Green Mountain Babies Needed to Tame Wilderness and Stimulate Economy 
By James Ehlers

Four hundred years ago, Vermonters, and New Englanders in general, were fruitful, and they certainly multiplied. A seventeenth-century family bore eight children, seven of which lived to adulthood. Compare that to today, however. The modern Vermont family numbers 2.90, and that includes the parents. 

The Vermont of the 1600s, not even so yet named, was admittedly quite different. In a day when many hands were required to clear, till, mine, milk, sheer, harvest and hunt to ensure survival, a large family guaranteed a ready and reliable source of labor. They cut their trees and trapped the beaver creating "value-added" goods on site. 

They "bought and ate locally," working the landscape to do so. They killed wolves and lions to counter the very real threat of becoming locally harvested themselves. 

Twenty-first century Vermont is another story. We talk about a working landscape, but only three percent of us are actually employed in doing so. We "protect" trees and quarantine land from productive use, labeling it "wilderness." We import under plastic wrap virtually all that we consume and shoot animals with cameras. We burn oil for heat, not local resources, and wear it to shield us from the same harsh winter winds once held at bay with pelts. Large families are avoided and in the extreme scorned as excessive and damaging to the planet. 

All of this said, while we may think we love Vermont more than those first pioneering spirits seeking opportunities in our harsh hills, that is most likely far from true. 

Personally, I think one would have had to love Vermont more to stay and stump its woods by hand for pasture to sustain their daily existence than those of us who now lay claim to those same fields for our new contractor-built homes. Yet, for all of the advantages we now enjoy afforded on the backs of others, we find ourselves in the middle of a new wilderness. 

The threat is no longer the northwest winds of January nor the teeth of a lion, it is literally our own unproductiveness: we are the second-oldest state in the nation. We no longer have the families and their youth investing in the landscape that has made Vermont the place we love, and we have created this situation. A generation of public policy, however, has ensured that beavers would always have work and the unemployed would always have a shade tree under which to recline. 

The wolves and catamounts that once ate our young have lost their place in the food chain to policy makers that now also make Vermont scary for Vermont youngsters. Our natural resources, once the seed of our fulfillment, are now quarantined and protected from us for the "future." We don’t conserve, wisely use, much here anymore, we preserve. That may now include our population. 

As we look to the future and fate of our state and forced to prioritize by the economic calamity here and around us, we need to consider our greatest resource, our youth, in all policy proposals that are forthcoming from the politicians to address our economy. Even after the national and global situations sugar off, we will still be left with an unsustainable situation perhaps far worse than a landscape of the past 80 percent deforested: an aging population. 

The elderly require more services and vote for a government that expands those services. Factor in that we need working young people to pay the taxes to support the romantic notion of this place we call "a wild Vermont," and we face a dilemma greater than beavers laying claim to the driveway. Experts have projected that in the next 20 years the number of dependents (i.e. the elderly) will increase by 50 percent relative to the number of people needed to support this human habit of aging. We are in short a state of dependents. Hardly the pioneering and enterprising men and women of centuries past that did not even know they were Vermonters. 

As we go forward, and policy makers bandy about ideas of what to do to "stimulate" Vermont’s economy and what type of businesses should receive their favor, I suggest that all proposals should be measured against what those proposal will do to encourage the in-migration of the same pioneering and enterprising Vermonters that created this place and stimulate more Vermonters to find a happy medium between 2.9 and 10. If Vermont is not attractive to the young, it will not matter what we have preserved for the next generation … of trees. We need more young people, not more old trees. The forests are still as fecund as they once were; it’s us that risk withering. 

Vermont has long been a taxing place to live. We do not need to make it any more so than the winters and rocky hills already do and have. The same opportunities that greeted the generations days gone by still lie in the landscape awaiting our cultivation. We need only ensure that our spirits are still free and not preserved as some relic, some charade or faux representation of what was.