Headwaters Magazine - Spring 2020

HEADWATERS

Fritillary Butterfly Visits a Wise Aster

By Gretchen Saveson I hope that we learn to read the creations of the world like we read this magazine. Literacy of this kind comes when we turn each page with the thirst of a fritillary butterfly wondering what gives nectar its tang, or why flowers can’t use their petals as wings as she does. It comes when we hold a page up to the light to verify that it too has pulsing veins, when we let the wind take it from our hands, and when we run until we catch it but have lost our breath.

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Masthead

Table of Contents

Editor in Chief Emmett Gartner

The Culture of Permaculture: Vermont Practitioners Reject the Dogma, Embrace the Principles

By Chris Gish | Page 4

Managing Editors Maya Bostwick Chris Gish Managing Designers Alexis Martinez Gretchen Saveson Treasurer Sydney Decker Contributing Editors Julia Bailey-Wells Meryl Braconnier Corinne Hill-James Ellyn Lapointe Avery Lentini Contributing Artists Harrison Betts Eileen Brickell Braden DeForge Eleanor Duva Nadia Kamel Katelyn Lipton Planning and Outreach Rebecca Goldstein Danny Holman Grace Mungenast Jill Reynolds Dakota Smith Passionate about an environmental topic? Want to see your art or writing in the Fall 2020 edition?

1. Write a 100 word pitch that outlines your topic and approach (investigative piece, a series of interviews, op-ed, photo essay, art piece—fill us in on how you want to present your work).

2. Email uvmheadwaters@gmail.com by Friday, September 12th at midnight. Please include your pitch, a potential article title, your name, and your year.

Find us @uvmheadwaters on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter and online at uvmheadwaters.org Cover: Art by Alexis Martinez Copyright © 2019 Headwaters Magazine This magazine was printed on the traditional land of the Abenaki People

Soil Searching: How a Vermont Farm has Found Sustainability Through Science and Soil

By Noah Beckage | Page 8 Patience

By Matty King | Page 11 A Case for Civil Disobedience in Environmentalism

By Avery Lentini | Page 13 Bursting the Bubble: Advocating Through Music

By Paige Aldenberg | Page 17 How to Take a Dust Bath

By Katelyn Lipton | Page 19 A Sticky Situation: Searching for Sustainability in Vermont’s Maple Syrup Industry

By Sam Blair | Page 21 Designing Resilient Systems

By Nadia Kamel | Page 26 Eco-Anxiety at a ‘Green’ University: UVM Students Wrestle with the Mental Health Impacts of Climate Change

By Maya Bostwick | Page 29 What the River Carries: Oral Histories of the Missisquoi River

By Meryl Braconnier | Page 31 Decomposing Feathers

By Harrison Betts | Page 36

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Dear Reader, Welcome to the eighth edition of our esteemed environmental publication. We readily admit, putting this magazine into your hands—or more likely, onto your screens—was not the easiest task for the distinguished Headwaters team to undertake. We faced setbacks, big and small. Thankfully, environmental journalism is accustomed to setbacks, and my gratitude goes out to every one of our members who stuck through them.

When we write, illustrate, and design for our publication, we embrace the fragile beauty of our world and the importance of exposing its unjust imbalances. Writing in the midst of a global health crisis is no different. As with the adverse effects of air pollution, the human toll of COVID-19 will not be distributed equitably in the United States. In fact, the same inequalities that burden low-income neighborhoods and communities of color with industrial particles will exacerbate the health crisis—a repugnant byproduct of the nation’s environmental injustice.

These heavy truths bestow responsibility on those capable of action. Science is charged with determining causality, while teachers and journalists are entrusted to disseminate meaning. We work in tandem to inform you, and that is why we appreciate every ounce of attention you grant us and other publications like ours.

Within this edition, you can explore affirming coverage on the widespread anxiety associated with our climate’s teetering state. This intuitive feeling, burdensome as it may be, is why we write about climate change edition after edition, and the reason many of us have pursued roles in this magazine to begin with. As you will discover, there is a community in accepting that feeling’s chaos and working to manage its internal presence—part of that community is wedged between these covers.

To restore tranquility, our writers and designers will immerse you into the banks of the Missisquoi River with sobering stories of nostalgia and change offered by its residents. You will walk with maple sugarers, delve into the dogma and principles of permaculture, and hear from those that believe our political inaction on environmental issues necessitates more than words to make long lasting change.

Please let their collective works provide you the same sense of intrigue and passion as our writers and contributors find with creating them. For the behind-the-scenes infrastructure that powers this publication, we thank the unwavering support of our Planning and Outreach Team, along with UVM’s Environmental Program, the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, our advisor, Josh Brown, and UVM’s Student Government Association.

When you turn the final page of this edition and grapple with its lessons, understand the devotion we have to our reporting.

It is the same devotion that courses through your hometown newspaper and environmental outlets beyond our own. We ask that you support them as you would us and, especially in these trying times, remain faithful in our collective journalistic mission.

Warm Regards,

Emmett Gartner University of Vermont ‘20 Editor-in-Chief of Headwaters Magazine

Art By Alexis Martinez 3 Headwaters Magazine

The Culture of Permaculture Vermont Practitioners Reject the Dogma, Embrace the Principles

By Chris Gish

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or Sydney Rose Katz and Brian Thompson, permaculture was the “entry point” to their life’s work. A permaculture course in high school ignited the young couple’s passion for sustainable agriculture, which they have each pursued full time since graduating college four years ago.

Now both are farmer managers in Vermont—Katz at Elmer Farm in Middlebury and Thompson at Full Moon Farm in Hinesburg—in addition to tending their own homestead. As their agricultural experience has deepened over the years, however, their thoughts on permaculture have soured.

“There’s not a lot of substance behind the buzz,” Thompson says of permaculture. “It doesn’t feel like it’s really grounded in anything.”

At its core, permaculture professes to be a practicable— and desperately needed—means to build healthy natural and social systems. ‘Permies’ favor long-lived, diverse perennial plantings, earthworks to catch water, and a philosophy based on observation and general principles. The resulting designs strive to welcome local wildlife and heal the land even as they bear fruit for their human designers.

At a time when most environmental movements fail to articulate a genuinely positive vision of the future, this approach posits a refreshing possibility of mutual benefit between humans and the natural world. Alissa White, a University of VT (UVM) PhD student who has long been involved in permaculture as both a practitioner and teacher, affirms that permaculture can be so inspiring because it maintains the possibility that “there is a way forward to be a human and not be a problem on this planet.”

This vision of harmonious food production has become one of the most compelling symbols of alternative farming.

Near our own city of Burlington, Vermont alone, there are almost a dozen groups that offer Permaculture Design Certificate (PDC) courses, typically in the form of intensive

1-2 week experiences where participants immerse themselves in example permaculture systems and design plots of their own.

As Thompson hints, however, such popularity and positive vision are not the only aspects of this agricultural movement. The ways that permaculture play out amid the complexity of real social and ecological systems are often messy and uncertain. …

The Farm Between offers an excellent example of both the vibrancy and tension that can spring up around permaculture. John and Nancy Hayden grow an array of perennial crops like blueberries, gooseberries, aronia, and tree fruit, and make decisions as much for the health of pollinators and wildlife as for their own bottom line.

In summer at this 18-acre plot between the villages of Jeffersonville and Cambridge, VT, birds flit between hedges, helping themselves to a share of the farm’s abundant produce as they provide reliable, non-toxic pest control.

Monarch butterflies gather on dedicated milkweed patches, which are planted among rows of a young orchard and pollinator garden. The varnish peels off an old piano slouching next to the brook, which has been converted into habitat Art By Alexis Martinez Headwaters Magazine 4

for native insect pollinators. Often, another local homesteader or farmer stops by to chat and visit the farm’s thriving nursery, which sells locally-adapted trees and shrubs.

Perennial polycultures, consideration for non-human life, and intentional community-building—these match many of the most vaunted permaculture techniques and principles. Yet, the Haydens refuse to call themselves a permaculture farm. As John Hayden elaborated over email, “We don’t brand ourselves as a Permaculture Farm because we want [to] be under a bigger tent that includes all philosophies and practices that are committed to a society and economic system based on ecological frameworks and limits.”

Since they founded the farm 28 years ago, the Haydens have used an evolving combination of practices to meet this social and ecological commitment. Many of their techniques, including growing annual vegetables with horsepower, cannot be pigeon-holed with the permaculture label. Their recent switch to a perennial polyculture configuration reflects personal and economic reasons—their own advancing age and a budding market for specialty crops—more than a desire to reach the gold standard of permaculture.

In opting not to use the permaculture label, Hayden also alludes to a number of serious criticisms with the movement as a whole. Specifically, according to Hayden, “it is easy to find faults with its origin, claims and exclusivity, and there certainly have been some big egos that have turned people off as they profited from self-promotion and the certification process.” …

In terms of these origins and exclusivity, permaculture has been criticized for emerging from a particular kind of affluent, white, male environmental consciousness cultivated by a handful of quasi-celebrity figures—folks who, in White’s words, constitute “self-proclaimed gurus.”

Some 50 years ago, Australians Bill Mollison and David Holmgren began experimenting with “permanent agriculture” on their Tasmanian homestead, promising nothing short of social revolution from thick, self-published tomes.

