilman is a self-taught podcaster. She was born in Vermont but left to study musical theater at the University of Michigan. She then landed an entry-level job at PBS' MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour and continued to work as a freelance television producer around New York. That wasn’t paying the bills, so she moved back to Vermont and took a job as a private investigator. She began producing her distinctive Rumble Strip podcasts on the side, relying on listener donations to support it. Rumble Strip podcasts now air on Vermont Public Radio and at rumblestripvermont.com.The Peabody Awards praised Heilman’s work on "Finn and the Bell" as “subtle, thoughtful, and gorgeous.” “Heilman’s important work serves as a reminder of what we stand to lose with the ongoing crisis in local news,” the Peabody Award announcement stated. “Local media institutions aren’t just responsible for holding the powerful accountable and shedding light on injustice; they’re also there to simply document life around them, to act as the institutional memory for the people they serve. They reflect communities back to themselves, forging the shared bond felt with each other through joys as much as tragedies.”Heilman continually looks for ways to build community. Alongside her podcasting, her newest project is to help create a “mobile cultural center” in Hardwick called The Civic Standard.Heilman wants her work to dignify the lives of ordinary people. “My hope is that … people I've talked to have felt seen,” she said.“It makes me very happy to introduce Vermonters to each other who might never meet, where you can see yourself in that person,” Heilman said on The Vermont Conversation. “If I achieve that, I feel I've done something perhaps useful.”

The students graduating from Vermont’s high schools this year are extraordinary in many ways. For most of high school, they have been on the frontlines of a global pandemic. They attended school from their bedrooms. They had to find the strength to forge connection and community while enduring personal isolation. They returned to school wearing masks to keep each other and their families safe as the pandemic raged around them. Now, like young people everywhere, they dream of a brighter future — and are actively building it. They are the ones we have been waiting for.On this Vermont Conversation, we speak with five remarkable members of the class of 2022. Ava Thurston from Harwood Union High School has been Vermont state champion in both cross-country skiing and running in all four years of high school, won the U18 national championships in cross-country skiing this year, and aspires to ski in the Olympics. Yahir Ramirez from Bellows Free Academy in St. Albans is the son of Mexican farmworkers in Vermont who volunteers with Migrant Justice, and he soon will attend Harvard. Addie Lentzner from Arlington Memorial High School helped prod Gov. Phil Scott to extend emergency housing for people experiencing homelessness during the pandemic. Kiara Mack of Winooski High School is an all-star soccer player and team captain who confronted racism directed at student-athletes. Sawyer Totten is a transgender student and LGBTQ+ leader who inspired peers from around the state to walk out and speak out to protest the national wave of anti-trans legislation.These students have made a lasting mark on their communities. Now, they are heading out to change the world.For Ramirez, who will be a first-generation college student when he attends Harvard, graduating Bellows Free Academy “really means a lot to the family because it really just shows that we're able to do it. … My background or my color, it doesn't limit me.”Kiara Mack says that she struggled to get through high school until she finally felt she was being heard. Then she emerged as a student leader against racism. “I'm proud of the impact I have on people. I have a lot of younger students who I try to steer more in the right path because I feel that I can connect with them on a different level,” she said. “I'm really happy with the imprint I've left on my school and who I am being seen as I am graduating.”

How did abortion rights become a battlefront in the culture wars?Felicia Kornbluh has been a participant observer in the fight for reproductive justice. Kornbluh is a professor of history and of gender, sexuality and women's studies at The University of Vermont. She is also chair of the board of the Planned Parenthood of Vermont Action Fund. Kornbluh’s work to advance reproductive justice carries on the tradition of her mother, an attorney and who was a key player legalizing abortion in New York in 1970. Kornbluh chronicles her mother’s activism journey in a forthcoming book, “A Woman’s Life Is a Human Life: My Mother, Our Neighbor, and the Journey from Reproductive Rights to Reproductive Justice in New York and the Nation.”The day after Politico leaked the Supreme Court draft opinion with the bombshell news that Roe v. Wade would likely be overturned, Kornbluh wrote an article for the American Prospect titled “Advice to Progressive Menfolk.” Kornbluh began her piece with the admonition, “Don’t you dare be surprised.”Speaking of the forces that have aligned to make abortion illegal, Kornbluh told the Vermont Conversation, “This is a crowd of people who really just aren't that happy with the 20th century. … They want to incapacitate the federal government. They don't want to engage in federal taxation that takes money away from some people and gives it to other people. Those were 19th century legal ideas. I think that's very, very dangerous.”As abortion rights hang precariously in the balance, Kornbluh sees an opportunity. “I don't want to sugarcoat the situation that we're in right now, but I'm optimistic in two ways,” she said. “One is that in the 1960s and 1970s, it was not easy to win abortion rights or other reproductive rights. It was a very hard fight, but it was an effective fight. And I think every time we look at a really ambitious social movement in American history, we see that the organizing really works. When people come together from diverse backgrounds, and they give it everything they got, they win.”

Has rural America turned a permanent shade of red? Or have Democrats abandoned rural voters, competing only in cities?Chloe Maxmin has been pioneering a new style of progressive politics in conservative, rural Maine — and winning, earning her national attention. Maxmin is a climate activist who graduated from Harvard in 2015, where she and classmate Canyon Woodward co-founded Divest Harvard, a climate action group. In 2018, Maxmin returned to her rural Maine county and twice flipped a Republican seat — first for state representative and then defeating the highest-ranking Republican in Maine. She was the youngest female state senator in Maine’s history. Woodward was the campaign manager for Maxmin’s successful 2018 and 2020 campaigns.Maxmin and Woodward have teamed up to share their story and give some tough-love advice to Democrats about why they’ve lost rural voters and how they can win them back. Their new book is “Dirt Road Revival: How to Rebuild Rural Politics and Why Our Future Depends on It.”“We need a Democratic Party that can inspire and support such campaigns in which political power is rooted in community, based in relationships, and built to last,” Maxmin and Woodward wrote. “There is power in the untold stories of rural people, in their frustration and search for a better life, in the wisdom that dwells at the crossroads of independence and interdependence."

A tsunami of censorship is sweeping across America. In 2021, there were attempts to remove nearly 1,600 books from libraries, schools and universities — a four-fold increase over 2019, according to the American Library Association. Censorship typically focuses on books that cover LGBTQ+ issues or race and racism.But is censorship sometimes necessary? The alleged gunman who killed 10 people in Buffalo used social media to livestream his attack and to post his racist rants. How should social media companies control misinformation and hate speech? Should former President Donald Trump be allowed to use Twitter and other social media platforms even though he has used the medium to spread election lies and stoke violence?Christopher Finan has been grappling with these issues for 35 years. He is executive director of the National Coalition Against Censorship and former president of the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression. Struggles over free speech date back to the founding of the country, he said, and he chronicles the changing nature of censorship in his new book, “How Free Speech Saved Democracy: The Untold History of How the First Amendment Became an Essential Tool for Securing Liberty and Social Justice.”Freedom of speech is an essential part of democracy, according to Finan. "We will have free speech as long as we're willing to fight for it," he said, "and this is a time to fight."

