Guardians, not Angels: Forging a Healthy Future for Vermont's Environment

By Mary Elizabeth Fratini

Activists Cheryl King Fischer, Alyssa Schuren, Ginny Callan. Photo: Margaret Michniewicz; design Jan Doerler.

Imagine a highway running the length of the Green Mountains’ ridgeline, a nuclear power plant on the shores of Lake Champlain, skiing down slopes whose snow came from treated sewage, and eight hundred homes covering the side of Mount Mansfield. Impossible in Vermont – this liberal bastion of back-to-the-land transplants and generations of families who depended on a healthy environment for farming, forestry, and maple sugaring – right?

In fact, each of these “impossibilities” was imminent at one point, halted only by an active and organized citizenry that said no through legislation, regulation, protests, and education. Still, most Vermonters – native or not – maintain a persistent blind spot for how frequently we have stood at the brink of losing our clean and working landscape, and how threatened that landscape remains today, in a world where our leaders equate patriotism with endless growth and consumption.

Tom Slayton, outgoing editor of Vermont Life magazine wrote in his foreword to the Vermont Encyclopedia: “There can be no denying that Vermont is changing … that suburban sprawl continues to gnaw away at our roadsides and open meadows and that trophy homes are cropping up on many hillsides and lakeshores… That very struggle is an expression of Vermont’s traditional character, as Vermont fights to go its own way, against the immense pressures of an international economy that eats open farmland for breakfast and has no way to measure adequately the value of streams and lakes that are clean and clear, mountains that are wild and free, or a beautiful countryside that produces food.”

Missing History

The ridgeline highway was a New Deal program offered in the wake of Vermont’s post-flood reconstruction in 1927, modeled on Virginia’s Blue Ridge Parkway; state leaders ultimately rejected the project as too expensive, likely to desecrate the mountains, and attracting undesirable tourists. For the next forty years, Vermont remained a rural and pastoral retreat due largely to the scarcity of paved roads; even if you could get there from here, it took forever. The completion of Interstate 89 in the late 60s, and of the early southern sections of I-91, changed that forever.

“My more cynical self tells me the reason we are as green as we are, and have as healthy an environment and economy as we have, is because we have been hard to get to,” said Elizabeth Courtney, executive director of the Vermont Natural Resources Council (VNRC), founded in 1963 by a group of farmers and foresters. “It has been to our advantage to be 10-15 years behind the [development curve], we have reaped the benefits of watching our neighbors make mistakes and to our credit, we have implemented many significant environmental protections that other states never had the opportunity to do, but I think that Vermont is at a crossroads.”

The Lake Champlain Committee (LCC) was also founded in 1963, in response to a proposal to turn the lake into an international seaway for supertankers, and quickly won two major victories: preventing the seaway and blocking a proposal to site the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant on the shores of the lake in Charlotte. The following decade saw both the nadir and the zenith of Vermont’s modern environmental movement, beginning in 1970 with Acts 250 and 252 addressing land use, development and water pollution. In 1971, the University of Vermont established one of the earliest university-wide environmental programs in the country; the state allocated $50 million in bonds to clean rivers and streams that were rapidly filling with sewage, sawmill tailings and garbage; and the Legislature passed the second-in-the-nation bottle bill, which resulted in a 76 percent decrease in litter on the state’s highways. By the end of the 1970s, the state had banned highway billboards and phosphates in detergents, passed bills for screening junkyards and controlling municipal dumps, and required legislative approval for any additional nuclear power plants to be built after Yankee’s opening in Vernon in 1977.

“The passage of billboard legislation and Act 250 really helped set the state apart in terms of landscape and economy,” said LCC Executive Director Lori Fisher. “I grew up in the Northeast Kingdom and remember coming back across the state border with the family, my dad would always toot the horn, feeling like he was back in God’s country. It’s so apparent when you travel now what a significant piece of legislation that was in creating and protecting the aesthetics of this region.”