Now, figures like Geoff Lawton and Toby Hemenway have joined Holmgren and the late Mollison as the face of the movement, attracting abundant attention (and money) via demonstration sites, glossy coffee table books, and popular Youtube channels. To this day, many permaculture practitioners can trace their mentorship and training directly back to Holmgren, Mollison and this handful of leaders.

Even in the Northeast, only a few figures lead many of the most recognizable PDCs and permaculture farms, which,

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as Hayden hints, could allow them to keep tight control of permaculture’s messaging and business opportunities.

More broadly, permaculture has a legacy of restricting access to wealthy and well-connected people. A typical PDC costs upwards of $2,000, in addition to the unpaid time away from work needed to attend. Even after one understands the fundamentals of permaculture design, it is difficult to implement a farm or garden without the funds to own land or otherwise obtain long-term tenure.

Similarly, permaculture designs can be imbued with tendencies toward exclusion and the preservation of an unequal status quo. One prominent Vermont permaculture consultant, for example, summarizes their services: We plan, develop, and manage land-based wealth preservation and security projects for those with the forethought to invest an abundance of present day resources to reduce their familly’s [sic] vulnerability to future food, energy and other supply-chain disturbances, as well as peak-oil, climatic, economic and other events.

Not only is permaculture rooted in an affluent, white positionality that might actively seek to preserve its privilege in a time of uncertainty, some critics go further to contend that permaculture is grounded in precisely the settler colonial philosophy that it allegedly overcomes.

One experienced Vermont permaculture practitioner, Jessica Rubin, notes that as appealing and inspiring as the movement can be, “permaculture is really the terms of white men from Australia who coined practices that have been lived throughout the world in different ways based on climate, land and condition by indigenous people everywhere.” She worries about “a certain kind of dogma” in permaculture that obscures its many overlaps with other peoples, traditions, and movements.

Indeed, de-emphasizing the contributions and wisdom of indigenous peoples, women, people of color, and other marginalized communities is a core issue with permaculture. Like many ‘mainstream’ forms of environmentalism, permaculture publications often employ a discourse of non-specific, universalized notions of nature and humanity. The Permaculture Research Institute vaguely promises a system “which functions to benefit life in all its forms,” while Mollison, in his autobiography, similarly relies on a universal ‘we’ to discuss the social dimensions of permaculture: We are a nonhierarchical network joined only by volunteer or the user-pays principle, we have no internal status differences, and we relate as equals. As we never

need to vote, we are democratic; each acts as they see beneficial.

With more than a decade of experience implementing and teaching permaculture, Rubin understands much of this positionality and association. She points out that permaculture emerged hand in hand with environmentalism, the back-to-the-land movement, and other iterations of an often affluent, white counterculture. Personally, Rubin fell in love with permaculture as an undergraduate after WWOOFing at a number of small farms across North America, meeting some inspiring mentors, and living in intentional communities. Since then, she has dedicated her life to earth care by becoming a permaculture teacher herself, founding a number of land-based agricultural enterprises, and living a sustainable lifestyle even as she attends graduate school at UVM for ecological landscape design.

White points to stories like Rubin’s to show just how diverse, meaningful, and transformative permaculture can be. While White readily acknowledges that “I’ve heard people in the permaculture community describe it as being colonial and taking from indigenous knowledge,” she finds hope in folks like Rubin who are “so conscious about acknowledging the roots of permaculture and talking about power structures.” Ultimately, both White and Rubin see permaculture as a “work in progress” that transforms its practitioners even as the movement itself evolves to work through its particular and sometimes problematic history.

On any farm, these social issues play out in the context of agronomic and economic concerns. Improperly conceived, permaculture can imply a limited and rigid set of practices that may not work for a farmer’s local conditions or economic viability.

One of Katz and Thompson’s primary misgivings with permaculture is simple: It is not able to ‘scale up’ and feed the world. Reflecting on this critique, White agrees that permaculture design does not lend itself to selling cash crops at market prices. Rather than finding this a setback of the discipline, though, she is grateful that permaculture has the tools for a comprehensive critique of the economic and ecological tendencies that drive conventional farming.

In Vermont, she sees many permaculture farms embracing the “transformative potential” of the movement by entwining educational programs, value-added products, and agrotourism into their farms, rather than relying on a strictly production-based model.

For John Hayden, the constant push for viable largescale production is “such an American—or capitalist—way of thinking.” He believes that farming is so valuable not as a means to make a living under the current socio-economic status quo, but as a platform to bring people together to radically change the very conditions under which they can make a living.

Beyond this economic tension, the movement employs a distinctly universalized design process. One leading permaculture manual frames this as the movement’s strength, noting: “One of the most important things about permaculture is that it is founded on a series of design principles that can be applied to any circumstance.” According to Katz, though, such blanket applicability can lead to “blindly applying some tips and tricks in the back of a permaculture book” to any situation.

Online critics call this “PDC Syndrome,” in which aspiring permaculturists favor a handful of popular practices regardless of the circumstances. In temperate, moist Vermont, for example, water retention systems originating in arid Australia may not always be the wisest choice; likewise, planting nitrogen-fixing shrubs could actually set back local ecosystems, since many native plants are adapted to rel-

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atively nitrogen-scarce forest soils.

White and Rubin are both actively aware of this tendency to impose rather than listen to the unique needs of one’s social and environmental situation. According to White, permaculturists—like anyone working at the interface of people and nature—have to be very careful not to extrapolate general principles to “specific outcomes” without a lot of humility and ground-truthing. Rubin affirms that “listening and observing is really important, and paying as much attention if not more to the non-human life that’s there.” Both emphasize a thorough, iterative site analysis, deep listening, and a general sense of humility so that a human designer is never imposing a prescriptive set of principles or their own wishes on a landscape.

These are real issues that surface in the practice and movement of permaculture. For practitioners like White, Rubin and the Haydens, however, the unique strength of the movement lies in its ability to collaborate across diverse systems, forms of knowledge, and situations. White, for her part, doesn’t see any inherent contradiction between frameworks like Western science, permaculture, or agroecology. Rather, these and other movements can all collaborate on the urgent task of addressing the “human-caused crisis on the planet.”

Rubin takes it a step further. She would add indigenous cosmologies, spirituality and non-human patterns to the ways of knowing that can all be layered with one another to create a more holistic lifeway. For her, permaculture is so valuable because it deals with “whole systems,” and addresses not only how one tends the land, but also “your inner world, your emotions, your communication, your spiritual practice, how you treat people” and even “how you choose to participate in a capitalist economy.” …

Writing amid an unfolding viral pandemic, it can feel out of place to linger on the nuances of a fringe agricultural movement.

Permaculture, however, was also born amid a perception of crisis—around peak oil, industrial farming and the global destruction of biodiversity—so it gives some insight on the divergent tendencies that emerge from crucial moments of uncertainty and change. Some permaculturists offer “wealth preservation and security” for those already at the top of an unjust economic order, or rely on dogmatic belief in a few key figures and rigid practices.

Others, however, use permaculture as a collaborative, open-ended tool to develop more just relations with humans and nature. For some local farmers like Thompson and Katz, pure permaculture may be an unrealistic or impractical way to contribute to the local food system. Yet Rubin is quick to note that diverse approaches can still collaborate and support each other across differences, and permaculture, at its best, is a profound way to do this.

In a deeply uncertain future, she holds onto hope that this kind of collaboration—a “natural blueprint” for a community and mutual aid—will be stronger than ever. H

Art By Amanda Cole and Emily McCarthy 7 Headwaters Magazine

Soil Searching How a Vermont Farm has Found Sustainability Through Science and Soil

By Noah Beckage

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o cars and passers-by traveling down Mt. Philo road, the peripheral seas of grass are lush but unobtrusive under a deep September sky. Throughout this month last year, I spent my mornings wading through those tall pastures, the boonie hat on my head bobbing around the surface of the vegetative ocean like a khaki buoy. I made my way through the shoots of fescue, rye, meadow, and kentucky bluegrass, sampling plots and collecting data on the pasture’s health. I recorded species, average height and density of the vegetation, and any surface indicators of soil health such as the presence of moss or decomposing plant matter. As I knelt on the soil scribbling observations on a clipboard, I was transfixed by this vibrant agroecosystem of grass and earth.

I came out to these pastures to try to understand soil life and the impact it has on agriculture. I was working with Juan Alvez, a University of Vermont (UVM) plant and soil sciences professor and research associate with UVM Extension’s Center for Sustainable Agriculture. For his research, Alvez cultivated a partnership with Philo Ridge Farm, an agriculturally diversified farm in Charlotte, VT. Our shared role was to collect and analyze data on the farm’s pastures and soils, allowing us to better understand the overall agricultural ecosystem and make recommendations on how to sustainably foster its vitality. The farm managers, in turn, trust these recommendations in the eager hope of healthier soils, greater pasture yields, and, ultimately, healthier beef cattle—the farm’s trademark animal. So far, Alvez’s research suggests a holistic, ecologically-minded approach to raising pastures as the best practice for maximizing the well-being of both the farm and the land it cultivates.

“Don’t disturb soil; let life thrive, and encourage diversity,” is Alvez’s standard prescription for optimal soil health.

