Avsnitt

  • In 2017, Timothy Snyder wrote a short book, “On Tyranny: 20 Lessons from the Twentieth Century.” It was a cautionary tale drawn from Snyder’s studies of totalitarian regimes. He mused about how lessons from foreign regimes like Hungary, Russia, and Eastern Europe applied to the U.S. The lessons were warning signs that signaled when a country was veering toward totalitarianism. “On Tyranny” was the New York Times bestelling nonfiction book of 2017 and stayed on bestseller lists for years.

    Timothy Snyder is the Richard C. Levin Professor of History and Global Affairs at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. The Guardian wrote, “In the years since the 2016 U.S. presidential election there has been no more significant critic of the advance of Trump’s form of nihilism than Timothy Snyder.” This year, he has testified before Congress about foreign influence in the U.S. and has campaigned tirelessly in support of Ukraine in its war against Russia.

    Snyder has a new book, “On Freedom,” in which he reflects on what it means to be truly free. He talks about the difference between “freedom from” – or negative freedom – and “freedom to,” which he says is what a free society must embrace.

    Snyder said that “freedom from” leads to “a clash of all against all. Because if freedom is just me against other stuff and I never have to ask who I am or what I want, then eventually I start to see you as a barrier.”

    Sen. J.D. Vance is an example of someone who espouses negative freedom. “His view is that government can't do anything and therefore it won't do anything and therefore my oligarch friends get to run everything. And the only task that I have as a politician is a kind of performer who makes up stories that get people angry at one another and fight one another. Negative freedom leads …to a moral vacuum. It leads to political helplessness, and eventually it leads to social self-destruction.”

    By contrast, “freedom to” is “not just a matter of … women not being oppressed, it's also a matter of their having health care so they can be free.”

    “There's a positive feedback loop between doing things together and being more free as individuals.”

    Is the U.S. on a glide path to fascism?

    “Not a glide path, because I think history is made up of the structures and the trends but it's also made up of the funny little bumps that nobody expected,” Snyder replied. “I think it's fair to say that we are at a moment where things can go either way, and I think it's quite clearly defined now, precisely because the way Kamala Harris is talking about freedom. She's very much in a future orientation.”

    By congrast, Donald Trump “is a guy who, facing prison and thinking about nothing except himself, needs to die in bed and that bed has to be in the White House and the rest of us be damned,” said Snyder. “He's also a person who's filled with grievance about a story that he made up himself. The internet is full now of people who use AI to generate fake images and then get mad at the fake images.”

    “This is not a time to be unaware of choices or to be cynical about voting or to imagine that history or something is going to take care of us. Only we are going to take care of this for us.”

    Snyder writes that “being joyous is the first step to freedom.”

    “Freedom should make us happy because freedom is about caring about the little things that people care about and about being able to put those things together in our own unique ways and maybe to bring them to life, whether that's a family or whether that's a hobby or whether it's a profession or whether it's a sport or whether it's a getaway,” said Snyder.

    “Freedom is the condition in which we're actually able to bring other values together. So it's inherently a happy thing.”

  • What do Nazis, fascists, incels, skinheads, misogynists, insurrectionists and Proud Boys all have in common? Many of them confide in reporter Elle Reeve.

    It was around 2015 and Reeve was reporting for Vice News about the rise of the “alt right,” a term coined by its leader, Richard Spencer. She spent time on internet message boards like 4chan and 8chan where far right activists communicated, trolled liberals, and began to coalesce as a movement. These were often ordinary people who increasingly embraced conspiracy theories and violence.

    This was during the presidency of Barack Obama, when many people were imagining that the U.S. was in the glow of a “post-racial” era. Reeve knew better.

    “Racism wasn't dying off with an older generation,” she told the Vermont Conversation. “There was a strong beating heart right there on the internet.”

    In 2017, Reeve was there when the alt right burst out of obscure Internet chat rooms and into public consciousness in a violent attack in Charlottesville, Virginia. Her documentary account, “Charlottesville: Race and Terror,” earned her and Vice News Tonight a Peabody Award, four Emmys and a George Polk Award.

