Montpelier’s environmentalism has a people problem

Published April 1, 2026 in VT Digger

The brand of conservation dominating Montpelier treats humans as a threat to the land. Rural Vermonters know better — and it’s time to make that case.

Dear Editor, 

“You cannot save the land apart from the people or the people apart from the land.”

Kentucky farmer, poet, and essayist Wendell Berry wrote these words just over two decades ago, observing a fundamental flaw in the conservation-based environmentalism that was displacing subsistence farmers in his home state.

The ideology underpinning that environmentalism understood people and land — along with the related issues of housing and conservation — as separable. Resisting that logic, Berry became known for holding a more fully ecological perspective, one that recognizes people as part of nature. In his view, the distancing of humans from the rhythms of the natural world is precisely what brings about ecological crisis.

The flaw in the brand of environmentalism that Berry spoke out against is this: it is inhumane and, in its inhumanity, it is anti-ecological. That environmentalism is what currently dominates Vermont’s politics.