As any ecologist knows, diversity of species is integral to an ecosystem’s stability and overall vitality. Alvez explains that the same principle applies to the microecosystem of soils: “You want to have some balance of different microorganisms.” This balance is necessary to fulfill all the ecological

roles required to maintain healthy soil, including nutrient recycling, soil cohesion, and the accumulation of organic matter.

Organic matter is any material in soil that is of an organic origin, such as living microbes, dead plant matter, or manure. It is the vital raw material that turns inanimate dirt into living soil. Its abundance is, Alvez asserts, “the gold standard of agroecology.” That is because accumulating organic matter proportionally increases the amount of water soil can hold, turning a deluge that might otherwise risk flooding into a welcomed boost to pasture yield. “For every inch of water that the soil absorbs,” Alvez tells me, “you can grow an additional 200 pounds of [grass] forage.” Ian Johnson, the Assistant Livestock Manager at Philo Ridge, explains that when organic matter accumulates in soils, they “will take up water quickly and won’t stay as waterlogged for as long. Then it will hold water better throughout dry periods.” At a farm with over 200 acres of pastures, that extra inch of absorption goes a long way towards increasing resiliency and yield.

But soil is only one side of the agroecological coin; if organic matter is the gold standard, then animals, as Alvez puts it, “are the cornerstone of agroecology.” Johnson is responsible for caring for the farm’s livestock, including “everything from calving, lambing, feeding, and watering up to organization around harvest and processing.”

In the middle of that spectrum of responsibilities is one task that is critical for nourishing animals and regenerating soils: rotating the grazing animals from pasture to pasture.

Since grass pasture comprises 100 percent of the diet for the farm’s sheep and belted cattle, constantly rotating the animals ensures that, in Johnson’s words, “every day they get a fresh paddock of grass that’s sized to their needs for that day.” The key is having just enough pasture to cycle through so that animals always have fresh, mature grass.

By the time the animals have come back to the field where they first grazed after about 30 to 45 days, “the grass has had time to regrow, and there’s adequate food for [the ani-

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Art By Braden DeForge 9 Headwaters Magazine

mals] when they come back.” The grass is only grazed down to a minimum length that still allows the plants to utilize their photosynthetic tissue to regrow, rather than depleting the energy stored in their roots. This way, the pastures can regenerate themselves sustainably without draining the energy potential of the soil. The problem with leaving pastures on their own for too long without grazing animals is that “over time you get succession,” Alvez points out.

This means that pasture species gradually decline, and the grazing cycle breaks down as fields slowly transition into forests; the grasses are outcompeted, unpalatable shrubs spring up, and eventually trees take root.

Thus the cycling between grazing and regrowth is essential to the regenerative agriculture of Philo Ridge. “There are a lot of names for it,” Johnson says, “but basically we’re trying to build soil carbon and soil biology to grow a healthier forage mix so that we can raise healthier animals.”

One of the ways the farmers at Philo Ridge have been trying to do just that is through introducing nitrogen fixers to the pastures, a recommendation initially put forward by Alvez intending to cycle a nutrient critical to plant life back into the system. “We’ve been adding a lot of legumes to the pasture mix, which is because they sequester their own nitrogen,” Johnson affirms. Since adopting this practice, the change in forage quality has been noticeable: “you can just see it in the rate of regrowth of the grass, the color, how lush it is, and the feel of the soil itself.” Johnson also points out how the vigor of the grasses has been healing some of the damage to the soil that has resulted from tilling in the past. This traditional agricultural practice tears up and churns soil under the false premise that manual aeration will increase porosity. Without such disturbance, pastures begin to thrive with greater access to nutrients and water.

Johnson describes the vitality that has returned to the farm since ceasing tillage: “The grasses themselves are established better in the soil, their roots are getting deeper and breaking through some of the compaction and hardpan that had been left from previous tillage.”

Single-cell wide networks of fungal mycelia play one of the most crucial yet hidden roles in regenerating this vitality. In essence, they are able to bridge the above and below ground components of the agricultural cycle. Jessica Rubin, a graduate student in UVM’s Plant and Soil Sciences department and founder of the mycoremediation research collaborative MycoEvolve, emphasizes that “not only are [fungi] decomposers, intaking dead matter and turning it into elements that can be taken up to support life, but their mycelium also basically expand the rhizosphere—the root zone of plants—and access minerals, nutrients, and water that the plant can’t get on its own.” In this way, the fungi mycelia act as a catalyst for the agricultural soil cy-

cle, quickening the accumulation of organic matter and the recycling time of nutrients. Arbuscular mycorrhizae, the symbiotic fungal partner of legumes, never produce mushrooms; they remain underground and unseen. Unless torn up and killed by tilling, the mycorrhizae can, “release a glycoprotein called glomalin that helps basically sequester carbon and bring soil aggregates together,” according to Rubin. During a time of drastic global climate change, minimizing the carbon footprint and environmental impact of agriculture is a primary motive for Philo Ridge— and these fungi help do that.

That goal is part of the reason why the farm has been trying to revitalize the land through sustainable practices “from the beginning,” says Johnson. Johnson is referring to the year 2012, when the current owners bought what was then a traditional dairy farm and began converting it into the diverse, sustainable operation it is today. Empowered by knowledge and research-backed science, they have been largely successful. “We’re cycling a lot more of the nutrients on-farm. We don’t have to bring in as much seed or fertilizer for the land base,” which he says is a direct result of “working with the land, growing perennial crops that are lower maintenance, and reaping that reward of what wants to grow here and what wants to grow within this system.” Professor Alvez is also seeing the effects of this transition in the carbon-holding capacity of the soil; the pastures are coming alive again, and, in a sense, breathing.

“In the agronomical concept of respiration, your soil starts accumulating more carbon, sequestering more carbon. We measure that at Philo, and we have a net positive.” This measurement indicates that the soils and grazing animals are effectively removing carbon from the atmosphere and storing it within the Earth.

The sustainable agriculture at Philo Ridge has yielded resounding success for the farm and the environment. The farm serves as a model for other farms throughout Vermont: “I definitely see these practices spreading throughout the state as an alternative to [current] dairy management,” envisions Johnson. Alvez as well has bright hopes for the future of sustainable, small-scale agriculture in the state: “If you’re willing to listen, if you’re willing to learn new things, you can change for good and forever. You can pass your farm to your kids, and they can keep farming in the same way.” Like the herd of graceful belted cows I watched browse through verdure pastures during the late and lush summer, perhaps sustainable farms can also flourish and cycle through time, generation after generation. H

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Patience

By Matty King

By using an ancient building style revered for its meticulous construction, UVM student Matty King learned to slow down a little and better connect to the world around him.

Photos By Danny Holman 11 Headwaters Magazine

D

ating back as far as 600-700 AD, kumiko is a Japanese wooden lattice work traditionally used in sliding doors or to divide rooms. Kumiko itself is made up of hundreds of different patterns, with each piece designed to mimic sequences in nature believed to be good omens. These pieces are often backed with rice paper to distribute light and wind in a meticulously beautiful way. Due to a modern increase in popularity, kumiko has begun a resurgence among Eastern designers, in part for one simple concept: you can’t fake it. Even for those who use powerful machines to craft large panels of kumiko, it must still be made up from thousands of intricately cut pieces with perfect angles. Having read extensively about it, it was the idea of this painstaking process that attracted me to making my first panel, using a traditional Asa No Ha pattern. Around the time I made it I felt increasingly less in control of my attention, longing for a project that would force me to slow down and practice a little patience. I would work for hours a day, only to find that I had barely inched forward a step in the process. Although this project took over three weeks to complete, it was a fulfilling process that helped me see that I too could make something beautiful when I simply slow down.

Asa No Ha

As perhaps the most well known kumiko pattern, Asa No Ha has an important history as part of Buddhist furnishings. It is said to represent the hemp fibers used in traditional infant clothing.

Sakura

The popular design Sakura has a long history in Japan because it depicts the world-famous cherry blossom. This pattern increased in popularity in the Western World after the end of the Meiji period (1868-1912), when Japan sent seedlings to the United States as a sign of respect.

Shippo-kikku

Shippo-kikku, one of the few kumiko designs using bent wood, is a beautiful pattern that plays off the hexagonal shape of the tortoise shell, a symbol of longevity in Japan. This effect is created by the seemingly never-ending lines of the design. H Art by Gretchen Saveson Headwaters Magazine 12

A Case for Civil Disobedience in Environmentalism

By Avery Lentini

W

e live in uncertain times. The climate crisis simmers at the center of this uncertainty and threatens to dismantle vulnerable ecosystems and every one of our human institutions. Since the term “global warming” was first used in a 1975 Science article, this phenomenon is no longer considered to be a scientific controversy. Though the planet has, in fact, gone through cycles of warming over past millennia, it is happening faster and more extremely now than ever before. Researchers far and wide have rallied behind exposing these destructive patterns driven by anthropogenic behavior, warning us of the consequences of our unfettered growth. This news comes as a heavy burden, especially to young people. We have been dealt unprecedented

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circumstances—now we must figure out how to navigate them with unprecedented tactics. We are living through a planetary experiment, but this is also our final chance to right the wrongs—or at least, minimize the damage—of climate change.