    In 2019, Reeve became a correspondent for CNN, where she works today. She was at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 reporting on the attack on Congress by Trump supporters, many of whom she knew well.

    Why do they talk to her? “They want to tell their story, they want to confess, they want to unburden themselves,” she said.

    Reeve has a new book, “Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics.” The title refers to how far right activists speak of taking the “black pill” of nihilism to justify their cruelty and violence. “It's this dark nihilism that the world is doomed. There's nothing you can do to change it, and you at best, can hope for it to collapse.”

    

    Reeve traces how far-right rhetoric has moved from the fringes to the mainstream, with Donald Trump and J.D. Vance channeling extremist ideas and language.

    Vance has denounced the “woke ideology” of “white women who are miserable about their own lives, enforcing codes about racial justice, gay rights on other people to make other people miserable, to account for how miserable they are in their own lives,” Reeve explained.

    Vance’s use of the term “childless cat ladies” is another far right meme. “I've read that on 4chan six or seven years ago,” said Reeve. “It has trickled upward.”

    Another far right notion that is now embraced by mainstream Republicans is that diversity is bad. “They think that racial and ethnic and gender diversity makes us weaker. It makes us fools. This is just something that they ridiculed all the time.”

    Reeve explained the far right context of Trump’s attacks on people of color. “If a white person commits a crime in their world, it's because they're a bad guy. But if a Black person commits a crime in their world, it's because they're Black.”

    Reeve warned that many people “are vulnerable to those ideas. I just interviewed a ton of people at a Trump boat parade. They were so nice to me, and then they started talking to me about how it's not right to eat people's cats, and these people do animal sacrifice, and they're dirty and they bring disease.”

    “It's not all crazy people who believe this stuff. It's regular people and your neighbors," said Reeve. “You have an obligation to push back against that, whether or not they'll listen to you."

    Reeve said about the future, “There has been an escalating radicalization among the Republican elite and a softening among the voters… People speak freely about civil war. That is dangerous.”

    “I don't like it but I don't know where that balance ends up after the election. You can't do something like Jan. 6 without a feeling that there's an army behind you of supporters who will back you up.”

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  • The much-anticipated debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump took place on Tuesday night. It was the first time the two politicians had met.

    With national polls showing the race for the White House a tossup, this debate, currently the only one that is scheduled, has outsized significance. In a CNN flash poll following the debate, 63% said that Harris performed the best. This flipped the script from the Trump-Biden debate in June, when 67% of respondents said that Trump outperformed President Joe Biden.

    In other breaking news following the debate, pop megastar Taylor Swift endorsed Kamala Harris for president. In a post on Instagram to her 283 million followers, Swift wrote, “I’m voting for @kamalaharris because she fights for the rights and causes I believe need a warrior to champion them." She highlighted “LGBTQ+ rights, IVF, and a woman’s right to her own body.”

    Vermont Sen. Peter Welch spoke this morning about his thoughts on the debate, the 2024 election, cutting off arms sales to Israel, voter suppression and election violence, and his reflections on the 9/11 attacks.

    In July, the Democrat sent shock waves through the political establishment when he became the first U.S. senator to call for Biden to withdraw from the race. Eleven days later, as other Democratic leaders made similar calls, Biden dropped out and endorsed Harris. The vice president officially became the Democratic nominee in August, launching one of the most compressed presidential races in history.

    “I was just saying out loud what many of my colleagues and many Americans were saying privately,” Welch said.

    After watching the Biden-Trump debate in June, Welch concluded, “It was terrible, and it was not about a bad night. It was about an apprehension that there was a serious condition that was affecting the president who served us very well.” Welch insisted that he was neither asked nor dissuaded by his colleagues or the White House when he told them what he was going to do.

    Welch had a very different reaction to Harris’s debate performance against Trump. “I thought she did absolutely everything she had to do,” he said. “She was strong. I love the way she started out by crossing the stage, extending her hand to Trump, taking over the physical space and not letting him do his physical intimidation moves that are his favorite.”