These victories came through the consistent vigilance of citizens, who often formed groups initially as a response to specific local threats and then expanded their missions as necessary, as did the LCC. Regarding the Champlain seaway and the Charlotte nuclear plant, Fisher said, “We really formed in response to this outside effort and existed for the next ten, fifteen, maybe even twenty years with this single focus, moving from one issue to the next.”

Originally formed as a bi-state organization, LCC has continued its intergovernmental approach, including more integration with Quebec. “We try to ignore political boundaries... Pollution knows no political bounds,” said Fisher, who originally interned with LCC while a student at UVM and has been a director since the late 1980s.

The ban on phosphorus in laundry detergents in the 1970s caused the single largest nutrient reduction in the lake’s history, and subsequent gains followed with wastewater treatment upgrades, but the remaining problems are diffuse and more difficult to regulate.

"We find ourselves in a situation where the economy is often a significant driver of how people see issues today. In the early days there were great opportunities to improve through ‘command and control’ regulatory approaches [like the Clean Air and Clean Water acts] even at the national level and it permeated here," Fisher said. "Today there are more people and more entrenched economic interests and as the human footprint gets bigger, it gets harder to find and implement solutions. On the national level, the Clean Air, Clean Water and Superfund acts grew out of Earth Day, but it’s hard for me to see them getting through Congress today."

Courtney experienced the clash between the environment and economics firsthand in the mid 1990s when, after serving on the state Environmental Board for almost a decade under governors from both parties, she was voted out by a Republican-controlled Senate that refused all of Democrat Governor Dean’s appointments for the board, twice. “It was a stunning day for me, because literally the same day I was voted out, I was accepted as a fellow at Harvard University in Environmental Studies,” Courtney recalls. After two years there, she accepted her current position in 1997 at a time when the organization began to wonder if Vermonters were becoming complacent about environmentalism. “Our question was why? Is it because we are doing such a good job and there is nothing to worry about, or are we really missing something here?” she said.

Originally founded by a group of farmers and foresters at Goddard College, VNRC’s current mission is to continue conversation about keeping the environment healthy and productive with a broad cross-section of Vermonters, and to show that natural resources are integral to economic wellbeing. Central to that intent is the pending growth-center legislation, which has passed the Senate and is now under consideration by the House. “Our interest is to bring economic and regulatory benefits to town, village, and city centers in order to reinforce the historic settlement pattern, which is concentrated development surrounded by open countryside. At the same time we are helping to protect the natural resources that surround it,” Courtney said.

With sweeping anti-environment policies permitted on the national level in more recent years, often through administrative rule-making rather than legislative debate, decisions by state officials on issues like the smart growth and phosphorus bills are vital to environmental protections in Vermont. The Vermont Alliance of Conservation Voters is one of the few groups that support politicians for their environmental voting records. “In order to get good policies, we need people for whom the environment is among their top two or three priorities,” said VACV’s Executive Director Susan Thompson.

Although VACV hasn’t finalized its campaign plan for the upcoming election, Thompson said it will follow growth-centers legislation and bills addressing the impact of big box stores on small communities, as well as climate change. “Our elected officials need to be the leaders on climate change, which is an issue facing the entire world,” she said.

From Activists to Executives

LCC and VNCR are the state’s oldest environmental organizations, and VACV is its leading political sentry. That these organizations are led by women is cause for comment only because it is so SET ITALS common END in Vermont’s environmental movement, which boasts a nearly unending list of women leaders. Many of the movement’s top women today became involved decades earlier as citizen activists, like Ginny Callan, program director of the New England Grassroots Environmental Fund. NEGEF is a collaborative community grant-issuing organization that focuses on small citizen groups whose funding needs often fall beneath the radar of large foundations.

Callan is perhaps best known as the author of Horn of the Moon cookbooks, which grew out of the restaurant of the same name that she ran in Montpelier for 13 years in the 1970s and 80s. But Callan has spent more than 30 years practicing and teaching the principles of non-violent civil disobedience, beginning with a demonstration against Vermont Yankee in 1979 in which she was one of more than 200 people arrested. Callan also participated in further protests against nuclear submarines in Groton, Connecticut and was arrested at the Rotunda in Washington, DC for protesting U.S. involvement in Nicaragua. “That felt like the most powerful thing I did in my life,” Callan recalled. “I’ve always been an activist and continue to believe that if you don’t speak up against what is wrong, you are acquiescing.”

