Vermont’s land laws should incentivize people who heal the land

This commentary is by Ben Falk, a land planner and the founder of Whole Systems Design. He lives in Moretown.

“A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community,” the conservationist Aldo Leopold wrote in “A Sand County Almanac,” his classic account of restoring a worn-out Wisconsin farm.

For 25 years, I’ve tried to put Leopold’s “land ethic” into practice at my beat-up, abandoned sheep pasture. Here’s what I’ve learned.

First, “sustainable” was always the wrong word. Doing less bad was never doing good. Second, when you aim for revitalization instead, things start to make sense. You see that you were meant to be here. You’re not the one creature that only destroys and never heals. You belong to a place. Not just to a human community, but to the whole land community, and to the watershed. Land health is integral to thriving human habitat.

I started with the water and let its dynamics organize everything else. In ecological design we say, “You can’t get anything right if you get the water wrong.”

So first I dug swales and some shallow ponds. Then I planted fruit trees, nut trees and berry bushes on contour, along with herbaceous perennials. Everything was built to slow, spread and sink water, and to encourage biodiversity, food, beauty and medicine.

Then came Aug. 28, 2011: Tropical Storm Irene. Over 12 hours, more than half a foot of rain came down.

By that night, my village, Moretown, was under 8 feet of water. Our fire department was one of the first buildings to flood — in the same flood plains where Act 181’s Tier 1 maps actively encourage development under local flood rules.

I woke up that Monday to a changed Vermont, almost all of it for the worse. But before I knew that, I walked the land. Every pond had filled with crystal-clear water. The swales were brimming, trickling slowly over their sills, totally clear. Not a speck of ancient soil or newer hard-earned soil was moving.

Six inches of rain on 25 acres — our 10, plus 15 above us that flow onto our land — is about 4 million gallons. We banked it in the groundwater, filled our storages, fed our soil. In one event, we kept the runoff from more than twice the land we manage out of the flood.

Here’s the irony: Vermont’s Acts 59 and 181 were meant to deliver three things: more carbon stored, more biodiversity, less flood damage. My hillside does all three faster than a so-called nature preserve devoid of humans, while generating economic yield, improving local food security and being prime human habitat: my family’s home.

Soil organic matter has risen from 2% or 3% over most of our ground to between 4% and 12%. Each percentage point is about 16 tons of carbon dioxide per acre in the top 6 inches. Across our 10 acres, that adds up to hundreds of tons held in the ground, which fuels better plant yields and stormwater absorption.

The place is now prime bear and turkey habitat. The bears have been climbing my fruit and chestnut trees and have become almost pests. When people ask what we plant for wildlife, I just laugh. What don’t we plant for them? A graduate student in entomology at the University of Vermont visited a few years ago and said, “I’m seeing insects I haven’t seen on one site in Vermont before. Do you have an unusual amount of plant diversity here?” The birds arrive earlier and stay later.

If we did this on a small fraction of our landscape, our rivers would be noticeably less flood-prone. Keeping water in the hills is a no-brainer. We’ve seen multiple new springs form. And drought resilience matters as much as flood resilience, as dry spells grow more frequent.

This is nothing more than a land ethic applied to one’s home, but it takes time, energy and funding. And nobody digs swales or plants white oaks for their grandkids when they’re drowning in regulatory hurdles. They need the creative space that livability enables.

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Vermont’s Current Use program ties its tax relief to acreage and sales income; permit costs and regulatory hurdles favor scale. Go big or get out.

Laws that view people as the problem throw away the maximum leverage for reaching their own stated goals. Vermont became a place worth protecting because of the relationship between people and land: a working landscape, not a wilderness preserve. The mutual flourishing of people and the more-than-human world has married Vermonters to this land for generations. No one is regulated into good husbandry. Vermont can become a shining example of thriving human habitat if our Legislature supports rather than hinders long-term land tenure.

We might ask those seeking to represent us: What are you doing to help Vermont be an example of “small is beautiful,” not competing at the bigger, faster, more efficient corporate industrial model, but doing it with more care, craft, resilience and beauty?

How are you supporting diverse land uses through tax policy that values subsistence homesteads, not just commercial farms?

What are you doing to encourage cottage industry and enterprise, and zoning for rural production and processing?

And most of all, what are you doing to harness the landscape, legacy and brand that have made Vermont unique in all 50 states, and play our own game rather than compete with outside forces at a game out of scale with the reality of this place?

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont’s land laws should incentivize people who heal the land.