The only antidote to our crisis is complete structural change—economic, cultural, and political—because many feel as though the very system in which we exist is what got us here in the first place. It is important during this time of global ecological crisis to consider the systems of power that produce environmental degradation and myriad other forms of oppression. Business interests rely on the exploitation of humans and natural resources to sustain a profit,

and powerful politicians continue to choose to ignore the realities of the climate crisis.

These entangled predicaments beg a series of questions: What is the best way to manifest the urgency demanded of us to solve our global crisis? How can we organize ourselves around action most efficiently and effectively? Where is the place for civil disobedience and nonviolent direct action within the environmental movement?

Monica Filippenko of the Burlington chapter of Extinction Rebellion (XR), a global environmental organization that uses nonviolent civil disobedience to drive policy reform, chips away at some of these questions. Her experience as an activist sheds light upon how national organizers are responding to recent damning climate reports.

Filippenko acknowledged the different forms that civil disobedience and environmental activism can take, including artistic expression, demonstration in the streets, and demanding action from representatives. As a professional who works with children, she fears getting arrested would hurt her career. Even so, she has remained an active member of the movement and has been involved with protests around the state demanding action from elected officials as well as the attention of the public. Speaking along the basic tenets of XR’s strategy, Filippenko discussed the timeliness for civil disobedience today. “I think the reason [direct action] has to happen now is because nothing else is working … We still need to lobby the politicians and all that kind of stuff, but with every day that passes and nothing changes, it is a huge loss because of the timeline that we’re on.”

She warned of the need for “a heightened level of urgency,” expressing frustrations that people are only just beginning to wake up to this reality now.

Filippenko is right: If we are going to take climate change as seriously as scientific data suggests we should, then our window for action is fleeting. Though we have known about climate change for more than 30 years, political will and emissions have only worsened. The climate crisis blows any previous timeline in calling for change out of the water entirely and continuing along our current track of status quo politics feels futile. “I think that building resilient communities is actually sort of independent of whatever the government is telling us to do from the top down. We can build resilient communities without them,” Filippenko said. Her words support a revolutionary idea.

Never before has collective humanity been faced with such an urgent threat, and we need to respond accordingly with radical, people-driven action. Though we are approaching a tipping point ecologically, these circumstances present us with an enormous opportunity for building grassroot coalitions as we demand progressive climate policy from our representatives and alter our cultural behaviors around

consumption and output.

“We need to cause disruption, because the problem we’re facing is going to disrupt our daily lives, a thousand times over,” Filippenko said. “Even though to an extent as humanity, we’ve already locked ourselves into a certain degree of failure with what we’ve done, it’s not all or nothing.

And if we can fail less badly, then that matters.” Protests take up space and cause physical disruption, demanding people’s collective attention to the issue. There is inherent power in disruption; it interrupts the structure of daily life and thus breaks us free, if just for a moment, from the hold of our shared cultural routine. Filippenko elaborated on her experience with a second, more performative activist organization called the Red Rebels. “There are things we can do that are really eye-catching and appeal to people’s emotions. It is interesting just to witness people’s reactions.

Lots of people were uncomfortable to see [the protest]...

And I think that that is what really makes an impression, when people feel something.” By capturing pathos, direct action forces onlookers to confront the presented issue, internalize it, and—if we are lucky—become inspired to fight for it themselves. With contagious actions like this, we begin to see crucial shifts in power.

Different mediums channel expressions of protest that can be just as commanding as marches through cities or sitins in representatives’ offices. Peter Schumann, the founder of Bread & Puppet Theater in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont, is well-versed in politicized performances.

Schumann proposed another interesting perspective on the diverse means that environmentalists can use to interrupt normative language and discourse. “I think that language isn’t just what newspapers issue and what so-called information distribution does. Language is talent and music and picture and sculpture—all these means that are available to us that come from our inside.” Schumann then expressed why he thinks art is so effective in achieving this alternative channel of communication: “To be unlimited in your means, you can be as big as you want to be. You can be as loud as you want to be. All those elements are available to you, it doesn’t have to be in the traditional channels. No! Outside! In the street!”

Climate change, though scientifically indisputable, has been artificially politicized by powerful economic interests.

Like Schumann emphasized, to rely only on corporate media to cover it creates an often-skewed narrative around the issue. Protest allows us to circumvent this form of media representation. Mainstream networks often favor a sort of surface-level ‘balance’ by avoiding instigation of hot-button issues. Consider the disruptive power of the Standing Rock Protests. Injustices towards indigenous peoples have happened consistently since the arrival of the White man

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in the New World, but the corporate media cycle seldom covers them. It was not until indigenous activists staged acts of civil disobedience that these injustices captured the attention of the media and became a fixture of public conversation.

Trish O’Kane, a University of Vermont (UVM) professor and professional journalist, emphasizes the importance of proper planning and intention in these efforts.

Her own journey with direct action began by studying the Civil Rights Movement—perhaps the most effective practice of civil disobedience this country has ever seen. “The Civil Rights Movement was based on a lot of theory—well planned, philosophically grounded civil disobedience,” O’Kane detailed. This moment in history was radical in every sense of the word. Black communities were victimized by the system and recognized nothing would truly improve unless they took action into their own hands to force the change themselves. These individuals, like Dr. King Jr. and Rosa Parks, were revolutionaries who demanded structural change for a collective better world—and they demanded it immediately. The looming threats of climate change bring a similar heightened sense of pressure to act. When a community has inherited an injustice, how can we expect them to continue to exist under the status quo? The environmental movement at large would thus benefit greatly from the lessons that Civil Rights era leaders have taught us: It is in our best interest to take control of the narrative ourselves and demand change happen now, not later.

O’Kane believes, however, that direct action should not be taken as the sole force in the fight against climate change. “I think there isn’t just one tool,” O’Kane said. “I think it’s lazy if you haven’t used the other tools of democracy first ... I object to just jumping to civil disobedience if you aren’t using all those other levels of [democratic] power at the same time.” While her point about civic engagement is valid, the view that civil disobedience is lazy is contentious. Direct action, if informed by extensive research and strategizing, can be a powerful way to circumvent the characteristically slow and incremental slog of American electoral politics. How can we continue to trust a system that has failed us so badly?

With a crisis like climate change, we do not have a precedent on how exactly to approach our timeline for action.

Civic engagement is now more important than ever, and it comes as a responsibility of being a citizen in this country.

It is increasingly evident, however, that civic engagement alone will not get us the immediate structural change we need. Ultimately, we need to come at change from all sides, with direct action taking a front seat. We can either put total trust in our representatives or we can take the initiative to mold public awareness ourselves and work to influence

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politicians whose views block the advancement of climate change policy.

The narrative that we need a moderate candidate or course of action exists only in our collective imagination.

If together we choose not to buy into the system that landed us in this crisis, we hold the power to escape it. Civil disobedience provides us with a powerful response to the trying question of how to move forward in a system that has failed us. Such organization takes aim at exposing the underbelly of corrupt institutions that led us to this tipping point. Joining a movement and engaging in protest of any form sends a formidable political message, but the connotation of direct action being radical by nature prevents some from getting involved in the first place. This narrative does damage to the legacy of the selfless leaders who have practiced civil disobedience throughout history and the communities that continue to do so today in response to their circumstances. Like them, we, as young people, need to respond to our circumstances, because the climate crisis threatens to affect us all. We simply have no other choice.

Direct action, importantly, holds the unspoken power of building community. Filippenko said, “I feel connected when I’m a part of a group, ... it’s like a meditation that changes my perspective on the world.” When O’Kane recounted the story of the time she and a group of other protesters were arrested for trespassing on a nuclear test site, a similar theme emerged: “It had a very religious feel to it. A very spiritual feel to it.” Civil disobedience and direct action connect us to something greater than ourselves; by putting our bodies on the line, we devote ourselves to the sincerest form of engagement. If we want our action to work, we need people to engage in this form of action on national and international scales. Like O’Kane stressed, it is possible for the movement to burn out unless matched with substantial organization and study. Unless we can build a community around civil disobedience, we will not maximize the platform that it provides. Effective direct action does not come from strokes of luck, but rather from prolonged efforts without surrendering and standing in solidarity with each other and our planet. In this moment of such great uncertainty, we would be wise to follow Schumann’s mantra, “just do your push-ups, get on your boxing gloves, and go out!” H

Art By Harrison Betts Headwaters Magazine 16

By Paige Aldenberg

Advocating Through Music

Bursting the Bubble: Bubble: 17 Headwaters Magazine

U

nderground music events are common occurrences in coffee shops and bars throughout Burlington, Vermont. Within these booming walls and dimly lit pockets, gems such as the Light Club Lamp Shop offer spaces where people are headbanging at the stage or getting cozy with a loved one under twinkling lights. The scattered lamps and glittering backdrop of the stage create a room of wonder, and at benefit shows, this atmosphere is amplified by the intersection of music and advocacy. Whether the crowd is loud and energetic or intimate and mellow, the Burlington community exemplifies a unique form of advocacy.

While environmental concerns are larger than any one individual or community, action often begins on personal and local levels. For environmentalists just starting to practice more eco-friendly behaviors, composting at home and supporting local businesses can be powerful stepping stones, but large environmental problems also demand large-scale collective action. For global issues ranging from climate change to environmental refugee support, simply donating to charities can be a helpful contribution. For many years, people have been coming up with creative ways to engage the public around these actions.