Abortion may soon be outlawed in much of the United States.If the U.S. Supreme Court overturns the landmark 1973 decision, Roe v. Wade, 28 states are poised to ban or further limit abortion access. This would end nearly a half century during which reproductive rights were constitutionally protected.Melinda Moulton vividly remembers the days before abortion was legal. She was 12 years old when her mother died after a botched hysterectomy, a result not having access to safe abortion care.Before abortion was legal, people with unwanted pregnancies like her mother “were shamed. They lived in fear. Imagine how that traumatized a woman at a young age. A lot of women died and took their own lives by self-induced abortions or back alley abortions,” she said.The threat that abortion may once again be illegal in many part of the country “is a blatant attack on the health and safety and welfare and lives of many, many women,” Moulton said. “If a woman becomes pregnant, and she does not or is not able to carry that child for whatever reason, then she's going to probably try to find a way to end the pregnancy. And it's going to be really horrific for women in this country.”Moulton, now 72, has been a lifelong advocate for women’s rights. Moulton has served on the board of Planned Parenthood of Northern New England, been a member of the Vermont Commission on Women, helped lead the 2017 Vermont Women’s March and is currently vice president of the board of the ACLU of Vermont. She recently retired as CEO of Main Street Landing, a developer of the Burlington waterfront.“Women deserve to have the right to determine what happens to their bodies. And what's happening in this country is that we have a political party that is basically saying that as long as it's in your body, we control you,” Moulton said.“This is not about the unborn. This is about control over women. It just reminds me a little bit of the Taliban,” she said.Moulton is now working to help pass Proposal 5, which will enshrine reproductive rights in the Vermont constitution.Moulton said that Prop 5 will send a message to women around the country. “Know that Vermont is here and we will provide you with safe, affordable … reproductive health care,” she said.

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.”

Could feeling bad be essential to feeling good?That’s the contention of clinical psychologist and neuroscientist Tracy Dennis-Tiwary. She is a professor of psychology at Hunter College of the City University of New York, where she directs the Emotion Regulation Lab. She is the author of a new book, "Future Tense: Why Anxiety Is Good For You (Even Though It Feels Bad)."Anxiety and depression are the focus of intense interest as the country grapples with the mental health fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic. The Surgeon General has warned that young people are facing a devastating mental health crisis.Dennis-Tiwary argues that the anxiety-as-disease story is false. She says that anxiety is not the problem — it’s how we cope with it. She encourages people to embrace “a new mindset about anxiety — a fresh set of beliefs, insights and expectations that allows you to explore anxiety, learn from it and leverage it to your advantage.” She discusses anxiety and how to use it as a tool.

In 1820, The Emancipator became the first newspaper in the country devoted exclusively to the cause of abolishing slavery. It was published in Tennessee, a slave state. Other abolitionist newspapers followed, such as The Liberator, published by famous Boston abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, and The North Star, the anti-slavery newspaper founded and edited by abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass.Today, The Emancipator rises again. This modern version is a multimedia collaboration with The Boston Globe’s Opinion team and Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research.“Just as abolitionist publications in the 19th century called for the end of the enslavement of Black people, The Emancipator will amplify big ideas and solutions for achieving a racially just society,” Amber Payne and Deborah Douglas, co-editors-in-chief of The Emancipator, wrote in their introductory essay.Payne tells The Vermont Conversation that there is a difference between reporting about race and journalism that is intentionally anti-racist.“I think about reporting on racism and race (is) reporting the facts, getting the story down," Payne said. By contrast, "Anti-racist journalism (is) centering the right voices in a story, centering those that are most impacted and empowering them to tell their story.”“I don't know that we're trying to change people's minds,” Douglas said. “What we're trying to do is have a dialogue to give people the context to think about how they're implicated in the American project. So we can offer information that partially validates some of what they think but offers better information. Or we can just blow them out of the water with straight facts about how it’s different, or we can offer our own personal stories or allow our contributors to offer their personal stories and their own lived experience and just really flood the public conversation with a whole new set of narratives that previously there hadn't been much room made for. By taking up space, and giving people the opportunity to at least hear a different story or a different side of the story, then possibly we can embark upon this narrative change that we hope to effect.”“We're in this shared mission drawing from that abolitionist spirit of this multiracial and diverse movement where there's shared equity around one focus," Payne said.She hopes readers of this modern abolitionist newspaper “feel equipped to maybe have that conversation with their neighbor or their father or anybody (who) they felt a bit uncomfortable about and uninformed about when it comes to racial and social justice and equity, but they feel like they can have that conversation and have a better understanding.”

When residents of Wuhan, China, began mysteriously falling ill in December 2019, the Chinese government quickly moved to quash news about the disease outbreak. That crackdown on information proved to be the perfect accelerant for the Covid-19 pandemic to take off and spread throughout the world.Censorship has been a deadly component of the pandemic, asserts Joel Simon, who is co-author with Robert Mahoney of “The Infodemic: How Censorship and Lies Made the World Sicker and Less Free.” Simon is a fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at the Columbia Journalism School and the former executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists. “Instead of communicating openly with citizens, governments suppressed critical information or actively misled or confused their citizens, a strategy that has been dubbed ‘censorship through noise,’” Simon and Mahoney argued. “Alongside the Covid-19 pandemic, there was an infodemic, a deluge of lies, distortion, and bungled communication that obliterated the truth.”

Lois Gibbs knew something was not right when her 5-year-old son began having seizures. She soon discovered the local school and playground in Niagara Falls, New York, was built on a toxic waste dump known as Love Canal. It was 1977. Gibbs soon transformed from a suburban housewife into a crusading activist who changed the face of the national environmental movement and whose work led to the creation of the federal superfund program. Love Canal has become synonymous with corporate greed and toxic pollution. Hooker Chemical, the largest employer in Niagara Falls, had been dumping highly toxic waste in the working-class community since the 1940s. The company covered the polluted landfill with dirt and sold it to the city’s board of education for $1, and a school was soon built on the site. Hundreds of community members and schoolchildren were poisoned, and some died. Echoes of the Love Canal saga can be felt today in communities including Bennington, where local residents just reached a $34 million settlement with Saint-Gobain, a multinational plastics company which, along with previous owner ChemFab, operated a plant that was responsible for contaminating the soil and water. On April 21, Gov. Phil Scott signed a law giving people who have been exposed to toxic chemicals the right to sue responsible companies for the cost of monitoring their health. The Love Canal story is told in a new book, “Paradise Falls: The True Story of an Environmental Catastrophe,” by New York Times bestselling author Keith O’Brien, a former reporter for the Boston Globe.