Callan’s former restaurant was known as “a hotbed for activists and legislators,” Callan said. She eventually sold the restaurant in the 1980s to spend time writing a second cookbook and raising her son and daughter in East Montpelier with husband Cort Richardson, an environmental consultant. When a proposal to build a sludge composting facility in East Montpelier came up, Callan was reactivated as a leader of Citizens for Clean Compost, and received a small grant from NEGEF. Shortly after that Callan was invited to serve on NEGEF’s grantmaking committee as the activist representing Vermont, and when NEGEF expanded to all six New England states, Callan became its full-time program director.

NEGEF’s Executive Director Cheryl King Fischer has also spent years as a civic activist. She began as a biology major and was a graduate student in medical technology with noontime lab duty on the first Earth Day in 1970. Her co-workers came back from the gathering in Hartford with a copy of The Population Bomb, which Fischer said turned her whole head around. “I knew from that moment on that I would be discussing population as a critical cause of environmental degradation,” she said. Fischer became the volunteer executive director for Connecticut’s statewide Zero Population groups and, following her passion for working on the environmental crisis instead of a medical career, she got a second masters degree in resource economics from UVM with a focus on community planning.

“I came to Vermont from Connecticut in 1973, not as a ‘60s hippie to live on the land, but to get a degree in my field, and was fortunate to find professional jobs in Vermont from that point on,” Fischer said of her route to environmental executive. She worked for a variety of organizations including the New England River Basins Commission and the Agency of Natural Resources, as well as spending many years negotiating conservation easements with the Vermont Land Trust. “My claim to fame is that I had my hand on 48 projects preserving 10,000 acres of land during my time there, of which I am very proud,” she said. She was tapped to design and launch NEGEF from the ground up in 1995, and has shepherded the organization as it expanded to cover all of New England, awarding a total of $350,000 in small grants in Vermont alone through 2005 to 127 groups in 79 towns.

Both Callan and Fischer believe that the concentration of women in the environmental movement, at least in the earlier years, may be due to the lower pay rate in non-profits as compared with corporate jobs. “Vermont tends to be more receptive to women leaders in general and women will often give time to organizations without an economic reward,” Callan said. “Part of it has to do with the pay structure of the non-profit world,” Fischer agreed. “Women took those jobs at the entry level as young women and gained skills and were able to become leaders. However, I question whether it is so much the environment as an issue, or just 35 years since feminism took center stage. When I went to school, the environment was a man’s world, technical and scientific – I was the only woman in my masters program – but that isn’t true any more.”

Like Fischer, Courtney came to environmentalism through a graduate program, studying landscape architecture and regional planning at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. “Natural systems and the interface between living on the land and the ecology were really my origins in the movement,” Courtney recalled. After finishing the program, she practiced with a landscape architecture and planning firm in Ludlow.

“While it is true that, across the country, women are assuming positions of leadership in all sectors, the environmental field is a complex mix of everything from science to politics, and the leadership skills required are perhaps better met by women,” Courtney said. “In my experience women tend to be more capable of multitasking and working; why is that? I don’t know. But individuals – and some of those individuals are men – who are capable of multitasking, patience, and being tolerant of ambiguity tend to be better suited for this complex mission.”

Women continue to stream into the ranks of the environmental movement, though the reasons for this concentration may be changing. “I think more and more women are putting careers first. For myself, I am not married, and don’t have kids, and I’m just getting to all that now in my late 30s because I put my career first,” said Thompson. “Women are ambitious and I think that they are rising to the top as leaders because they are not stopping.” Thompson also believes that it is important for future leaders to work their way up the ladder. “I’ve been an organizer and a glorified office manager, I know what it is like to run a non-profit from the bottom up,” she said. “You are a better leader if you know what it is like to be in all of these roles, how to mobilize and work with your activists and where to put your energy.”