Beginning as early as the 19th century, music has been a powerful tool in advocating for social or environmental change through protest anthems and charity concerts. One of the best-known benefit concerts of recent history was the Live Aid concert of 1985, which was held as a fundraiser for famine relief in Ethiopia. With Queen as one of the performers, the organization collected over $125 million in donations, and the legacy of Live Aid inspired the founding of many other iconic charity organizations, like Red Nose Day. Notable artists who have used music and concerts to support environmental charities include Green Day, Drake, and Lil Dicky. In 2019, Lil Dicky released the song “Earth,” which brought light to the subject of climate change in a humorous manner and sparked conversation.

By working with organizations such as the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation, “Earth” became a viral environmental song featuring around 35 celebrities. This kind of advocacy

in the music industry is a huge step for global environmentalism.

Members of the Burlington community are creating a new musical advocacy movement of their own. Local writer and performer G. Cenedella founded Bursting the Bubble, a performance showcase that promotes environmental action through charitable giving. Local bands and artists perform at Bursting the Bubble events in order to bring the Burlington community together to have fun while raising awareness and funds for pressing issues of our time. Cenedella described Bursting the Bubble as a play-on-words that reflects efforts to reach outside of the Burlington community and act on environmental and social justice issues happening around the world.

To Cenedella, Bursting the Bubble creates space where “people and music and art can be brought together—you can’t separate those things from any movement.” She spoke about a sense of empathy forming in audiences that revitalizes the Burlington community in its efforts to address the often-neglected dark realities of environmental and social issues. While some of the artists who now work to raise awareness on current events in their performances are close friends with Cenedella, the Bursting the Bubble series plans to continue reaching out to new organizations and charities. Cenedella said that charity showcases such as

these are a place where one can have “the power to believe that… we can make an impact.”

The showcase debuted on January 27, 2020 and raised over $1,000 in donations to go toward Australian bushfire relief funds. Australia experienced mass destruction of its natural and urban areas in a series of uncontrolled fires that started in September 2019. The health, environmental, and economic concerns of this crisis were unprecedented.

Cenedella intentionally organized energetic performances to reflect the urgency of the matter, stating how before this event she felt “scared, angry, and overwhelmed with not knowing how or what to do with a world that just feels like it was dropped and crumbling in our hands.” The featured artists presented a high energy, rock ‘n’ roll type of show, and the loud spirit brought emphasis to the need to act on climate change and issues of indigenous rights in Australia.

The energy in the second showcase held on Feb. 16th was smooth and relaxed, and the event focused on a local social justice issue—the needs of immigrants in Burlington. The event raised over $600 for the organization Hearts You Hold, a non-profit organization whose goal is to support migrants, immigrants, and refugees. Cenedella said that this time, in contrast to the fiery intensity of the first showcase, the artists aimed to foster a more “cozy and intimate” mood with its lineup of Burlington ambient and folk-rock artists Erica B., Allison Fay Brown, Hannah Hausman, and Tom Pearo. Should Bursting the Bubble showcases go forward, the style of the performing artists will continue to go hand in hand with the goals and character of the chosen charity.

Moving forward, Cenedella hopes to keep gathering the Burlington community around pressing current events. As locals strive to reduce their ecological impact and fulfill social responsibilities, there is still work to be done around action. Bursting the Bubble creates a welcoming space for people to express shared concerns about these issues and to join the conservation through an advocacy approach.

Cenedella mentioned that although processing and discussing these issues can be challenging emotional work, listening to other perspectives provides a productive outlook on the future of our environment. She hopes Bursting the Bubble will promote this message, saying that “when you soften the way you walk with your community, you are better equipped to fight the bigger.” Although Bursting the Bubble is a new organization, it has demonstrated the potential of its far-reaching impact on local and global efforts through two successful showcases. Harnessing the compassion of the Burlington community, Bursting the Bubble is evidence that music can be an important aspect of activism on local and international scales and a creative means to tackle problems of our time. H

Art By Eileen Brickell Headwaters Magazine 18

How to Take a Dust Bath

By Katelyn Lipton

19 Headwaters Magazine

Headwaters Magazine 20

A Sticky Situation: Searching for Sustainability in Vermont’s Maple Syrup Industry

By Sam Blair

I

t is a bright September day as more than a dozen foresters and I walk into the woods beneath the orange-and redhued flanks of Mount Mansfield in Underhill, Vermont.

They have come together, and I have come along, to discuss the newest developments in their profession, compare notes, and eat donuts. But this is no ordinary conference—foresters do things a little differently when it comes to professional development. Instead of meeting in a hotel ballroom, we are out in the woods, walking from stand to stand and examining the silvicultural treatments that have been applied to each area of the forest.

The first stop of the day is a sugarbush leased and tapped

by Eric Sorkin, co-owner and CEO of Runamok Maple.

‘Sugarbush,’ ‘stand,’ ‘silvicultural treatment’: these are just three terms in a whole lexicon of forestry jargon on hand today. For the uninitiated, ‘sugarbush’ is a common-

ly-used name for a stand dominated by sugar maples that are tapped to produce maple sap. ‘Stand’ refers to the unit at which foresters manage the woods—a finite area within which conditions are similar enough to warrant packaging up as a single, bounded entity. ‘Silviculture’ connotes the art and science of growing trees. Another term in the air today: sustainability. But unlike the forestry terms defined so easily above, sustainability gets awfully hard to pin down the moment you step into the woods.

I have been thinking about sustainability in Vermont’s forests for the last two years as I have interned for Audubon Vermont, an organization focused on implementing conservation programs across Vermont’s working landscapes.

Over that time, it has occurred to me that a closer look at the sugarbush might shed light on some of the issues that arise when we start thinking about sustainability in Art By Alexis Martinez

21 Headwaters Magazine

landscapes where humans and wild nature must coexist, and sweeten my own understanding of the booming maple products industry in the process.

As I follow the foresters into the sugarbush, I am picturing a timeless Vermont tradition drawn straight from the label of a maple syrup jug—metal buckets hung from old open-grown maples, perhaps a flannel-clad old-timer leading a team of horses through the woods. But as soon as we make our way to the boundaries of the sugarbush proper, it is apparent that we have come upon a very different, and distinctly modern, scene. The woods are full of plastic tubing—so much tubing that the overall impression is of having stumbled into a strange, giant maze or the grips of a very large and disorganized spider.

But there is an internal logic here, which becomes apparent as Sorkin provides helpful narration. As we walk into the sugarbush, we duck under two black plastic tubes, each about an inch in diameter, strung up across the path at head-height. These are the “mainlines,” the arteries of the sugarbush circulatory system. They zigzag throughout the forest, gathering up flows of sap from smaller blue polystyrene “lateral lines,” which spread out through the woods in a giant web. Each lateral line collects sap from 10-15 trees and feeds it into one of the mainlines, called the “wet line,” which carries the sap downhill to a collection tank. The other line, the “dry line,” contains exactly nothing—but during the sap run, this is the kind of nothing that can pull the needle of a vacuum gauge to register up to 25 inches of mercury. A vacuum runs through the dry line until it is spliced into the lateral lines, where it pulls the sap out of the tree with a force equivalent to as much as 12 pounds per square inch of pressure.

As the twenty-odd of us fan out through the woods, I consider the intricacy of the webbing spread before me, whose purpose is to convey the vacuum to the trees and to carry their sap away in return. Here is an engineered landscape whose interconnectedness rivals that of other networks we bring to mind with far greater familiarity: power grids, road networks, oil pipelines. This, too, is a site where economic value is literally being extracted from the earth, pulled up through the roots of maple trees in spring. And when it comes down to it, this system of tubing simply represents a whole lot of work. Who would have expected to find it here, under the slowly yellowing leaves of an early fall in the Vermont mountains?

Sorkin would have. His company, Runamok Maple, is on the cutting-edge of the maple products industry in Vermont today. Their tastefully packaged organic syrups, infused with flavors like cardamom and coffee, aged in bourbon and whiskey barrels, and even smoked with pecan wood, retail on the company website at $16.95 for a 250

ml bottle. Some quick back-of-a-napkin math reveals that this translates to a price of roughly $255 per gallon, more than ten times the $24 per gallon that maple syrup fetched on Vermont’s bulk market in 2018.

This has been a recipe for success. Runamok has grown rapidly since its inception in 2009, increasing from 81,000 taps in 2017 to 100,000 taps on 1,350 acres of land in 2018. The really amazing part of the story: this does not even put Sorkin and his business near the top of the pack.

Vermont’s largest producer, Sweet Tree Holdings LLC, runs upwards of 400,000 taps (and counting) on 24,000 acres of forest in northeastern Vermont.

As we walk deeper into the woods with Sorkin, alternately ducking under and clambering over the flexible lateral lines, his commentary is keen and to the point. It is all about yield.

“Vacuum systems,” he says, “have allowed us to more than double our yield.”

“Is that the same everywhere?” I ask.

“Depends on the producer,” he responds. “Depends if they’re good or not. How much leakage they have in the system.”

He points to a pressure gauge spliced into a line junction: “With the new technologies coming out, we can even monitor vacuum pressure across the sugarbush remotely.”

This is helpful, I surmise, because leaks can be the size of a pinhole—hard to identify when walking the lines on a blustery March day.