    Welch said that Harris “was able to parry his attacks, and she had a capacity to do something effectively, and that's ridicule and belittle a guy who is well deserving of ridicule and belittling.”

    Vermont’s junior senator said that the most memorable part of the debate was the discussion of abortion rights. Harris, Welch said, “combined clarity with compassion and a deeply grounded, deeply felt moral sensibility about the right of women to make their own decisions. And she did that in a way where she was rightly and justifiably condemning a totally incoherent policy by Trump, somebody who bragged about getting the Supreme Court stacked to get rid of Roe v. Wade.”

    Welch said the race for president is too close to call. He believes that if Trump loses, he will once again declare that the election was stolen. “That's the pitch he's making to prepare his voters for an explanation of his loss as fraud,” he said.

    Welch, who was in the House chamber when Trump supporters attacked on January 6, 2021, asserted, “I don't think you'll get away with that kind of insurrection again.” But he warned against a raft of voter suppression efforts, such as in Georgia “where that very Trumpish legislature is stacking the deck with partisan folks on their election commission.”

    Voter suppression and Trump’s refusal to commit to a peaceful transfer of power is “a real live issue for us. When I say us, I mean our country,” he said.

  • When Corinne Prevot was attending high school and ski racing at Burke Mountain Academy in 2008, her colorful hand-sewn hats were an instant hit with her friends and fellow racers. As she moved on to attend Middlebury College, where she raced on the ski team, her stretchy form-fitting hats continued to be a hot item both around campus and on the ski racing circuit, where she sold them from a shoebox.

    With lots of enthusiasm but little business acumen, Prevot turned her side hustle into the clothing brand Skida (Swedish for “skiing”). Her signature hats and neck gaiters can now be found everywhere from New York City to California to the Green Mountains. A Skida neck gaiter was recently featured in a New York Times Wirecutter column about the best sun-protective clothing.

    Prevot, 32, now has more than two dozen employees, mostly young women. Skida has expanded to make pants, running wear, and even mittens. The business is headquartered in Burlington but much of the clothing is sewn by women working from their homes all around the Northeast Kingdom and beyond.

    Just down the road in Randolph is another young entrepreneur who is innovating with a traditional brand. Sam Hooper is the 30-year old owner and president of Vermont Glove in Randolph, the century-old business that he bought in 2018.

    Vermont Glove is one of the last glove companies left in the U.S. It makes high quality hand-stitched goat leather gloves. The gloves are considered the gold standard among utility lineman who use them to handle powerlines. The company also makes popular gloves for gardeners, skiers, and others.

    Prevot said that the key to Skida’s success is that the brand conveys a “sense of joy and self-expression. And I think that that's kind of what propelled us forward year after year, especially as our market becomes more crowded.”

    Skida also distinguishes itself by its public stance in support of abortion rights, including donating to national abortion access funds and the campaign for Vermont’s Reproductive Liberty Amendment, which passed in 2022 with 77 percent of voters in support.

    Prevot said that her business is “value aligned. And I think just when we look at the makeup of our team and our organization and our culture, women's rights is a really important thing for us to stand behind.” More recently, Skida raised money for Vermont flood victims.

    Vermont Glove is also mission driven. When the Covid pandemic hit, Hooper transformed his manufacturing facility to make masks and personal protective gear, which were distributed free to towns and hospitals around Vermont.

    “There was a need, and we had a skill to meet it, so we wanted to step up and do our part,” said Hooper, adding that his goal was also “to keep people employed.” At one point, Vermont Glove’s mask making operation was threatened by a shortage of elastic for ear loops. Skida “saved the day” by providing the elastic. Hooper and Provot have lately collaborated on a line of Skida mittens that are made by Vermont Glove.

    Vermont’s labor and housing shortages have impacted both businesses. For Vermont Glove to grow, new employees needed housing, which is in short supply in Vermont. So Hooper recently bought a former inn and converted it into 10 units of affordable housing for his employees and the community. “It's given us the ability to hire new employees and it creates a stepping stone for current and future employees,” he explained.