Jane Mayer has earned a reputation as one of the country’s top investigative reporters. As chief Washington correspondent for The New Yorker, Mayer has been relentless in exposing the hidden forces shaping American politics. Her bestselling book, “Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right,” documents the vast influence of the Koch brothers and was named one of the 10 best books of 2016 by the New York Times. In the past year, Mayer has exposed the right-wing funders behind former President Donald Trump’s big lie of a stolen election. She reported how Ginni Thomas secretly supported the Jan. 6 insurrection as her husband, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, considered cases that involved her. And this month she exposed the shadowy conservative organization that smeared Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson in a failed attempt to derail her Supreme Court confirmation. Mayer often provokes the ire of those she exposes. The Koch Brothers hired investigators to smear her, and the subject of her most recent exposé tweeted her personal contact information in an attempt to intimidate her. Mayer worked at the Wall Street Journal before joining the New Yorker in 1995. She has won numerous awards for her reporting. Esquire called Mayer “quite simply one of the very few, utterly invaluable journalists this country has.” Disclosure: Jane Mayer serves on the board of the Vermont Journalism Trust, the parent organization of VTDigger.

From Brattleboro to Newport and beyond, a crisis is brewing in the Green Mountains. Housing, especially affordable housing, is desperately hard to find.“The state would have to build a minimum of 5,800 homes and apartments by 2025, and more than triple that to address the broader affordability crisis,” Seven Days reported, noting that the growth of Vermont’s housing stock has fallen to one third its 1980s levels. Solving the housing crisis is “going to take both public investment to bring the price down and it's also going to take less barriers in terms of our land use policies to get housing built,” said Gus Seelig, executive director of the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board.An unspoken driver of the affordable housing shortage, Seelig said, “has been the growth of income inequality as a key factor in leaving folks behind. … It doesn't take a lot of people coming to Vermont with a ton of money to have a big impact on the housing crisis.”We discussed the housing crisis and efforts to address it with Seelig and Elizabeth Bridgewater, executive director of the Windham and Windsor Housing Trust in Brattleboro.

Transgender Vermont educator responds to Fox News attack with ‘love and light’Laws targeting LGBTQ+ people are proliferating across the country. Some 240 anti-LGBTQ+ bills have so far been filed — more than three per day — mostly targeting transgender people,.In Idaho, Texas and Alabama, Republican leaders have passed laws criminalizing transgender health care, while Florida has banned discussions of LGBTQ+ issues in elementary school in a law that critics dub the “Don’t Say Gay” bill.Vermont is also under anti-trans attack. On April 6, conservative Fox News host Laura Ingraham aired a segment titled “Groom & Doom,” which singled out a webinar offered in February by the Burlington School District titled “Let’s Talk About Gender Identity and Expression.” The webinar was led by Nikki Ellis, an assistant principal at Edmunds Middle School who is transgender. Ingraham charged that middle school students are “bombarded by efforts to undo any semblance of traditional values that their parents might have taught them.”In the days following the broadcast, Ellis and the Burlington schools were flooded with hate mail. Burlington School Superintendent Tom Flanagan denounced the attacks, reassuring LGBTQ+ community members that “we care about them and that we are here for them.” Anti-LGBTQ+ attacks are not limited to schools. The head of the Burlington Republican Party, who has a history of making transphobic social media posts, tweeted out photos of Vermont legislators who support a transgender rights bill and labeled each of them a “groomer.”On Tuesday, transphobia took a deadly turn when a trans woman was killed in Morristown.“It's sad and unfortunate that being transgender or being queer is being compared to sexual abuse and pedophilia because being who you are in your identity as a queer person doesn't mean that you're trying to impose on anyone else,” Ellis told The Vermont Conversation. “The reality is that there are traumas and turmoil and abuse that happen for kids across all identities and all experiences and all communities. But that's completely unrelated to, you know, being LGBTQ+.”Rep. Taylor Small, Vermont’s first openly transgender legislator, said the anti-trans backlash comes at a time when LGBTQ+ people are winning legal protection in Vermont. “Last year, we were able to pass a bill to ban the LGBTQ+ ‘panic’ defense. And just last week, the governor signed a bill to make it easier for transgender and nonbinary people to amend their birth certificates to see themselves and their identity reflected on their vital records.”Ellis is unbowed by the transphobic attacks. They responded to critics with an invitation: “Hey, Laura Ingraham, I'd love to take you out for coffee or dinner. And I'd love to be able to have an opportunity for you to see me for who I am, the person that I am, the passions that I have and the way that I care deeply about my community. And to everybody else out there, the love that I have and the love of this work is unconditional. And that means that we will just continue to wrap ourselves, wrap other queer folks up in love and light.”

How did leading Republicans go from being Cold Warriors to apologists for Russian President Vladimir Putin? For insight, we turned to Stuart Stevens, who knows Republican politics from the inside. He was a top Republican political operative who worked on five presidential campaigns, including the campaigns of Mitt Romney in 2012 and George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004. Stevens, who lives in Vermont, now finds himself inside a very different political operation. He is a central player in the anti-Trump Lincoln Project and argues that the current Republican Party should be “burned to the ground.” His latest bestselling book is, “It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump.”Stevens tells The Vermont Conversation, “I think that there is a large element of the conservative movement that has become a pro-Putin autocratic movement. … Donald Trump did not change the Republican Party. He revealed it. And for those of us who worked in the Republican Party for a long time, it's a devastating conclusion. But I think it's the only honest one.”“We have an autocratic movement in America that is threatening democracy itself,” Stevens said. “They'll be for democracy when they win and they won't be for it when they lose. That means you're not a democracy. And if we don't wake up and face this, we're going to lose democracy.”

The Vermont Land Trust, founded in 1977, is one of the oldest and largest land conservation groups in the country. It has helped protect more than 620,000 acres in Vermont, comprising about 11% of the state.The land trust began with a simple goal of conserving land and supporting farmers. But with heightened awareness about equity and racial justice today, things are not so simple.Who can claim the right to land that was stolen from Indigenous people? How has racism shaped who owns land? How can land conservation help combat climate change?Last year, the Vermont Land Trust received a $6 million grant from the Vermont Community Foundation and High Meadows Fund to diversify farm ownership and address climate solutions, of which $2 million is “to expand land ownership and access among people who have been historically marginalized or oppressed based on their race or ethnicity.”This grant, the largest of its kind in Vermont, raises challenging questions, concedes Nick Richardson, president and CEO of the land trust since 2017.“When a white-led organization like ours is the recipient from a white-led foundation of funding that's meant to be directed towards BIPOC land sovereignty work, that's the indication of a problem,” he said, referring to Vermonters who are Black, Indigenous and people of color. “It shows how far we have to go as a state in terms of meeting our goals and … commitments that we should all make around BIPOC racial equity and justice. And that's really uncomfortable and hard work. And we're really committed to it.”

Education is the new frontline in America’s culture wars.In Florida, teaching about LGBTQ+ issues has become a flashpoint. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis recently surrounded himself with smiling elementary school children as he signed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill that bars discussion of sexual orientation or gender identity in the state’s primary schools.Teaching about racism is also now perilous. At least 36 states have passed or proposed laws or policies that restrict the teaching of race or racism.At the heart of this culture war is a struggle over who controls education. As a result of recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions loosening restrictions on funding religious schools, some states are enacting policies permitting public funding of private schools, including religious schools. The Vermont Senate recently passed S.219 to restrict public funding for religious schools. But critics, including former Vermont Education Secretary Rebecca Holcombe, fear that Vermont may unwittingly establish a precedent that conservative legal groups will take to the U.S. Supreme Court in an effort to knock down the wall between secular and religious education.I spoke with Holcombe and Derek Black, a professor of law at the University of South Carolina and a leading expert on education law and policy, about the implications of allowing public funds to pay for private and religious education.“The Supreme Court is moving toward a doctrine that suggests … that you can't exclude religion and that the state really can't control its dollars once they enter the private sector,” Black said.If that happens, he said liberal states may simply end programs to pay tuition for some students to attend private schools, while other states may “run wild” with public support of religious schools.“We may be leading to a tale of two different countries when it comes to public education and privatization in America,” Black said.