On the scale at which Sorkin is operating, tiny efficiencies make big differences. The dual imperatives of this business are squeezing the most sap out of the sugarbush and growing as quickly as possible. And growth, over the last 20 years, has been the defining trend in the maple industry.

According to statistics from the latest U.S. Census of Agriculture, production of maple syrup in Vermont increased by almost four hundred percent between 2002 and 2017.

The number of taps more than doubled over that time period, while the number of sugaring operations declined by 19 percent. As producers have grown and consolidated, the yield per tap has also increased, reflecting the continued adoption of “high-yield” vacuum techniques that can produce almost half a gallon of syrup per tap.

This rapid and unprecedented growth could have serious implications for the economic sustainability of the maple industry. Increases in supply that are not accompanied by subsequent increases in demand have a tendency to lower prices—a basic principle of microeconomics. But retail maple syrup prices have remained relatively high and stable over the past few decades, a strange state of affairs which likely has a great deal to do with the fact that the province of Quebec, which produces more than 70 percent of the

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world’s syrup, uses a quota system which Vermont Public Radio called “a sort of legal government-sanctioned cartel.”

This system restricts the amount of syrup on the market in any given year, setting the global price for syrup at an artificially high level. There is even a “strategic reserve” of more than 88,000 55-gallon drums of maple syrup held at the ready to stabilize global prices.

The question many people involved in the maple syrup industry are asking now is a simple one: How much longer can the status quo last? As American producers, most notably in Vermont, have ramped up production, talk in Quebec has moved towards increasing quotas or ditching the quota system altogether. A 2016 report commissioned by Quebec’s Agricultural Minister called the system “a heavy, inflexible handicap to the province’s performance” and recommended doing away with it entirely. This would have serious consequences for Vermont’s rural communities, who benefited from maple syrup production to the tune of $54 million in 2018. Even as maple production, in the face of the cratering price of dairy, serves as a last tenuous lifeline for many farmers in rural Vermont, the industry faces the real possibility that prices will fall significantly at some time in the future. In fact, for producers who do not sell directly to consumers, they already have—the bulk price of syrup in Vermont fell by 20 percent between 2013 and

23 Headwaters Magazine

2018.

University of Vermont Extension Farm Business Management Specialist Mark Canella writes that this drop in prices “has forced many maple business owners that sell bulk syrup to question if they are or will be at the right size to stay viable.” A further drop in prices, of the sort that might be expected if Quebec were to lift its quota system, would leave many producers stuck in a trap of diminishing returns, trying to eek more and more syrup out of their woods just to break even. This scenario does not represent what most people would call “economic sustainability.”

In another sense, though, the sustainability of the maple industry boils down to simple physiology. If trees tapped for maple sap are able to replenish enough conductive wood and carbohydrates each year to compensate for the losses they incur through tapping, then the practice of sugaring is, in the most basic sense, a sustainable one. Trees compartmentalize the wounds around tap holes by isolating long columns of wood above and below the holes. If a tree is unable to replace this lost wood each year by growing an even greater volume of new, conductive wood, it is losing out over the long-term, and so are the sugarmakers who are tapping it.

A recent study conducted by UVM Research Assistant Professor Abby van den Berg and a team at UVM’s Proctor Maple Research Center examined high-yield vacuum extraction techniques and found that they were, on average, “sustainable”—but there were troubling details in the fine print. Of the healthy, dominant and co-dominant canopy trees they examined—the core of the study—35 percent still had growth rates below the required minimums for survival over the next 100 years. Among less vigorous and smaller-diameter trees, the numbers were even more worrying—here, 66 percent of trees did not meet the minimum required growth rates. It is true that a relatively high percentage of trees in a young forest might be expected to die of natural causes over a century, but with no comparative long-term study of tapped and untapped maples, there is no way of knowing how concerning the numbers Van den Berg and her team found really are. If they are elevated over the baseline mortality rate of the forest, the consequences of these high-yield practices could be decreased tree vigor and depressed sap yields—the slow death, in essence, of the sugarbush.

One solution to this problem is to reduce the density of the sugarbush by the judicious use of a chainsaw. The “Guide to Improving and Maintaining Sugarbush Health and Productivity,” widely used by sugarmakers in the United States, describes “thinning” as the act of “removing poorer-quality, slower-growing trees, freeing up resources for those that remain.” Thinning increases the light and

nutrients available to “crop” trees, improving their health and increasing radial growth. But this involves removing trees that may be dying but are still producing sap, perhaps briefly diminishing yields. These are the kinds of tradeoffs that some sugarmakers are loath to make.

Another disincentive to thinning is the fact that it cannot occur in a sugarbush that is rigged up with an extensive system of tubing. There must be room to bring in machinery, and to fell and process trees. For this reason, management plans tend to prescribe thinnings “once it is time to replace the sugarbush lines,” often on a hypothetical tenyear cycle. But in fact, advances in tubing technology have led to increased durability and longer tubing lifespans, rendering this ten-year cycle more wishful thinking than reali-

ty. It is as if the trees are prisoners: trapped in a network of tubing, bound to an ongoing process of extraction, unable to break free.

Back in the sugarbush—once Sorkin has left—the foresters are quick to discuss this issue. “It’s time for a thinning,” the property’s consulting forester Addison Kasmarek says pointedly. “We’re rewriting the management plan now, and we’ve said over and over that the stand is overstocked, but we’ve been having a tough time with Eric. He is just refusing to take down the lines. It’s really tense.” Others are quick to chime in: “I’m seeing the same thing!” “What are we supposed to do?” “There’s nothing to do but change over to a fifteen-year cutting cycle—or longer.” “Yes, but the consequences of that…” Voices overlap and intersect

Art By Eleanor Duva Headwaters Magazine 24

like the tangle of lateral lines running through the woods around us.

Tubing networks are not the only human systems shaping the sugarbush. Political networks overlay and interpenetrate this landscape as well, further complicating an already-challenging situation. Use-Value Appraisal (UVA), a Vermont tax-incentive program started in 1977, changes how the value of land is calculated for tax appraisal purposes, basing the calculation on the value of the agricultural or forest products that the land can produce, instead of the land’s value if it were to be sold for subdivision and development. In essence, UVA is a big tax break for Vermont’s rural landscape. UVA is perhaps the most boring, yet most important, aspect of the maple industry in Vermont today. There are two UVA categories, Agricultural and Forestry, and sugarbushes, as both “agricultural” and “forested” landscapes can be enrolled in both. The catch?

The Agricultural category requires nothing of landowners other than that they produce an agricultural product from their land, while Forestry UVA requires a detailed management plan with information about the current condition of the forest and intended management activities. This plan is legally binding—a choice to disregard it can lead to hefty fines or removal from the UVA program.

Kasmarek enumerates the consequences of this dual vision of the sugarbush to me and a few others as we turn around and begin to make our way out of the woods.

“When we’ve really pushed sugarmakers on their management practices,” she says, “and insisted that something be done according to the plan, we’ve had people just up and leave Forestry UVA for Ag, because they say ‘look, why would I stay when Ag doesn’t require me to do any of what you’re telling me?’”

On top of the leniency of the Agricultural designation, back-end enforcement of the Forestry UVA standards is severely lacking, as it is delegated to already-overworked County Foresters who each administer thousands of parcels. Take this lack of enforcement and habituate landowners to it over the course of 40 years, and the term “legally binding” starts to lose its bite. Given all this, it is not hard to imagine why the talk in the sugarbush turned towards something approaching despair as we made our way out of the web of tubing.

The fact of the matter is, sustainability is and always has been a tricky concept to pin down in the maple products industry. Although maple sap is, in the academic jargon, a “non-timber forest product,” a term with the ring of sustainability to it, sugaring is an extractive process that cannot do anything but leave a mark on its environment. When producers make maple syrup, they—and by extension, we as consumers—are condemned to have an impact on the

landscape. The discourse of maple producers, as found in promotional materials, packaging, and news coverage of the maple industry, tends to obscure this simple yet profound fact: Maple syrup production changes the landscape from the level of the individual tree on up to the whole forest, and it is also entwined with forces like globalization and industrialization. In the industry’s vision of itself (or at least the vision it wants the public to see) maple syrup is a kind of panacea, a cure for the world’s ills. In this telling, syrup and the sugarbush it comes from exist somehow outside of the forces that drive the human lifeworld—markets, capital, the state. The evidence strongly suggests that this is not the case. Maple syrup, and maple trees, are deeply entangled in our human systems, from the tubing that marks out the sugarbush to the regulations that govern it.

And when it comes down to it, the chain of practices that constitutes “sugaring” is only as sustainable as the links that make it up—the trees that produce the sap, the regulations governing how that sap is harvested, and the economic viability of the industry doing the harvesting, to name just a few. Maple syrup is only as sustainable as the choices that are made throughout its production.

As we reach the edge of woods, walking on a logging road that is blessedly free of tubing, I pause and look back at the sugarbush. It stands quietly in the low daylight of late afternoon, shades of yellow and orange glowing softly under the almost-setting sun, tubing just visible among the trees. I wonder what happens in the sugarbush after we leave and the last faint sound of our voices fades into what seems to be silence. Do the noises of birds and animals, leaves and wind, slowly reemerge, replacing our own?