    What does success look like for these young entrepreneurs?

    “Sustainable growth where we can still have a significant impact on our local community through meaningful job creation, and continued product quality (compared) to what is out there,” said Hooper.

    For Prevot, “Success would be for the Skida brand to be cherished and loved and that people continue to find joy in our products, and that it keeps them warm in the winter -- and that we still have winter.”

  • What used to be called 100-year floods are now annual occurrences. Summer 2023 was the wettest ever in Vermont, with 2 feet of rain falling on the state. One storm submerged the capital of Montpelier. This July saw towns such as Plainfield ripped apart by raging rivers. In Connecticut this month, a storm dropped more than a foot of rain, leading to deadly and destructive flooding.

    Author Porter Fox says the source of these deluges — as well as heat waves, fires, and floods — is the ocean, where about 90% of global warming is occurring. This is the inexorable consequence of human-caused climate change. The top layer of the ocean has warmed about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit, which is “large enough to transform marine biodiversity, change ocean chemistry, raise sea levels, and fuel extreme weather,” reports the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.

    Fox explains the connection between oceans, climate change and extreme weather in his new book, “Category Five: Superstorms and the Warming Oceans That Feed Them.”

    Fox has a personal connection to the ocean. He grew up on Mount Desert Island in Maine, home to Acadia National Park. His father was a renowned boat builder, and Fox learned the craft of ocean sailing by trial and lots of error.

    He later attended Middlebury College and wrote about skiing adventures all around the world as an editor of Powder Magazine but has now returned to his first love, the sea. Fox’s other books include “The Last Winter” and “Northland.”

    In “Category Five,” Fox captures the awesome power of the ocean by profiling a legendary storm sailor, a mapmaker and a maker of sailing drones, among others.

    “The ocean is the mother of all weather. It's like a battery that is getting charged up by this excess heat that we have,” Fox said. This is creating squalls and hurricanes with “metrics that we've never seen before.”

    These monster storms are “traveling farther while moving slower, thus dumping more water and the ferocity of their winds has more time to wreak havoc as they go,” Fox said.

    “A full throated ocean gale is absolutely terrifying,” he said. These storms have an “explosive sound and shrieking and raging wind and waves that are so powerful they can toss around a 30,000 pound boat like it's a little toy.”

    Even landlocked places such as Vermont are experiencing the power of the ocean.

    “Most of the rain that you see in Vermont comes off of the ocean and evaporation. So we have a hotter climate over the ocean. We have more evaporation. We have more energy being infused into the atmosphere,” Fox said. “So every front, every thunderstorm, every squall, every rainstorm is directly connected to the ocean.”

    The warming ocean has transformed how and when storms occur. “Hurricane season used to be roughly from June to November,” Fox said.

    Hurricanes have recently occurred in January and May. "Now there is no off season,” he said.

    What would it take to fix what is broken?

    “It's kind of an obvious answer: just a little bit of everything,” Fox said. That includes “changing how we create and consume energy around the world, closing down coal-fired power plants, changing from gas cars to electric cars or hydrogen batteries.”

    “Without the ocean, we'd be gone by now," Fox said. "That 90% of the heat that it is absorbed (by oceans) would be right up in the atmosphere. Temperatures would be unbearable. Storms would be so much more powerful. And yet the ocean is this buffer.”

    “There's a lot of checks and balances, and it's perhaps the reason that this little blue ball of a planet has maintained life for so long,” he said.

    “If we can just be aware of that and kind of nudge some of those balances," Fox said, "you could bring the planet back to the way it was pre-1800s.”

  • Among the thousands of delegates at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago this week, two dozen represent Vermont.

    On Tuesday, these delegates cast their ceremonial votes for Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Tim Walz to be the Democratic nominees for president and vice president. The Vermont delegation includes elected officials such as Sen. Peter Welch and Rep. Becca Balint. But the delegation is mostly composed of party activists who may not be well known but are fiercely committed.