Ski mountaineer Kit DesLauriers skied off the summit of Mount Everest into history. DesLauriers is the first person to ski from the so-called Seven Summits, the highest peak on every continent. Her 2006 descent of Everest capped a string of firsts: She was the first woman to ski the Vinson Massif, the highest mountain in Antarctica, and Mt. Aspiring in New Zealand. She also made the first female solo ski descent of Grand Teton in Wyoming. A two-time Freeskiing World Tour champion, National Geographic named her an Adventurer of the Year in 2015. DesLauriers was formally inducted into the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame this week, following her election in 2019.Kit DesLauriers is the mother of two daughters with her husband, Rob DesLauriers, whose family runs the Bolton Valley ski area in Vermont. She is the author of a memoir, Higher Love: Skiing the Seven Summits, which was reissued last year. She is a member of The North Face global athlete team, the board of the Alaska Wilderness League and the riders team of the climate action group Protect Our Winters. I spoke with her from her home in Jackson, Wyoming.

Countries around the world are debating how to respond to the unfolding humanitarian and political crisis in Ukraine. Few people have more intimate knowledge into the thinking of the Washington national security establishment than David Sanger. Sanger is a senior writer for the New York Times covering the White House and national security. He is a three-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, a CNN expert analyst and the author of three bestselling books, the most recent of which is The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage and Fear in the Cyber Age, which was also an HBO documentary by the same title.Sanger recently wrote about possible end game scenarios in Ukraine. “I think you can make a persuasive case that Vladimir Putin is going to end this conflict in a lot worse strategic position than he began it,” he told The Vermont Conversation. “Three weeks ago, we were thinking that Russia's military was 10 feet tall. We now think they're kind of the gang that couldn't shoot straight. We thought that Putin was a master strategist. We now think he bit off more than he could chew … and underestimated the Ukrainians and overestimated his own power. We thought that he was trying to split up NATO, and he ended up reaffirming NATO's power. These are all pretty big mistakes he made.”What is the mood among American national security leaders? “Worried that this war is going to spread to involve us,” Sanger said. “Even if the chances are 15 or 20 or 25 percent, that's pretty significant. Worried that the humanitarian disaster is going to continue for some time. Worried the American attention to this could flag.”Sanger also discussed his 40-year career at the Times and how he has periodically covered Washington from his home in Vermont.

In 2021, the Vermont Legislature issued a long overdue apology for Vermont’s early 20th century state-sanctioned eugenics movement, which targeted Indigenous people and other groups. According to VTDigger, “The eugenics movement used forced sterilizations and other practices in an attempt to wipe out targeted populations who were deemed unfit to procreate, including Indigenous people, French Canadians, mixed-race people, people with disabilities and low-income families, among others.”In issuing the formal apology, Senate President Pro Tempore Becca Balint declared, “This is a moment for grief, but it’s also a moment for growth.”The apology left unspoken how to undo the harm. Now, a bill in the Vermont House, H. 96, proposes that Vermont establish a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to examine what happened and possible reparations. We talk with Rep. Tom Stevens, chair of the House Committee on General, Housing and Military Affairs, and a sponsor of the bill, and Virginie Ladisch, a senior expert at International Center for Transitional Justice.“We’re trying to build something that represents the beginning of a longer conversation between those of us who are part of the system and the people that we’re needing to listen to during this process,” says Rep. Stevens.

Why did Russia invade Ukraine? What motivates Vladimir Putin? What do Russians believe about the war?To help cut through the fog of war and explain the back story behind Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, we turned to Russia expert Will Pyle. He is Frederick C. Dirks Professor of International Economics at Middlebury College and an affiliate of the programs in International Politics and Economics and Russian and East European Studies. Pyle says that Putin “viewed the breakup of the Soviet Union as the greatest tragedy of the 20th century.” He adds that “very rarely do empires break up peacefully … What we're seeing now is the conflict associated with an imperial breakup, where the imperial center says, 'No, we're not going to allow the periphery, these colonies, to go their own way without a fight.'”Pyle recently wrote in the Washington Post about the attitudes of ordinary Russians. He tells The Vermont Conversation, “Russians’ willingness to sacrifice material wellbeing for national foreign policy goals is much greater than citizens in other countries.” However, he is less optimistic about “their willingness to tolerate body bags and economic costs imposed by the sanctions, [which] are going to be really brutal.”“That willingness of the Russian public to tolerate sacrifice — it's not unlimited,” he said.

The world has been watching in horror at the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Author and environmental activist Bill McKibben argues that this is a war fueled by fossil fuels. He writes in The Guardian, “If you want to stand with the brave people of Ukraine, you need to find a way to stand against oil and gas.”McKibben is the co-founder of the global climate justice group 350.org, and Third Act, a new group focused on activism by older Americans. He says that the way to bring down “petrostate autocrats” like Vladimir Putin is for the U.S. and Europe to quickly slash their dependence on fossil fuels.“President Biden should immediately invoke the Defense Production Act to get American manufacturers to start producing electric heat pumps in quantity, so we can ship them to Europe where they can be installed in time to dramatically lessen Putin’s power,” urges McKibben. In the same week that the Russian invasion has been unfolding, the world’s top scientists released a climate change report that it characterized as “an atlas of human suffering.”I talked with McKibben about the confluence of war and climate change, and ways to confront both urgent crises.

When Alex Belth went on a first date with Emily Shapiro, he was smitten. He had finally met the woman of his dreams, and he imagined a life together filled with romance and kids. The were married in 2007, five years after that date.Belth, now 50, and Shapiro, 49, remain deeply in love. But their life has been very different from what they first imagined. Shapiro has struggled with chronic illness, and Belth has been her caregiver. At the age of 22, Emily developed Crohn’s disease, an incurable autoimmune condition that affects the digestive system. Shortly after they married, she was diagnosed with chronic migraines and a spatial management disorder in which her eyes don’t work with each other.Caring for loved ones with chronic illness has taken on new urgency during the Covid-19 pandemic. Of some 80 million Americans – and over 111,000 Vermonters -- who have been infected with Covid-19, some 10 to 30 percent of them will likely experience long-term chronic symptoms known as long Covid. Many people with the condition encounter frustrating barriers to getting effective care. Vermont Health Commissioner Mark Levine said on the Vermont Conversation in December 2021 that he predicts “a pandemic of long Covid.” Instead of enduring their health challenges in silence, Belth and Shapiro have chosen to live their lives out loud – literally. Belth, an editor at Esquire magazine, and Shapiro, a former emergency room unit secretary who now has a practice in energy healing, have released a new Audible Original audio book, Here I Are: Anatomy of a Marriage. It consists of their candid conversations about love, sex, romance and life with chronic illness. They recorded the book in their home in Bristol, Vermont, where they moved in April 2020 after years in New York City.“A lot of this stuff isn’t talked about so readily,” says Shapiro. “If someone else can feel a little bit better about themselves identifying with these universal themes, that's potent for me.”