Or does it stand quiet, still, expectant, waiting? “This land is still feral,” writes Laura Sorkin, co-owner of Runamok Maple, in a 2018 piece for Modern Farmer. But looking back, I see a forest somewhere between tamed and feral—a woods on the edge. H

Art By Eleanor Duva 25 Headwaters Magazine

Designing Resilient Systems

By Nadia Kamel

Headwaters Magazine 26

I

was drawn to permaculture because it utilizes art and design to create sustainable alternatives to conventional farming. These sketches were made as design practice in a permaculture class offered through UVM; they include different shading techniques and real-world examples of possible garden designs. Although permaculture is not the perfect solution to large-scale agriculture, it offers a way for people to connect more with their land, food, communities, and selves while creating resilient, permanent ecosystems.

Various landscape graphics, showing broadleaf and needle tree symbols, as well as possible shading techniques (birds-eye view of trees).

27 Headwaters Magazine

This is a sample design of a permaculture garden, based on a sketch by permaculture teacher Annie White. It demonstrates how space is designed to be used efficiently while adding diversity to a space.

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Eco-Anxiety at a ‘Green’ University UVM Students Wrestle with the Mental Health Impacts of Climate Change

By Maya Bostwick

W

hen thinking about climate change, “deep-rooted anxiety” is the primary emotion one undergraduate student at the University of Vermont (UVM) reports feeling. With forest fires raging across the globe and an unprecedented rate of biodiversity loss, it is hard to ignore the staggering magnitude of the climate crisis. Another UVM student explains that “when you think about climate change, it’s impossible to think about all the different moving parts. Like physical, scientific, geological, human,

29 Headwaters Magazine

social, health [concerns]...if you’re considering all of those every single day of your life, then yeah, you’re going to be overwhelmed.”

The American Psychological Association defines the term ‘eco-anxiety’ as the “chronic fear of environmental doom” that many people feel in the face of climate change.

At UVM, students are no strangers to the rocky emotional terrain that accompanies climate change. As much as the university promotes sustainability as a core principle, widespread climate anxiety continues to exist among the student body.

This sense of panic and anxiety may not be immediately obvious in UVM’s institutional approach to sustainability. UVM prides itself on being a ‘green’ school—one that carefully integrates sustainability into its curriculum and university practices. Despite the deliberate, optimistic way that UVM officially approaches sustainability, climate change still looms over students’ heads and elicits major emotional stress.

UVM graduate student Caylin McCamp works as the Education and Outreach Coordinator for the Office of Sustainability and researches student responses to climate change. She has found that a quantifiable, widespread eco-anxiety exists at UVM. One of her recent surveys shows that 84 percent of student respondents are worried about climate change, while only 13 percent remain optimistic.

76 percent of students say that climate change often or occasionally makes them feel uncertain about their future or affects their outlook on life, indicating that these fears run deeper than casual concerns.

Being confronted with the gloom and doom of climate change in academic spaces such as UVM’s campus can conflict with how students perceive life outside the classroom.

In the real world, “you’re surrounded by business as usual, yet you’re learning about these really grim realities. I think there’s a huge cognitive dissonance there,” said McCamp.

This “cognitive dissonance” can perpetuate feelings of anxiety for what is to come, grief and guilt for a dying planet, and a loss of hope that anything can change.

For some students, the psychological effects of climate change impact their worldview in ways they may not even notice. McCamp noted a trend in the student interviews she has collected: students will deny that they are affected by climate change only to later give specific examples that show how their decision making is fundamentally based on a future jeopardized by climate change. McCamp regards the doubt students express about having children or moving to a specific part of the country as examples of how they have internalized the reality of a changed climate.

Some UVM students echo these sentiments by emphasizing their individual actions to confront climate change.

“I feel like sometimes I put more of [the responsibility of climate change] on my shoulders than I should,” one environmental science student explained. “I guess that’s an impact of climate change that I see on myself. I’m like, ‘I can’t use plastic because this piece of plastic will be around forever and it’s me who’s using it individually.’” Another student expresses a similar feeling, saying, “I’m essentially committing my life to solving the problems [associated with climate change].”

This attitude reflects a dimension of guilt added to climate anxiety by the individualistic nature of a capitalist society. Phil McDuff of The Guardian argues that capitalism subsumes the individual into a system that drives climate change by promoting profit over anything else, yet perversely, it socializes many people to believe that the responsibility of addressing climate change remains individual.

As students prepare for an uncertain future it will be vital that they work towards mitigating the effects of climate

change, including the toll it will have on their own mental health. According to NYU Professor Eric Klinenberg, an essential step in facing climate change is strengthening community and encouraging communication around how people internalize this crisis. Realizing that many people are already suffering the burden of accepting the reality of climate change can help to prepare ourselves to face the prospect of a bleak future. Speaking to this notion, McCamp believes that addressing emotional health in the context of climate change is important because “if the future leaders that UVM is training to be the people who address these crises are paralyzed by the emotional burden of the material, and aren’t able to then be the leaders that they were trained to be, ... then we’re really in a pickle.” Unifying around the shared sense of eco-anxiety will not only help to ease the paralysis many people feel, but will also help them move forward with determination and resilience in the face of the realities of a changed climate. H

Art By Nadia Kamel

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cial use as a cheap substitute for other fatty oils, like cocoa On January 17, 2018, Skinny Pancake, creperie and lobutter. Thrifty producers of cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, cal favorite of the Burlington community, authored a press food items, and detergents took note and made the switch. release detailing why they would no longer be using NuteNowadays, palm oil is in more than half of all products lla in their crepes. They explained that one of the main that Americans consume. It is found in food items like ice ingredients in Nutella is modified palm oil, and, that “as cream, pizza dough, and candy bars, and in other commerfar as our one and only Planet Earth is concerned: palm cial products like lipstick, soaps, and shampoos. Palm oil is oil sucks.” This blacklisting of palm oil is not just a Burso widely used that globally, the average person consumes lington-based fad; rather, it is reflective of a global con17 pounds of palm oil each year. demnation of this commodity product. Palm oil is often These days, palm farming in Costa Rica is no lonassociated with the destruction of rainforests, the decline ger under contract with UFC, but with Palma Tica, a large of orangutan populations, and the displacement of naagro-industrial producer. For agreeing to only sell their tive peoples; however, just because these issues are potenproduct to Palma Tica, the company gave farmers access to tial consequences of palm oil production, does not mean low-interest loans and offered free seedlings. Incentivized that they are necessarily characteristic of the industry as a contract labor shapes economic development in the region. whole. Cooperative business structures, efficient use, and In some areas of the country, it is difficult to make a consisrepurposing of former agricultural lands are just a few ways tent living due to unexpected miseries like insect invasions, in which Costa Rica, a national producer of palm oil, is flooding, and disease outbreaks. Farmers see contracts with demonstrating the possibility of making this industry susPalma Tica as a path to a stable income, which can bring tainable. new opportunities and a higher standard of living for those Almost 2,500 miles away from Skinny Pancake, in the palm business. However, these contracts can be as Costa Rican trucks loaded with freshly harvested palm detrimental as they can be beneficial—they guarantee fifruits roll east towards the port town of Golfito, where they nancial assistance, but also prevent growers from selling to will be processed into refined, bleached, and deodorized other businesses that might pay more for their palm. Con(RBD) palm oil, the widely used commodity that Skinny tract laborof has its caveats, but palm can be the only option Pancake and others denounced. In Costa Rica, palm oil Oral Histories that farmers have to make a decent living. is a valuable product that accounts for over $125 million the Missisquoi River There are alternative business structures for palm of the country’s export economy. The consumer choices of oil that have had success in different parts of Costa Rica.

Vermonters will not stop these trucks from rolling on; agFor example, in the northern region of Puntarenas Provricultural endeavors in palm oil expand economic By opporMeryl Braconnier ince lies Coopesilencio, a palm cooperative that grew out tunities for locals, allowing them to strive for a better life of the occupation of UFC-owned land by locals. For over than previously imaginable. a decade, residents insisted that along they had claim to the terriCosta Rica’s palm oil sector is a relatively recent deThis piece synthesizes oral accounts of eighteen people who live and work tory.

Eventually, the government officially sold the land to velopment with roots the in the banana industry, which thrived in the towns of N. Troy, Troy, Westfield, Missisquoi River and its tributaries the locals, whoofconverted 600 in the country in the and earlyLowell, 20th century.

In Ithe 1940s, thethese people Vermont. interviewed as part a researchabout project onhectares of former baplantation into expansive forests United Fruit Company faced a crisis. the(UFC) social dimensions of For riverdecades, conservationnana efforts in the Upper Missisquoi Wa- of palm. The cooperative structure avoidswith the contractual they prospered off banana on the the participants Caribbean about tershed.plantations I spoke with their relationship the Missis- obligations that some farmers find to be an issue with Palma Tica. It also emcoast of Costa Rica. quoi, Then,their in the late 1920s and 1930s, experiences with flooding events, and their perceptions of Vermont’s powers locals to care for the land and engage in sustainable international economic downturn coupled with a seemingshifting river management strategies. All names included below are pseudonyms. practices, as they live ly-unstoppable banana blight—a deadlythat herbaceous fun- workfarming Please understand the following both includes perspectives of where peoplethey work and can directly see the of overuse herbicides and pesticides. gus—began to spell trouble for the company.

