Rural Vermont needs the young to choose this place

This commentary is by Neil Ryan, a third-generation Vermont farmer and consultant helping brands and nonprofits in Corinth.

Vermont is bleeding its young. A University of New Hampshire poll in July found that almost two-thirds of Vermonters ages 18 to 34 plan to leave this state. In September, Vermont Public asked Vermonters what they’d tell an 18-year-old about building a life here. About half said the young should move away.

This is a tragedy. And it is a disgrace. Our state government should have stopped everything and said, “We will look at every policy choice we’ve made and commit to doing everything possible to reverse this.” That hasn’t happened in part because our Legislature is uniquely responsible for a cascade of exclusionary policy choices over the last three decades.

I thought back to my 18th summer in the 1990s. I can still recall the feel of the sun on my face back then, running hay between our neighbor’s dairy farm and our farm. Vermont seemed bountiful. Optimistic. I remember being surrounded by young people doing similar things. And I remember knowing I wanted nothing more than to be in Vermont working with livestock and the land.

Fewer young people feel that way about Vermont today. We’ve made it too hard for them to get started.

Thomas Jefferson wrote, “The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government.”

At the very end of this past legislative session, a few legislators worked compulsively to put conditions on new exemptions for accessory on-farm activities. The justification was, in effect, that absent Act 250, young people might start noisily getting married on farms all over the place. This even as evidence mounted that young people were turning away from Vermont and rural Vermont was hollowing out.

Who here doesn’t hope for a Vermont where young people meet each other, fall in love, marry on a farm and perhaps — please! — choose a life of farming for themselves? Apparently, enough legislators primarily fixated on speculative nuisance concerns.

When I was 18, and young people were still plentiful, we had a farm party. Around 10 p.m., a neighbor walked over to tell us to turn down the stereo. We did. Today, we have senators convinced Act 250 permitting is necessary to corral that.

Vermont now has the most regulations per capita in the entire country. Vermont not coincidentally has the worst economic momentum of all 50 states. For the last five to 10 years, our Legislature has passed a cascade of sweeping land-use policies that, intentionally or not, position rural Vermont as a quiet, lifeless, scenic amenity for the affluent, and more difficult for everyone else.

I say to our current crop of legislators: You cannot have equity when investment and relief flow only to the winners you already chose, and everyone else gets crushed by ever-expanding layers of regulation. Wendell Berry said, “If we want to save the land, we must save the people who belong to the land.”

If you are a city mouse, more power to you. Vermont deserves thriving downtown centers. If you are a country mouse, your life, your work and your aspirations are every bit as valid as anyone else’s. It’s time that our state government ran on that understanding.

Vermont must have a rural economy so that rural Vermont is alive with the young. It must be alive with the young so our land has farmers, our farms have markets, our forests have stewards and our wood becomes things of use and value. Vermont must have a diverse rural economy, not one met with suspicion or objection by the Legislature and state agencies at every creative turn.

Rural Vermont’s future, should Montpelier choose to embrace it, is a full constellation of enterprises that spring from our agrarian foundation to reconstitute rural life that makes people happy. This must once again be the beckoning country for the young, and they must be trusted to live as they see fit, not forced into a narrow land-use vision shaped and lobbied for to an undue degree, particularly by the Vermont Natural Resources Council. In recent years, Legislative committees have shut out individual rural Vermonters. Instead, committee chairs relied on their favored lobbyists for testimony.

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Our Statehouse is the people’s house, and individual Vermonters have a right and responsibility to appeal to their legislators. This fall, rural Vermonters have presented a lengthy list of policy suggestions: Grow What’s Good Here, aimed at easing the burdens on Vermont’s working lands practitioners and rural families. If the past year has signaled anything, it is that legislators and Vermont’s special-interest infrastructure must start listening to Vermont’s farmers, loggers, homesteaders, small-business owners and young families instead of ignoring them, disparaging them or talking down to them.

Vermonters are about to vote. Whatever one’s politics, we all have an urgent responsibility to evaluate who is actually taking the collective issues raised by rural Vermonters seriously. After voting, all Vermonters must hold their leaders to account. It’s incumbent upon us to stay committed to our land, our homes, our state and better governance.

Many of us chose to move to Vermont or chose to stay when we were young. By virtue of our choices and our dreams made real over time, we have contributed to making Vermont, Vermont. Rural Vermonters have done it despite the state’s posture and policies. Imagine if our state government empowered more young people to bring their vision of Vermont to life.

We can heal this place, grow its food, work its forests, build its businesses, fill its schools and create something better than what we have today. But to get there, we must begin removing the barriers to vitality that are driving the young away.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Rural Vermont needs the young to choose this place.