    On this week’s Vermont Conversation, we speak with four Vermont DNC delegates in Chicago.

    Addie Lentzner of Bennington is a rising sophomore at Middlebury College. She has been an outspoken advocate on housing and homelessness since she was a student in high school. At age 20, she is the youngest Vermont delegate.

    Lentzner is determined for youth to have “not just a seat at the table, but a leading voice in the conversation.” She said that the climate crisis, structural inequality, racism and abortion bans are a direct attack on her generation. “Young people need to be co-pilots and not just passengers on the plane to our future,” Lentzner said.

    The convention has been accompanied by protests against Israel’s war in Gaza. Lentzner, a grassroots activist herself, said, “The protesters are doing the right thing.”

    “They should be there standing up for human rights,” she said. “I also believe that that is part of our democracy, and the candidates should respond to that.”

    C.D. Mattison is a tech adviser to startups and a former candidate for mayor in Burlington. She is a former vice chair of the Burlington Democrats and serves on a variety of nonprofit boards.

    Mattison, who identifies as “a biracial, Black, gay woman,” said that following the election of Donald Trump in 2016, “it became incredibly clear that I couldn't just be on the sidelines. I had to be involved.” She said that Trump's candidacy in 2024 “is what I hope will be the end of our civil war. I don't think it ever ended.”

    Amanda Gustin is the vice chair of the Vermont Democratic Party and a Barre city councilor. She works for the Vermont Historical Society. Gustin said she was especially inspired by former First Lady Michelle Obama’s invocation to “do something.”

    “Stop agonizing and start organizing,” she said, quoting a sticker that adorns her water bottle.

    “Get out there, talk to your neighbors, make sure your neighbors are out there and voting,” Gustin said. “This big American experiment works when we all show up and when we all lend our voices and our votes.”

    Don Hooper is a former Vermont state representative and was elected Vermont’s secretary of state in 1992. He was a longtime board member of the Vermont Journalism Trust, the parent organization of VTDigger.

    Hooper, 79, is just two years younger than Pres. Joe Biden. He said that Biden should not have run. “I know what it feels like to be older. He still got it, but not every day. It's hard, it's tiring,” Hooper said. But he also said that Democratic fortunes have dramatically turned since Harris became the nominee.

    Channeling Michelle Obama, Hooper said, “Hope is making a comeback, and we're joyous.”

  • Zephyr Teachout has blazed a high-profile path on state and national political stages. But lately, the 52-year-old law professor and politician has been spending her time on a tiny stage in Vermont, directing a play about the saga of Israelis and Palestinians.

    Teachout, who grew up in Norwich, gained national attention in 2004 when she was director of internet organizing for former Gov. Howard Dean’s presidential campaign, helping to vault the small-state governor to briefly run at the front of the pack.

    In 2014, Teachout ran for governor of New York against the powerful incumbent Andrew Cuomo, winning one-third of the vote (Cuomo resigned in 2021 over sexual misconduct allegations). Two years later, Teachout ran for Congress. And, in 2018, she ran for attorney general of New York. She won the endorsement of the New York Times but lost to Letitia James, who later appointed Teachout as a special adviser on economic justice.

    Teachout is a professor of law at Fordham Law School. She is the author of "Break ’Em Up: Recovering Our Freedom From Big Ag, Big Tech, and Big Money."

    Far from the halls of power in Albany or the bright lights of Broadway, Teachout has maintained another passion: acting and directing at Unadilla Theater in Marshfield. When Unadilla founder Bill Blachly, who turned 100 this year, asked if she would direct the play “Returning to Haifa” this summer, Teachout quickly agreed.

    “The more intensely one is involved in whatever it may be professionally and certainly involved in politics, the more that I seek and need art, whether that's visual arts or music or theater as a way to be fully human, to experience both the joys and the griefs that we experience,” she said.