The last fifteen years have also seen a trend towards training new leaders in the environmental movement, and broadening the definition of environmentalism to encompass economic and social justice issues. “It’s been fascinating for us who have been in it for a long time to see the definition of environment expand to cover all the places where we live, work, play, and pray,” Fischer said.

“We want environmentalists, but also the cancer society, heart and lung associations, children’s, and health organizations because if you can reach out to a larger portion of the community, a much stronger and more vital voice will be heard,” Callan added.

This next generation of activists and organizers have already spent years channeling their passion into strategic victories, often before they’ve even reached the quarter century mark. When Alyssa Schuren accepted the executive director position at Toxics Action Center (TAC), a New England-wide non-profit that helps groups fight environmental toxins in communities through trainings, consultations and expert referrals, she was just 26 years old, but had already helped win national victories against Home Depot, Fidelity Investments and Occidental Petroleum as a leader of Rainforest Action Network’s student chapter at the University of Colorado in Boulder. From those years as a foot soldier in direct action protests, Schuren came to TAC through Greencorps, a year-long training program for environmental organizers, and led their successful campaign to shut down six of the dirtiest power plants in the country in Connecticut. After Greencorps, she led TAC’s expansion into Vermont in 2002, and was tapped to lead the organization when their executive director of 13 years left for electoral politics in 2005.

Of her early victories, Schuren said, “I was always committed to the quickest way to win. At that point we were the marching troops for national groups that were in the negotiating rooms with the companies. When I came to TAC, it was a legislative campaign but it’s about thinking strategically, whether it’s putting on a suit or chaining yourself to something, what will get the job done?”

Seven out of eight staff at TAC are women including Schuren and Vermont Organizer Meg Klepack, both based in Montpelier. “I’ve noticed more women in the environmental movement as a whole,” Schuren said. “These are really intense jobs, with long hours, and you wear your heart on your sleeve. That doesn’t mean these aren’t smart, or politically savvy, or conflict-averse jobs, but it does take a passionate, dedicated, committed, and driven person willing to make it more than just a job.”

Still in her first year with TAC, 24-year-old Klepack feels that her age is more challenging than her gender. “I used to say that if I was a man, but the same age, this job would be a lot easier because even if you are young, people take a man more seriously, especially in Southeastern Ohio when I was working on the Dean campaign,” Klepack said. “But that hasn’t been the case here in Vermont. As a young person you have to work extra hard to earn people’s respect and their trust that yes, she can help us; I’ve struggled with that for sure, but here that’s due to age and not because I am a woman.”

Leading Us Where?

While cause for celebration, the density of talented women in the movement will not by itself return Vermont to the forefront of environmental activism. Where the state was once the vanguard of progressive legislation, we now lag behind our neighbors in areas ranging from mercury pollution to groundwater protection. Part of the discrepancy comes from a legacy of thinking about the environment in terms of aesthetics and conservation.

“Even with the belief that Act 250 has saved Vermont from overdevelopment, the fact is that 60 percent of projects don’t trigger Act 250 review, and over the years there has been a cumulative impact of what I would call poor development practices that are catching up with us,” Courtney said. “Will you wake up one day and realize the Vermont you love is gone – your kids grew up here but can’t afford to buy a home; or maybe you sit through six long traffic lights to get to work where you are employed by a huge multinational corporation, not your neighbor. What will push you over the tipping point – when your birding area is built over, or your favorite trout run is too polluted to hold fish, or you are just so suspicious of the water quality at the local swimming hole that you don’t go there anymore?”

No issue highlights this tension more than the debate over commercial wind power in Vermont. Recent non-binding votes at the town level have split, with some towns opposed and others supporting local projects. Leila LaRosa is the public outreach coordinator for UPC Vermont Wind, the company proposing a wind farm in Sheffield and she is also an adjoining landowner to the proposed development site. Initially concerned about the project, LaRosa conducted her own research including a visit to the existing farm in Searsburg, and ultimately became a staunch supporter. “It is a confrontational issue because there is a disconnect between the resources people utilize and where they come from – with everything from food at the grocery store to energy at home,” LaRosa said. “There is a tendency for people, when faced with a problem that is overwhelming, to pretend it doesn’t exist. Something like wind power creates confrontation because it is here and big and in our backyard, so it really challenges us to face those larger issues.”