Fifty years ago, a burglary took place at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate office complex in Washington, D.C. What seemed like a petty crime spiraled into a conspiracy and coverup that led to the downfall of President Richard Nixon. A half century later, the echoes of that scandal still reverberate as Congress investigates the alleged crimes and coverups of another president, Donald Trump.Vermont author Garrett Graff reexamines the scandal that would shape all others in his new book, Watergate: A New History. Graff is a journalist and historian who has spent nearly two decades covering politics, technology and national security. He has served as editor of Politico and Washingtonian magazines, and he has contributed to Rolling Stone, New York Times, CNN and numerous other media. His previous books include the New York Times bestseller, “The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11,” and “The Threat Matrix: Inside Robert Mueller’s FBI and the War on Global Terror.” Graff is currently the director of cyber initiatives for The Aspen Institute.“Watergate is the most fascinating story ever told of how power unfolds in Washington, because no single institution — the media, the Justice Department, the House, the Senate — is able to force Richard Nixon from office,” Graff says. “Instead, it's this incredibly complex relationship of checks and balances … that is required in order to force a corrupt and criminal president from office."Unlike today, both Democrats and Republicans in Congress played a role in policing the Nixon presidency in order to maintain the balance of power, Graff says. "The Republican Party sort of had a sense of outrage that was not in evidence in either of the Trump impeachments.”Graff is concerned that the country has not learned the lessons of Watergate. “I think we are headed for a deeply grave crisis in our democracy. And it's not at all clear to me that America has the wherewithal or the courage to avoid that future right now.”

As the Covid-19 pandemic enters its third year, its impacts have fallen especially hard on young people. In December 2021, the U.S. Surgeon General warned of “devastating” mental health effects on youth, noting that there were significant increases in self-reports of depression, anxiety, and a 51 percent increase in emergency room visits for suicide attempts by adolescent girls in early 2021.Mentorship programs have long offered a way for young people to tackle challenges with the help of caring adults. Young people with mentors are half as likely to skip school and 55% percent more likely to attend college, according to MENTOR, an advocacy group.We explore mentorship with leaders of Vermont’s mentoring programs: Chad Butt of MENTOR Vermont, Kimberly Diamond of Big Brothers Big Sisters of Vermont, Beth Wallace of Everybody Wins Vermont, Kim Smith of Girls Boyz First Mentoring, and Pam Quinn of Twinfield Together. We also talk with a mentor and her 15-year-old mentee from Central Vermont about the impact of their partnership.

In a Winter Olympics filled with iconic moments, one was especially poignant: Vermont skier Ryan Cochran-Siegle, who stunned the ski world by roaring down the mountain to a second place finish in the Super G, FaceTiming with his mother Barbara Ann Cochran at the finish of his run. The two were laughing and crying. Ryan had won his Olympic silver medal almost 50 years to the day after his mother won an Olympic gold medal in slalom at the 1972 Winter Olympics in Sapporo, Japan.Cochran-Siegle’s feat marks a new chapter in the story of the Skiing Cochrans, Vermont’s First Family of Skiing. Six members of the Cochran family have skied in the Olympics. Mickey and Ginny Cochran opened Cochran’s Ski Area in 1961 in their backyard in Richmond, Vermont. The beloved ski area is now a nonprofit where generations of Vermonters have learned to ski.Barbara Ann Cochran, 71, watched her son’s silver medal run streaming on her computer at her home in Starksboro. In the hours that followed, the publicity-shy mother and grandmother has appeared alongside her son on the Today Show, among numerous other media. Ryan, 29, is one of Barbara Ann’s two children, and she has two grandchildren by her daughter Cate, one of whom jumped into her lap during her Today Show interview.Since retiring from ski racing at the age of 23, Barbara Ann Cochran has pursued a diverse career. She wrote ski columns for the Washington Post, has been a performance coach, and has run the ski school at Cochran’s for the past 40 years. She recently announced that this would be her last season directing the ski school.Cochran says that her father Mickey espoused a philosophy of skiing that he called the Cochran Way. “He was hoping that we would experience skiing as just a heck of a lot of fun. Those were his words. But he also wanted us to learn some life lessons. He wanted us to realize that in order to do well [and] get better at something, you really had to work hard at it and put effort into it. And he felt that it took not only the hard work, but paying attention to details …to get yourself better.”Mickey Cochran urged his children to not just focus on results, says his daughter. “It was about putting your best effort into it and seeing yourself getting better and better [in] what you were doing.”On an icy slope in China, Cochran-Siegle demonstrated that the Cochran Way lives on in a new generation. “Regardless of where I finished today I wanted to be proud of my skiing,” the newly minted Olympic silver medalist told NBC. “Even before I saw my time I was like, ‘That was as good as I could have done.’”

Katherine Paterson is one of America's most celebrated writers for children. The author of more than 40 books, she is one of just six writers who have twice won the prestigious Newbery Medal, for Bridge to Terabithia in 1978 and Jacob Have I Loved in 1981. She has also won the National Book Award twice. In 2000, Paterson was named a Living Legend by the Library of Congress.Paterson frequently writes about children confronting difficult issues. At 89 years old, the Vermont author shows little sign of slowing down. She recently published a new book, Birdies Bargain, about a child with a parent heading off to fight in Iraq.Paterson’s books are among the most beloved in children’s literature. They are also among the most banned. Book banning has lately been enjoying a revival, as books are being pulled from library shelves in “unprecedented” numbers, according to the American Library Association. Among the latest crop of books to be yanked from library shelves are Maus, the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust by Art Spiegelman; Beloved, by Toni Morrison; and The 1619 Project, a bestselling history of slavery in the U.S. that grew out of a special issue of the New York Times Magazine.Bridge to Terabithia rose to #8 on the American Library Association’s list of the 100 most frequently challenged books for the 1990s; her book The Great Gilly Hopkins was #20 on that list. Only a handful of authors had their books banned more often in the 1990s, including Maya Angelou, Mark Twain and John Steinbeck.“If you write a book that has any power in it, it has the power to offend,” Paterson says. “I don’t want to write a book that has no power in it, so I have to run the risk of offending.”