In response, not directly cited, and sadly, due to the boundaries of aeffects magazine article,ofdoes Since the official founding of Coopesilencio in 1973, over the UFC expanded and began to establish banana farms on not encompass all perspectives on river life in Vermont. As always, there is more 500 residents benefit from “schooling for all ages, a superthe Pacific side of Costa Rica; however, this strategy only to the story. market and café, offices, and [the] various agricultural and worked for a decade or so, and by the 1940s, banana blight eco-conservation projects” that the cooperative engages in. had spread to the Pacific coast. The blight raced through plantations and dramatically decreased banana outputs. he life of a river involves all things it touches with its swirling eddies and rushing In order to maintain the region,waters execu-carve banks and carry nutrients from eroded currents.profits These inmeandering tives decided to experiment with palm oil, which people sediment. They embrace the people that dip in for a quick swim or those that float across have cultivated initsregions West elevated Africa and Southeast rippled of surface, on canoes or kayaks. They nurse an elaborate web of life just Asia since the early 20th century.

The investment in palm below the surface, invertebrate casings cemented to the safety of the river bottom rocks. paid off. Manufacturers theinvolves globe soon realizedsupported the The lifearound of a river all wildlife by its waters—creatures often intriguing potential that this product had for widespread commerto the human eye.

What the River Carries:

T

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The first time I went [kayaking] there was this strange looking duck… I had never seen a duck that looked like that. It’s kinda an orange head with like a cap, a pointed cap. And she had babies with her. So we’d be going along, and she’d run up the river ahead of me, and the babies would all follow you know around the next bend. And then I’d see them, and I’d come up, and they’re like, ‘Oh! There she is again!’ And they’d run off again.

Dianne, farmer in Westfield The river can be a place of wonder and recreation, gently drawing people towards outdoor exploration. It is a place for dogs to run around, for people to play, and for nature to be noticed. On a calm day, the river washes over worries with gurgling waters.

The constant flow provides a reassuring sound that some describe as a free meditation soundtrack or a lullaby to rock them to sleep.

When the kids were babies, I would bring them [to the brook] just as a soothing presence and look at all the little… wood fairies and water nymphs. It was a place of joy and creative imagination… As a mom of newborns, I often found solace there.

Quiet.

Kerry, farmer in Westfield In Vermont, rivers run through the mountains and valleys like veins. They are the lifeblood of many ecosystems, activities, homes, and livelihoods. Places like Orleans County in Northeast Vermont have the Missisquoi River and its floodplains to thank for their rich and fertile agricultural land.

It’s as if the first-generation farmer who chose this as their location took and drew along all the wonderful soils for... that’s where he wanted to grab and make it his home. And it has withstood the test of time, the house and the land, and I think it’s because of the river.

Martha, farmer in Westfield

Art By Gretchen Saveson Headwaters Magazine 32

The Missisquoi River originates in Lowell, Vermont. A multitude of small springs trickle down from the highlands, merging into streams and brooks which coalesce to form the mainstem’s boisterous flow. The river then runs north through Westfield and Troy, abutted by farmland, dairy operations, residential and town property, and forest. It passes the Canadian border in N. Troy, rushing towards Quebec, where it loops around before returning to Vermont in Richford. Travelling thirty miles from Richford to Swanton, the Missiquoi finally drains directly into Lake Champlain.

Often when they were little, we sat on the bridge down here.

Remember that? Imagine how long it would take for the water that’s flowing by us right now on this little brook to get to the lake. All the way up and around and out into the lake.

Anonymous resident by the headwaters of the Missisquoi For communities, families, and individuals that live along the waterway, memories reside in its waters. The old treatment and perceptions of the river still have a presence in the landscape, sunken to the bottom like disposed car tires. On July 20, 2019, the Missisquoi River Basin Association held their annual river-cleanup to help recover some vestiges of this past neglect.

Volunteers paddled from Richford towards Berkshire, pulling up tires, rusted car parts, and countless cans from the mucky layers of silt. The river once served as a public sewer, and while that is less common these days, some people still treat it as a free dumping ground.

I think people are getting more aware that you know, the rivers are not for throwing shit, literally using it as a sewer!

Joan, self-proclaimed “River Keeper,” N. Troy Story-telling offers another effective way to acknowledge the dynamic relationships humans have had with the Missisquoi.

Old-timers recall the days when the river supported now-obsolete industries, when it provided ice for refrigeration and a form of transportation for loggers.

Back in, I don’t know, [the] early 1900s… the main rivers like the Missisquoi River… were used for transportation of timber, a lot of it. So in the wintertime, farmers would pile the wood on the river banks… And in the springtime, when the water came up, they had these log drives… The logs float downstream to the saw mills or to the paper mills… In that era, the flooding of the river was a blessing because it was how they would transport the wood to the sawmills.

George, farmer in Westfield Nowadays, flooding is rarely a blessing. While the farmers appreciate the fertile agricultural soils that the river once deposited,

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it now seems to want to take those soils away by wearing down banks and ripping through corn fields. When the river carries logs these days, it is against human will. The waters steal old, treasured silver maples from the eroded banks. Every spring thaw—and increasingly during the summer and fall—the Missisquoi and its tributaries flood, rapidly rising and falling over vegetative buffers and cropland, dumping silt, branches, and trash in their wake.

One thing about flooding is that you’re getting everybody else’s stuff. A lot of people will throw garbage over a bank somewhere and then the water will come up and then all of a sudden you got… bottles and just crap that just washes up… [Flooding] takes trees that are floating downstream and deposits them in your fields. And… if you have a mid-winter flood, you get huge chunks of ice coming up in your fields.

Bill, farmer in N. Troy For those living along the Missisquoi and its tributaries, flooding can have serious impacts, threatening personal property or livelihoods. Floods carry with them their own set of memories, reminding people of significant weather events, such as the Great Vermont Flood of 1927 that washed out 1,285 bridges and killed 84 people, including the Lieutenant Governor. Or the Flood of 1997 that ravaged Montgomery, taking out its center of town and important roadways, essentially isolating the community. In Westfield, this flood left telephone poles dangling over the river and full crop loads soiled. More recently, 2011’s Hurricane Irene resulted in $733 million in damages to 2,400 roads, 800 homes and businesses, and 300 bridges.

And the old timers used to tell us when we first got here… we’d have a flood, and they’d say, ‘Don’t worry about it. It’s only what they call a ten-year flood.’ But I think we get a ten-year flood every year now.

Dale, farmer in Westfield The increase in frequency of these extreme weather events pairs with more stringent zoning laws, regulations, and best management practices in the state of Vermont. Following repeated damage on developments near waterways, people now recognize the risk of building in floodplains. Cycles of damage and repair made clear the ongoing downfalls of river management practices once encouraged by the state, such as stabilizing banks with large stone slabs—a practice called rip-rapping—or dredging out gravel to deepen the river channels. Instead of resolving the issue, these practices push the damage further downstream by increasing the force and speed of the water. Now, considering the river’s ever-fluctuating dynamics, impacted by geology, stream flow, and human developments, scientists do their best to define the river corridor: the area of land adjacent to the river that it may need to ‘re-meander’ and attain equilibrium. After years of trying to control the river’s impact and woefully facing the consequences further downstream, researchers, policy makers, and landowners alike have learned that the best way to manage a river and minimize the damages of flooding may be, ironically, to do nothing at all.

There used to be a big push towards everybody rip-rap. That was what we did as the standard management practice when we lost some of the riverbanks. Now we’d be in big trouble if we did any rip-rapping or anything without government approval. So I’m a believer that it’s not worth even trying to fight the river and just let it go where it wants to go.

Dale, farmer in Westfield

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Over the last 20 years, the state has shifted from an active to a passive approach to river management, the philosophy being that waterways need the space to naturally equilibrate without human direction and that no further developments should be pursued within these river corridors. As for the developments that already exist, the families that have lived and worked along waterways for generations, there is a constant juggle of information and communication on how to balance the economic, social, and environmental needs of the landscape. It can be at once a wonderful, worrisome, and humbling experience to live alongside the Missisquoi.

The one thing I’ve learned in almost 50 years of farming here is that if you can figure out how to work with nature… you’re gonna most likely win... If you try to interact against nature, you’re gonna lose because nature is relentless… For instance, the water flowing in a river or a brook does it 24 hours a day. You might try to stop it while you’re there a little bit, somehow, do something, but the river continues. It’s relentless… It’s an interaction with the river of respect and appreciation mostly, but also...maybe an acceptance, that nature’s more powerful than I am.

George, farmer in Westfield While the course of the Missisquoi and the responses of humans have changed over time, the river’s flow has remained a constant and significant force in the landscape of Orleans County. All that these waters have touched and supported over the years, from duck families to human families, have experienced the river’s beauty and power—its moods of calmness and fear that ebb and flow with the extent of the floods. In all that it provides, in all that it takes, the river inspires respect.

But it’s a great river. It’s the Missisquoi. I’ve lived here all my life. I wouldn’t want to live no where else.

Pete, ex-farmer in N. Troy H

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Northen Bald Ibis

Turkey Vulture

Decomposing Feathers

By Harrison Betts My hope is that with the escape that outdoor activities will provide us during this pandemic, we not only appreciate birds and other wildlife more, but also have dialogues about the declining state of the world’s ecosystems.

Shoebill Stork

Great Albatross

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