In LaRosa’s time talking with people in the Northeast Kingdom she has found that traditional Vermont values of supporting independence and a working landscape are arguments for both supporters and detractors. “While there are a lot of concerns that are valid, there are also huge amounts of misinformation – that the blades will emit sulfur dioxide or cause cancer in animals or suck up polluted air from Southern Vermont into the Northeast Kingdom,” she said. “The problem with this whole debate is that we aren’t choosing between wind farms or everything staying the same; we are choosing between versions of change and the realities of what will happen if we don’t change the way we interact with our environment – the disappearance of winter, longer mud seasons, loss of maple sugaring industry, all of which are huge part of what Vermont is.”

The next phase of Vermont’s environmental movement depends on issues like wind power, which place conservation alongside increasing human consumption, depleted natural resources, and continual threats to public health and the economy. “My understanding is that Vermont was the gold standard for other states in the 1980s, especially under Governor Madeleine Kunin, for real efforts to protect water, air, and public health, but I think a culture developed in the 1990s where the goal was to put business first and that has resulted in the problems at the Agency of Natural Resources,” said Annette Smith, executive director of Vermonters for a Clean Environment.

Smith cited the shifting of water quality control from the Department of Health to ANR as well-intentioned, but with unforeseen problems with tracking accountability and permits that have continued for too many years. “I don’t see a lot of people making connections between the environment and public health. The only way the environment is being protected right now is by citizens rising up all over the world and saying no and holding leadership – both Republican and Democrat – accountable for allowing corporations and industry to dictate policy that does not protect citizens or the environment.”

Mary Elizabeth Fratini is a freelance photojournalist living in Montpelier.

Act 250: A Primer on Vermont’s Revolutionary Land Use Law

Celebrated and maligned in equal measures across party lines, Act 250 signaled the beginning of Vermont’s modern environmental movement and more than three decades later remains the signature piece of legislation. But what is it, exactly, and where did it come from?

The opening of I-89 in the 1960s and the eventual completion of I-91 over the next twenty years moved Vermont from a remote retreat to a mere three-hour drive for an estimated forty million urban dwellers. Easier access meant increased development pressures, particularly around ski areas, but without any regulatory oversight. Senator James Jeffords served as Vermont’s Attorney General from 1969 to 1973 and described that time by saying, “Development was going all over the place – with no concept of how the sewage was going to get down into the ledge, and not run all over…it was a mess.”

Initially just nine pages of statute, Act 250 created nine District Environmental Commissions, each staffed by three laypersons, not governmental officials, charged with issuing permits for particular kinds of development and subdivision plans according to 10 criteria (see below). It also established the nine-member Vermont Environmental Board to review appeals of decisions by the Commissions and created a first-in-the-nation position of a statewide environmental judge. The laws findings declared that, “it is necessary to regulate and control the utilization and usages of lands and the environment to insure that, hereafter, the only usages which will be permitted are not unduly detrimental to the environment, will promote the general welfare through orderly growth and development and are suitable to the demands and needs of the people of this state.” [Title 10, Chapter 151]

The applicant, municipality and its planning commission, regional planning commission, and affected state agencies are automatically parties to an Act 250 hearing. Commissions may also grant party status to adjoining property owners and other interested persons. Anyone with party status can appeal a commission’s decision to the Environmental Board, but only statutory parties may appeal decisions from the Board to the State Supreme Court.

“Act 250 was an idea whose time had come,” said Thomas P. Salmon, governor of Vermont from 1973-77. “History records that the most significant period of economic growth in Vermont has occurred following enactment of this visionary statute, which insists that Vermont will employ value-driven criteria as the basis for development decisions. It has tempered how we have grown in a manner that helps make this state the special world that it is.”