Student discipline used to be handled by guidance counselors and principals. Today, police are increasingly called upon to respond to children’s behavioral issues, giving rise to the school-to-prison pipeline. Today, over 1.5 million students attend schools with police but no counselors. The consequences can be dire: students are five times more likely to be arrested and charged when they attend schools where there are police, also known as school resource officers, or SROs.Professor Mark Warren and Jonathan Stith argue that during pandemic-schooling, schools are responding to a student mental health crisis with harsh discipline that has fallen hardest on students of color. This “white lash” has resulted in what they call the “pandemic-to-prison pipeline.”“The pandemic has really caused a lot of trauma and a lot of stress, economic hardship, family loss for young people and disruption of schooling,” says Mark Warren, Professor of Public Policy and Public Affairs at the University of Massachusetts Boston and the author of Willful Defiance: The Movement to Dismantle the School-to-Prison Pipeline. “Instead of getting support, and investment of support, what we've been starting to see is the intensification of discipline and policing practices in schools.”Warren argues that there is no research-based evidence that the presence of police improves safety in schools.There is now a national campaign to limit the police presence in schools. Since June 2020, more than 138 school districts announced they would remove police from schools. In Vermont, several school boards, including Burlington, have voted to end or reduce their police contracts. A report last year by a task force of the Burlington School District concluded: “The majority of SRO activity is not associated with law enforcement but with mentoring students and connecting them with needed resources…These additional roles fell to the SROs due to social workers being overwhelmed with cases.”There is “a direct link between that the Black Lives Matter movement and police-free schools,” says Jonathan Stith, National Director of the Alliance for Educational Justice and co-director of the National Campaign for Police-Free Schools. The effort to increase school policing, as well as fights over the teaching of critical race theory in schools is “what we've been calling this ‘white lash’ post the Trump presidency.”

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended in January that for maximum protection against Covid-19 infection, people should upgrade to a N95 or KN95 mask.For Anne Miller, masks and personal protective equipment (PPE) are very personal. In April 2020, her mother in law was among the first Vermonters to die after contracting Covid-19. After that, the health care consultant and resident of Essex made it her mission to find and disseminate top quality PPE to anyone who wanted it.Miller is the executive director of Project N95, a “PPE clearinghouse” that connects people who need personal protective equipment to companies that make it. Project N95 has so far delivered over 12 million units of PPE and Covid-19 tests. The U.S. government is now offering a limited number of free N95 masks through pharmacies and other outlets.When it comes to finding high quality masks, “The big part of this is fit and filtration,” Miller advises. “An N95 has those straps across the back, they mess up your hair. These are the ones that are going to confer the best protection for you.”Miller warns that when the CDC tested masks, “60 percent of the KN95s that they tested were found to be fake…in the sense that they didn't do what they claimed to do. They didn't filter 95 percent.” She says it’s important to order from sources, such as Project N95, that test and certify that their masks meet rigorous standards.

Vasu Sojitra was an undergraduate at the University of Vermont and wanted to join his friends to go backcountry skiing. But he faced a challenge: Sojitra has only one leg. At the age of 9 months, his right leg was amputated following a serious blood infection. So Sojitra and his friends attached a snowshoe to ski poles to enable him to backcountry ski. Sojitra graduated UVM in 2013, and his remarkable pursuits as an adaptive athlete became the subject of a 2014 film, Out On A Limb.Sojitra has continued breaking barriers both as an adaptive athlete and as an advocate for racial justice and inclusion. He has climbed the Grand Teton, and in 2021, he and fellow adaptive skier Pete McAfee did the first disabled descent of Denali, the highest peak in North America. The excursion was featured in the latest Warren Miller ski film. Sojitra is also the first adaptive athlete for The North Face and is a co-founder of Inclusive Outdoors Project.“I try to pride myself in having a disability,” says Sojitra, who grew up in Connecticut and India and now lives in Bozeman, Montana. “I don't think the word ‘disabled’ is a bad thing. I think it's the lack of access that we have, and the lack of opportunities that disabled folks have when it comes to living a life around well-being. And that's just why I'm very much prideful of having a disability. …Once we start normalizing and representing disabled people in mainstream media, in leadership in all of these spaces, then people are going to start realizing that disability is not a bad thing.”Sojitra hopes that his ‘firsts’ in the outdoor world create space for people of color and people with disabilities. “As a person of color with a disability, [I’m] trying to really just showcase this is what humans look like. …We are out here, and we're having fun, just like the majority that some in these spaces are.” He intends to “keep expanding this narrative around what it means to be disabled in the outdoors, what it means to be a person of color in the outdoors.”

Jeremy Jones is hailed as the world’s best big mountain snowboarder. He has pioneered first descents on some of the worlds biggest mountains, exploits that have been captured in over 50 snowboard films. He has been voted “Best Big Mountain Rider of the Year” by Snowboarder Magazine eleven times, and in 2013 was named a National Geographic “Adventurer of the Year.” He is also the founder of Jones Snowboards.As Jones has traveled throughout the world’s snow zone, he has watched with alarm at the ways that climate change has impacted the landscape, people and snowpack. In 2007, Jones founded Protect Our Winters (POW) to mobilize outdoor athletes, businesses, scientists and winter sports enthusiasts to take action against climate change. In 2013, President Obama recognized him as a "Champion of Change" for his climate activism.Jones believes that outdoor community has untapped political power. POW focuses its climate activism on “what we call the Outdoor State, where there's 50 million people (for whom) the outdoors is a central part of their life. …If we could come together as the Outdoor State and say we want a clean energy future then we would be the most powerful voter bloc in the world. For example, the NRA is basically made up of 3 million really avid loud activists and they wield a ton of power.”“We have not popped a lot of champagne in the world of climate action," Jones concedes. "We've largely been getting out-executed and out-spent by the extraction industry.”“We really need a unified voice that says, if you are not doing everything in your power to get us on a clean energy future, embracing the technologies, then we are going to find someone to represent us that will. And sadly, there is not a single lawmaker in Washington, DC, who is afraid of the outdoor industry (who feel) if they take a bad vote on climate, they're going to lose their job. And we need to change that.”

As the Omicron variant spreads with breathtaking speed, the number of people hospitalized in Vermont is hitting record highs. More than half of Vermont hospitals report staffing shortages. Dr. Rebecca Bell, a pediatric critical care doctor at the University of Vermont's Children's Hospital and president of the Vermont chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics warned that health care providers around the state “feel this is their breaking point.”Bell works in Vermont’s only pediatric ICU. Even while treating the sickest children, she encounters resistance to having children tested or treated for Covid-19. “Many, many families have chosen to never ever test their child [for Covid]. I have many conversations with children admitted to the hospital that need a test and the families refuse a test.” When children are positive for Covid, some families “don't believe the result.” Bell and her colleagues face “a lot of anger and tension around that.”Bell is deeply concerned about what she is seeing with her young patients. “What young people tell me now, especially the adolescents, is that it's been a really long two years. …Things have been very tenuous for young people this entire time. The lack of consistency is really hard for younger children.”She says there is a mental health crisis among youth. “We have families that are really just tapped out in terms of trying to manage their child's mental health and all of the other things that are happening in their lives.” Bell adds that the rates “for self-harm or for suicide attempts … were going up before the pandemic, and they're continuing to go up now. It's very concerning.”Through the hardship, Bell takes consolation in “just seeing the way people have pulled together and supported each other in every setting, in every sector.” Ultimately, she says, “I keep talking about vaccines -- what an amazing thing that happened over a short period of time. So that gave me great hope.”

