The Weekly Reader

Link: http://www.reformer.com/editorials/ci_5191336

Young and green
Reformer.com

Friday, February 9
There has been much talk over the past year about the fear that young, educated people are fleeing Vermont and what the implications are for the state's economy in the coming years.

ED NOTE: A simple solution for the future of rural America

Follow up:

The problem certainly is real. Since the 2000 Census, the state has lost 12,000 residents between the ages of 25 and 44. While the 18-to-24 age group is growing, high housing prices and a lack of jobs paying a livable wage means that many of these young people will go elsewhere.

Vermont has the second-lowest birth rate in the nation and is 48th out of 50 states in the number of married couples with children. The state's population has been rising at a rate of 0.2 percent a year, a bit better than the New England average of 0.1 percent and much lower than the national average of 1 percent.

The fastest growing age group in Vermont is people between 55 and 64. They're the vacationers, second-home buyers and retirees, making the state second in the country in terms of the percentage of out-of-state homeowners.

These trends prompted the state to form the Next Generation Commission, a panel whose job it is to come up with remedies to keep young people in Vermont. Unfortunately,
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the panel focused mostly on higher education, and not on the two most obvious reasons why people leave Vermont -- jobs and affordable housing.

There is a looming problem that the state, and the world, will soon have to face -- the combination of climate change and the end of cheap, accessible fossil fuels.

Fortunately, Vermont is in a better position to survive what author James Howard Kunstler has called "the long emergency" better than most places. There still is an agricultural economy in place. Suburban sprawl is at a minimum and life is already conducted at the human scale that most of America has abandoned.

So, we suggest an initiative that could keep young Vermonters here, attract young people from other states to move to Vermont and create a new economic model that can stand up to a radically changed world.

Our long-term survival will depend on our ability to feed, clothe and shelter ourselves on a sustainable scale. That means local agriculture, local artisans, local manufacturing and local institutions to support them.

Why not try a homesteading program? Encourage young people to go into farming and offer cash incentives and tax breaks for people who either want to take over existing farms from retiring farmers or to start up new farms.

As we've seen in recent years, there's been more interest in eating locally produced foods, which use less energy and less chemicals and have less of an impact on the earth than food produced by factory farms. Organic farming is where the money is right now, but eventually, as the supply of cheap energy declines, all farming will eventually have to be done that way.

Farming is hard work, and it's not for everyone. That's why young people have been leaving Vermont ever since the Civil War. The big city has always seemed more glamorous than life behind a plow.

But city life will become less glamorous in an age of energy scarcity and climate change. So why not position Vermont to be a mecca for young people who are aware of the coming crises and want to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem? Encouraging local agriculture and a locally based infrastructure to service it will also go a long way toward a greener future for Vermont, our nation and the world.