Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet by Bill Mckibben

Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet by Bill Mckibben

Author:Bill Mckibben [Mckibben, Bill]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Environmental Degradation, Climatic Changes, Social Science, Nature, Science, Environmental Science, Global Warming, General, Environmental Conservation & Protection, Human Geography, House & Home, Sustainable Living, Earth Sciences, Meteorology & Climatology
Publisher: Times Books
Published: 2010-01-01T23:00:00+00:00


When my wife and daughter and I left the Adirondacks, we moved about fifty miles to the other side of Lake Champlain and the quite different state of Vermont. Different in topography—Addison County, where we live, is like a little chunk of Ohio that somehow ended up in New England, a broad flat valley filled with dairy farms. Different in climate—not quite as harsh. I’ll use several illustrations from present-day Vermont in the latter parts of this book. That’s partly because I live there; these are the stories of my daily life. But it’s also because Vermont is a particularly good example. Not because it’s typical—it isn’t, which is why I’ll also include lots of example from cities and suburbs the world around. But precisely because it’s different, most of all in its history. In fact, little Vermont may be one of the best places in the world to think about the scale of the future, simply because it’s had a very odd past.

The state was created in July 1777, when twenty-eight towns declared their independence from New York. It was, at root, a real estate dispute. New Hampshire and New York had disputed the ownership of the land, and in 1764 the King’s Privy Council ruled for New York, setting its eastern boundary on the Connecticut River. But that meant that lots of people holding titles to their farms granted by New Hampshire were suddenly out of luck. They began to agitate. After Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys won one of the first key victories of the Revolution, seizing the cannons at Fort Ticonderoga and humping them overland to Boston to pester the British, Vermonters expected to be welcomed into the new union. But New York wouldn’t relinquish its claims, and Congress wouldn’t move against New York, and so for fourteen long years Vermont was its own republic, always under threat and always threatening. Its leaders, Ethan Allen in particular, were charismatic, violent, and often drunk—but also shrewd and creative. They treated with the British, mostly to worry the Americans: as Ethan’s brother Ira once said, the British represented a north pole, and the Americans a south pole, and “should a thunder-gust come from the south, they would shut the door opposite that point and open the door facing on the north.”29

One could tell many stories from that time—the interloper who was tried by a vigilance committee and then hung in an armchair from a tavern sign for two hours at a height of twenty-five feet, facing the border of the Empire State, “to the no small merriment of a large crowd of onlookers”30—but in the end the intractable Vermonters wore down New York, which relinquished its claims, and Vermont joined the Union as the fourteenth state. For a decade and a half, however, it had been its own free place, not a former colony with aristocratic oligarchs, not a part of the American confederacy, but, as one Vermont historian puts it, “the only true American republic, for it alone had truly created itself.



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