President Biden used the F-word — fascism — on Thursday to describe the struggle confronting America as he marked the first anniversary of a failed coup attempt by a pro-Trump mob. Biden said that for American democracy to survive, it must confront and “triumph over the forces of fascism” as previous generations have done.Jason Stanley, professor of philosophy at Yale University and author of the bestselling 2018 book How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them explains, “Fascism is a cult of the leader who promises national restoration in the face of supposed humiliation by minorities, leftists, immigrants, feminists, and the LGBT community.” A fascist leader, he says, “promises that that only he can protect the nation, protect its traditions from this threat, and restore lost glory.”Stanley warns that Donald Trump and his followers employ classic fascist tactics to spread their message and secure power. Denying election results, creating alternative realities, attacking science, and even targeting women’s reproductive rights are all pages out of the authoritarian handbook.Stanley says that fascism has now entered a legal phase in the U.S. “What we're seeing is a slow legalization of things like anti-protest laws. …We're seeing the worst of all situations — like Georgia and Arizona, where the state legislature can appoint its own slate of electors, thereby enabling a stealing of an election. And we've already seen the takeover of the courts.” Stanley notes that despite the fact that Trump lost the 2016 election by 3 million votes, he appointed “one third of the Supreme Court, [who] are very young, hard-right jurists.” The result is that “the minority of the country is dictating the policy and imposing their will on everyone else.”“I am extremely alarmed,” Stanley says of the current state of democracy in the U.S. He adds, “I don't want to give this sense that it's out of our hands, because it's not… It's not too late to have a uniform consensus between conservatives and progressives and liberals and libertarians and say, 'Can't we all agree that our democracy should be protected?' I don't think it's too late.”

On January 6, 2021, supporters of former President Donald Trump, who falsely claimed the 2020 presidential election had been stolen, launched a violent attack on the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to stop Congress’s formal certification of President Joe Biden's electoral victory. Rep. Peter Welch, who has been Vermont’s lone Congressman since 2007, was in the House chamber waiting to vote. As rioters rampaged in the halls, Welch was ordered to lay on the floor by Capitol police who stood over him and his colleagues with guns drawn. Welch heard a gunshot. He thought he might die. “All of us thought that at some point,” says Welch. “When we heard that gun go off, and we saw that the mob was trying to break the doors down, that this could include violence. So the thought definitely occurred to every single person who was there, including the Capitol police officers. In fact, five officers died as a result of what happened that day.” Welch notes that many of his colleagues experience post traumatic stress disorder after the terror they endured in the insurrection. Welch says, “My PTSD now…is the reality that our democracy is very much in peril.” He points to what followed hours after the attack on the Capitol: 147 Republicans members voted to overturn the election of President Biden. “That's a shattering of the Democratic norm of the peaceful transfer of power,” says Welch. I ask Welch if he believes that the failed coup was a rehearsal for a successful one. “Yes, I do. It's definitely happening.” He adds, “There are efforts to use through legislation the capacity to overturn a presidential election, rather than the use of violence that failed on January 6. So yes, it's very much a work in progress.” Welch says that his sense of urgency about defending democracy is what motivates him to run for U.S. Senate in 2022. “It's an all-hands-on-deck moment,” he says. “Our democracy is imperiled. And we have to preserve it….Given my circumstances, given my service in Congress, the decision I made is this is the best way I can help. And I am absolutely all in."

As Covid-19 cases surge to record levels and threaten to overwhelm already strained health care systems, Dr. Mark Levine, Vermont’s Commissioner of Health since 2017, continues to parry and navigate through the pandemic storm. Vermont has led the nation in vaccination rates, but it has nevertheless endured significant losses. From March 2020 to December 29, 2021, more than 63,000 Vermonters have contracted Covid-19, and 468 people have died from the disease.“Omicron is an inflection point. We are going to see marked increases in case counts,” says Levine, who was a professor of medicine at the University of Vermont and associate dean for graduate medical education prior to leading the state health department.In this hour, Levine discusses the contagious new Covid-19 variant, the changing paradigm of tracking the pandemic, and the role of public health in a wide-ranging crisis.

What’s so funny about Vermont?Vermont political cartoonist Jeff Danziger writes that Vermont humor has a quality of "Yankeeness," characterized by "undemonstrative passions, studied understatement, and a reverence for patient consideration."Like this exchange, when a stranger stops to ask for directions.“Does it matter which road I take to Goshen?” asks the lost traveler.“Not to me it don’t,” replies the Vermonter.The weighty question of what’s so funny about Vermont is tackled in the new book, I Could Hardly Keep from Laughing: An Illustrated Collection of Vermont Humor. The book is written by retired teacher and journalist Bill Mares, co-author (with Frank Bryan) of a bestselling book of Vermont humor, Real Men Don't Milk Goats, and illustrated by Don Hooper, a former Vermont Secretary of State. (Mares and Hooper also serve on the board of the Vermont Journalism Trust.)On this Vermont Conversation, Mares and Hooper share some Vermont humor and discuss how it has evolved, though some might argue that it never has. And they unsuccessfully attempt to hijack the interview but are rebuffed by host David Goodman.

This week marks a grim milestone in the Covid-19 pandemic as the death toll in the U.S. hit 800,000 people. One in 100 older Americans has died from the virus.Gregg Gonsalves says the Biden’s Administration’s attempt to vaccinate our way out of the problem is not working. Gonsalves, a winner of the MacArthur genius award, is associate professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health and co-directs the Yale Global Health Justice Partnership.Gonsalves first became involved in public health during the AIDS pandemic when he was a leading member of ACT UP, the AIDS activist group. He sees parallels between the AIDS and Covid pandemics in the way that politics and profiteering have sabotaged public health. He has argued that the Trump administration committed crimes against humanity in its bungling of the early Covid response, especially against vulnerable and marginalized populations. But he is also critical of the Biden Administration’s approach.Gonsalves has also spoken about the backlash against science and public health, including in Vermont, where Gov. Phil Scott and his staff have attacked a prominent public health critic. “There's been a war on public health. …What politicians have figured out is to point to the other guy and say, Oh, it's their fault. …What this has done is created threats of violence against public health officials who have quit in droves. And it is leading to burnout among health professionals who…just are putting their fingers in dikes as water pours over the edge of the boat. “Gonsalves is critical but hopeful. “There's so many people …around the country, and frankly, around the world that are fighting this fight right now. There are there plenty of people like [Florida Gov.] Ron DeSantis and [Texas Gov.] Greg Abbott who preach the gospel of selfishness. But there's really incredibly generous, community minded, civic minded people in our country who really want us to get to the other side of this. And those are the people who give me hope.”

New England is on fire – with Covid infections, not foliage.All six New England states are now in the top 10 for highest rates of Covid-19 infections. New Hampshire currently has the highest rate of Covid-19 infections in the country, followed by Rhode Island (No. 2), Maine (No. 3), Massachusetts (No. 5), Connecticut (No. 5) and Vermont (No. 10), according to the New York Times. Hospitals throughout the region are in crisis as they fill to capacity.In response to this surge in infections, New York (No. 18) has imposed a statewide indoor mask mandate to tamp down the spread of the virus. But Vermont Gov. Phil Scott has staunchly refused to do the same — and backed his chief of staff, Jason Gibbs, who last week lashed out at a public health critic.“We should all be open to engaging in debate on policies and the evidence and data that underlie them,” says Anne Sosin, a Policy Fellow at the Rockefeller Center for Public Policy at Dartmouth College who has been the target of criticism from Scott and Gibbs. She adds that personal attacks “erode the will to do the hard work that needs to be done. But I can say that this will not silence me.”We speak about New England’s deepening pandemic and attacks on science and public health with Sosin and Jon Levy, Chair of the Department of Environmental Health at the Boston University School of Public Health.

