On Vermont and our Economy

There’s nothing like travel to take your head out of everyday life and get you thinking about things. Amy and I headed east last weekend for some much-needed R&R in Vermont, and through some coincidence of the normal seasons and global warming, we were treated to a perfect combination of fall leaves and late-summer weather.

More ridiculously idyllic pix will eventually get posted to Flickr, but a few highlights include:

• walking and driving the back roads around Brattleboro and towns around it like Newfane, Grafton, and Jamaica, watching leaves drift off the trees and flutter
• visiting a graveyard with a stone turnstyle
• stopping at an apple farm that grows ~70 varieties of heirloom apples on the premises — some of the best damned apples you’ve ever tasted
• local cheddar cheese and beer — ditto, and ditto

Best of all, we spent much of the time hanging out with friends Tom and Cathy and their two children, who live on 18 acres with a beaver pond, can’t hear traffic from their yard, and have a box of African percussion instruments and a tree-house with a pirate flag instead of a TV.

Tom (a journalist) and I were also trading book recommendations, and I walked away with his copy of Deep Economy, by Bill McKibben — which I devoured on the plane ride home and can’t recommend highly enough. It’s about the notion that our dependence on energy subsidizes a more hidden dependency on cheap shipping and mass production, and what that does to our food chain and our communities. Because it’s cheaper to produce lettuce AND ship it a thousand miles than it is to produce it on a local farm (at least until the price of oil doubles), the price at the cash register tips the balance in favor of WalMart and WalMart-like superindustries in our food chain. And much is lost in the process — including, in many places, any semblance of an ability to be self-sustaining.

Seriously, if you care about community, local economies, or what you eat, read this book. I’m not saying I agree with everything in it (and particularly I don’t think he’s found the right proscriptive angles yet), but it certainly makes a provocative book-end next to, say, Thomas Friedman.

As I was processing all this, replaying the tape of seeing Dr. Yunus’s talk last week, and after I came home to read about having passed “peak water” in the west, I came to a decision that some things must change for me. Among other things, I’m going to be thinking a lot more about how to get serious about harnessing the web (and Yahoo!) for social purposes.

posted on Thursday, October 25th, 2007 at 9:14 am Category: personal, social, travel. Comment or trackback.