Despite criticism that Act 250 is burdensome and anti-business, the commissions approve more the 98 percent of the 600-800 applications they receive each year, and 70 percent are approved within 60 days. More worrisome, especially in recent years, is the expansion of suburban sprawl development that is too small to trigger the review process, such as the commercial strip malls growing outside Vermont’s larger cities and towns.

For more information, visit www.state.vt.us/envboard

“The 10 Criteria for An Act 250 Permit”

The 10 criteria:

Water and Air Pollution - A development must not result in undue air or water pollution. This can include both direct and diffuse, or no-point, sources of air pollution, such as vehicle exhaust from a project that generates much traffic. Less obvious forms or air pollution – such as dust, noise, and odor – are also covered and can be especially important when a project would be close to population centers. Sub-criteria specifically address headwaters, waste disposal, water conservation, floodways, streams, shorelines and wetlands.
Water Supply – The developer must show that sufficient water is available for the reasonably foreseeable needs of their development from a private sources, such as wells or spring, or municipal water system or other public sources
Impact on existing water supplies – If a development will using an existing water supply, it must not unreasonably burden that source.
Soil Erosion – The project must not cause unreasonable soil erosion or reduction in the capacity of the land to hold water, because soil erosion from development is a principal cause of water pollution in Vermont.
Traffic – The commissions most often focus on safety and congestion related to automobiles, but can also look at traffic on waterways, rails, airports or any other means, or consider impact on safety at intersections, signalization, number of travel lanes. However, a commission cannot deny a permit application solely under this criterion, but it can impose reasonable conditions, such as requiring that running lanes or other traffic improvements.
Educational services – If a project necessitates an expansion of the town’s educational facilities and anticipated tax revenues generated from the project will not cover the expansion, that may pose an unreasonable financial burden on the town.
Municipal or Government services – The development cannot place an unreasonable burden on the ability of a municipality to provide such vital services such as waste disposal, fire and police, water and sewage, and road maintainance.
Scenic and natural beauty, aesthetics, natural areas, historical sites – The commissions ask if the project will have any adverse aesthetic impacts on the scenic quality of the area, and if so will those be considered “undue” when taking into consideration the type of development proposed and its surroundings? If it will destroy or significantly imperil either necessary wildlife habitat or endangered species, the commission must weigh the economic, social, cultural or recreational benefit offered by the development against the economic, environmental, or recreational provided by the habitat or species.
Conformance with capability and development plan – The commissions looks at how the project fits with the public and private infrastructure, natural resources areas and planning for orderly growth, including: impact of growth, primary and secondary agricultural soils and forest soils, earth resources, energy conservation, private utility services, costs of scattered developments, public utility services, development affecting public investments, rural growth areas.
Local and regional plans – All projects must conform with local and regional plans, which are updated every five years in Vermont taking into account changes in population, land use, and public infrastructure.\

“Who Needs An Act 250 Permit?”

Act 250 permits are required for:

construction for commercial or industrial purposes on more than 10 acres or on more than 1 acre, if the municipality does not have both permanent zoning and subdivision laws;
construction of 10 or more housing units, including mobile home parks, within a radius of five miles and within a continuous period of five years;
the subdivision of land into 10 or more lots of any size within a five mile radius, or within the jurisdiction of a district commission, during a continues five-year period;
construction of a road related to the sale or lease of land, if the road will provide access to more than five lots or is more than 800 feet long and will provide access to two or more lots;
any construction above 2500 feet in elevation;
any construction that would substantially change or expand a pre-1970- development that would require a permit if built today;
construction for a governmental purpose if the project involves more than 10 acres, or is part of a larger project that will involve more than 10 acres; construction of a support structure,
20 feet tall or higher, primarily for communication or broadcast purposes;
the exploration, beyond the reconnaissance phase, or the extraction or processing of fissionable source materials;
the drilling of an oil or gas well.

Farming and forestry are exempt from the Act 250 permitting process unless they will occur above 2500 feet in elevation.