The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman

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.”

This week, world leaders are gathered at the United Nations' COP26 summit in Glasgow, Scotland, to discuss what to do about the climate crisis. Gus Speth knows what brought us to the edge of this climate emergency. President Carter and all the presidents who followed knew, too.The United States government knew that climate change was an impending disaster. They knew that burning fossil fuels could drive the world into crisis. And yet for the last half century, American leaders put their feet on the accelerator of fossil fuel consumption and pushed down hard.The actions of American leaders “on the national energy system over the past several decades are, in my view, the greatest dereliction of civic responsibility in the history of the Republic,” writes Speth.Gus Speth is now telling the story of how and why this happened. Speth, who lives in Strafford, Vermont, is a luminary in the environmental movement. He served as chair of the U.S. Council on Environmental Quality during the Carter Administration. He went on to lead the U.N. Development Program, served as Dean of the Yale School of Environment and co-founded the World Resources Institute and the Natural Resources Defense Council. He was a professor at the Vermont Law School and is now part of The Next System Project, which addresses systemic challenges confronting the U.S. Speth’s latest book is They Knew: The Us Federal Government’s Fifty-Year Role in Causing the Climate Crisis. On this week's Vermont Conversation, Speth talks about what radicalized him, leading him to go from government insider to getting arrested in front of the White House protesting the Keystone XL pipeline.

It was the crime of the century.Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin — which is controlled by the billionaire Sackler family — was the hidden hand behind the national opioid epidemic that has destroyed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. The company deceived doctors and patients about OxyContin’s addictive properties and rewarded high-volume prescribers.In September 2019, Purdue Pharma filed for bankruptcy to protect itself from thousands of lawsuits from individuals, hospitals and local governments. In a settlement reached last month, Purdue Pharma was dissolved, and the Sacklers agreed to pay $4.5 billion to settle claims. But the Sacklers, who remain among the richest families in America, were absolved of opioid-related liability.It appears that the criminals got away with the crime.Ryan Hampton knows this story firsthand. An alumnus of the Clinton White House, he became addicted to OxyContin and ended up unemployed and homeless. He has become an addiction recovery advocate and served as one of four victims appointed as a watchdog during the bankruptcy proceedings. He tried to ensure that justice was done but found himself up against powerful interest groups, including representatives of big insurance companies, pharmacies, and state attorneys general. He finally quit as the co-chair of the Official Unsecured Creditors Committee and wrote a book, Unsettled: How the Purdue Pharma Bankruptcy Failed the Victims of the American Overdose Crisis. "Ignored by a system devised to protect extreme wealth and perpetuate social disparity, Purdue’s victims find themselves doubly victimized," Hampton wrote recently in the New York Times. "I know this because I not only represented the victims; I’m one of them."