The Earth’s coldest places are a hot mess.As a result of climate change, studies suggest that most ski areas in southern New England will be out of business by 2040. A recent climate assessment in Vermont says that the Vermont ski season will be shortened by up to a month. In the western United States, high elevation snowpacks have decreased by nearly 50 percent in the last four decades. In the Alps, half of the glacial ice has disappeared.This matters because when snow and ice vanish, sea levels rise, ocean currents change, wildfires become more intense, and fresh water becomes scarce — to name just a few impacts. Journalist Porter Fox has gone from traveling and skiing the world as a former editor of Powder Magazine to journeying through frozen lands to chronicle the alarming impacts of climate change. His new book is The Last Winter: The Scientists, Adventurers, Journeymen, and Mavericks Trying to Save the World."The cool, reflective crust of ice and snow now draped around the poles is the final buffer between us and radical climate change," Fox wrote recently in Time. If we lose the world's cold places, he warns, "we lose the world we know."

Why would a woman walk away from a successful career as a journalist and professor, a comfortable home and a good life to become a struggling farmer?That’s exactly what Beth Hoffman did. She had spent decades as a reporter covering food and agriculture for outlets including NPR and The Guardian and taught at the University of San Francisco. Then in 2019, she and her new husband moved from their home in San Francisco back to his family’s 530-acre farm in Iowa to try their hands at farming. The experience has been spiritually rewarding but financially sobering.Half of America’s 2 million farms made less than $300 in 2019, according to Hoffman. That’s a recipe for poverty, not success.Hoffman tells her story in a new book, Bet the Farm: The Dollars and Sense of Growing Food in America. She explores issues from how the changing climate is affecting farms, to the financial and emotional toll of farming, to the obstacles confronting farmers of color. She advocates for a new narrative about farming that includes an honest reckoning with the harsh realities that farmers face while feeding the country.

'Tis the season of American capitalism. Online shoppers spent $9 billion on Black Friday and $11 billion on Cyber Monday this year.What is the impact of all this spending? And while everyone loves a bargain, is it possible that some items are just too cheap?Author Tanja Hester argues that while Americans buy a lot, we may be leaving something on the table: our power to leverage change based on how we use our money.Hester is a former progressive political consultant who the New York Times describes as the “matriarch” of the women’s FIRE movement. (FIRE stands for financial independence/retire early, an investment strategy that's gained popularity in recent years.) Hester's new book is Wallet Activism: How to Use Every Dollar You Spend, Earn, and Save as a Force for Change. She contends that where we shop, what we buy, and where we donate can influence the fate of our society and our planet."I believe that we can make real change, and it's within our individual power to do so," says Hester.

When the Tao of Physics was first published in 1975, few people knew its author, the Austrian-born physicist Fritjof Capra. That would quickly change. What began as Capra’s passion project to explore the connection between Eastern mysticism and Western science became a global phenomenon. The book sold millions of copies and has been translated into 23 languages.Fritjof Capra has gone on be a trailblazing thinker and writer about systems theory, deep ecology and Green Politics. He is the author or co-author of about a dozen books, a number of which have been international bestsellers. The main focus of his writing and activism has been to help build sustainable communities. He founding director of the Center for Ecoliteracy in Berkeley, California, which advances education for sustainability.Capra, who is now 82 years old and lives in Berkeley, has just published a new book, Patterns of Connection: Essential Essays from Five Decades.Capra that he is “both hopeful and concerned” about the current state of the world.“I see the coronavirus as a biological response of Gaia, our living planet, to the ecological and social emergency that humanity has brought upon itself,” says Capra. “We need to restore ecosystems to re-establish the balance that we’ve destroyed.”

Vermont author Kekla Magoon has been going where few children’s authors dare to go, tackling topics such as racism and social justice in her books. She is now being recognized as one of America’s top writers for young adults.Magoon was a finalist for this year’s National Book Award, one of the world’s most prestigious literary prizes, for her new book for young adults, Revolution in Our Time: The Black Panther Party’s Promise to the People.It is a magisterial 400-page work that explores black resistance starting with colonialism in Africa and leading up to the Black Panthers and the Black Lives Matter movement.Magoon, who is on the faculty of the Vermont College of Fine Arts, said that her new book “carries the weight of history and it carries the power to inspire young people to say, ‘Oh I see myself in this and I’m going to use my voice.’”Earlier this year, Magoon received the Margaret A. Edwards Award from the American Library Association for “her significant and lasting contribution to writing for teens.” This is essentially a lifetime achievement award that Magoon won at the age of 41. The ALA proclaimed, “Kekla Magoon’s powerful prose and complex characters enrich literature for young adults by bearing witness to the trauma and triumph of the American Civil Rights Movement.” Magoon’s other books include X, a teen novel about civil rights leader Malcolm X that she co-authored with his daughter Ilyasah Shabazz, and How it Went Down, about the complicated aftermath of a shooting of a Black teenager. Magoon is also a recipient of the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award, John Steptoe New Talent Award, NAACP Image Award and other honors.Magoon told the Vermont Conversation that her writing “is a powerful opportunity to be telling Black history as a Black woman in this country. It’s part of what I value in the world. I want to be an activist. But I’m not the person who marches and protests. I’m really good at writing. So I choose to use the skills that I have to advance the …causes that I believe in.”Magoon is determined “to push back against everyone who wants to diminish young Black people. Because there are a lot of people out there that don’t want us to recognize and own our power, that don’t want us to have a space and a voice in the world. So the best thing I can do is to model the ability to do both of those things.”“I try to use my writing skills to make the world a better place.”

When reports began emerging in January 2020 of a mysterious respiratory virus spreading in Wuhan, China, politicians, health officials and scientists were unprepared for the global pandemic that was soon to follow. As the scale of the calamity unfolded, the world’s best known pharmaceutical companies had nothing in their arsenal to deal with it.The scientists and drug companies that mobilized an effective response were not the usual suspects. They were an untested group, and many operated at the fringes of science. BioNTech and Moderna were unknown to the general public and had not had commercial success with vaccines. But when leaders from the two companies heard about the novel coronavirus spreading in China, each believed that they could crack its genetic code and devise a vaccine based on mRNA technology, which they had been researching. These unlikely scientists were soon on a race to save civilization.Award-winning Wall Street Journal reporter Gregory Zuckerman tells this story in his new book, A Shot to Save the World: The Inside Story of the Life-or-Death Race for a Covid-19 Vaccine.“This is an age of outbreaks,” writes Zuckerman. “Each year, humans encroach on nature, increasing the risks that animal-borne diseases will cross over and threaten humanity. Lessons from the vaccine race will inform scientists, politicians, and others if—or perhaps when—we confront another deadly pathogen.”