    “Returning to Haifa” links two tragedies: the Nakba (“catastrophe)” experienced by Palestinians when more than 700,000 of them fled or were driven from their homes following the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, and the Holocaust, in which 6 million Jews died at the hands of the Nazis during World War II. Some 140,000 Holocaust survivors moved to Israel, many of them into homes abruptly abandoned by Palestinians.

    The play is based on a novella by Palestinian activist and writer Ghassan Kanafani, who was assassinated at the age of 36 in an operation by Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency. The story was adapted into a play by Naomi Wallace and Ismail Khalidi. It was commissioned by the Public Theater in New York in 2016, but the production was canceled due to political pressure. It finally premiered in the United Kingdom.

    “Returning to Haifa” depicts a Palestinian couple returning to Israel in 1967 and visiting their house and their son who they abandoned 20 years earlier in a terrified flight from Israeli forces. The play is described by the Guardian as “a poignant family drama, as a plea for Israeli-Palestinian understanding and as a warning of what will follow without some form of reconciliation.”

    Teachout was moved to direct the play by a current catastrophe, Israel’s war in Gaza that has killed some 40,000 Palestinians, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. Israel invaded Gaza following the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas that killed more than 1,200 Israelis.

    “It feels very important right now to celebrate Palestinian culture, to introduce people to great writers like Kanafani" who understood "the critical role that literature plays in tying together a community of people,” Teachout said.

    On the political stage, Teachout offered insights about the special challenges that Vice President Kamala Harris and other women face when running for high office.

    “It is harder to express anger as a woman and not be dismissed,” said the former gubernatorial candidate. “Men expressing anger on behalf of an angry public don't get the same kind of scrutiny and, frankly, sometimes disdain or disgust that women expressing anger get.”

    “You've noticed that Harris has chosen to run as a happy warrior,” she said. “If you're in politics, you know these things are choices. It is also a choice that I made in my campaigns and that you see Elizabeth Warren making. There's a lot more comfort with joyful women than angry women … Harris, as a Black woman in particular, faces extraordinary challenges, and she's doing an extraordinary job not letting those challenges define her candidacy.”

    Teachout credits Harris’ rise in the polls to the desire that people have “to see past the next two years, to see a collective future. What I think Harris is tapping into in the last few weeks is a sense that a future is possible. … We're not stuck with these frankly ancient politicians. And I also think that is insufficient," she said.

    Teachout, who has been a leading scholar and critic of corporate monopolies, said Harris needs to “take on big power.”

    People “think everybody's in big money's pockets. There's no point to politics (so) why don't we just cause chaos,” Teachout said. “There's kind of a real nihilism to those who either don't vote or decide to vote for Trump just out of a kind of irritation with what's going on.”

    Harris needs to show that she is “willing to fight, to actually make enemies … (and) take on corporate power,” Teachout said. “For Harris to beat Trump, really leaning into that populism is critical.”

  • For more than a century, New Hampshire sent its troubled youth to the same juvenile jail. It was called the Youth Development Center, or YDC. The young people were supposed to be cared for and then live productive lives. Instead, many of them were physically and sexually abused. More than a thousand people have said that the adults in charge at the YDC abused them. A statewide settlement fund established by NH lawmakers has so far paid out over $95 million to settle lawsuits filed by former detainees.

    Jason Moon is a senior reporter and producer on the Document Team at NHPR. Moon’s investigation into the abuse at the YDC is now a three-part investigative podcast called “Youth Development Center.”

    Moon’s other work includes “Bear Brook,” an investigative podcast into a brutal murder in New Hampshire that has been downloaded more than 31 million times. He also contributed reporting and music to The 13th Step, an NHPR podcast about abuse in New Hampshire’s addiction recovery centers which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and won the prestigious duPont-Columbia Award.

    Moon said of his investigation into the Youth Development Center, “A lot of these kids didn't necessarily have very strong advocates for them at home coming to try to find out what they could. So you have that enormous power dynamic, you have the secrecy that's built into the system, where really the only information that can make it out of the system is written by the adults in charge. They write all the reports, they have complete control over the narrative that makes it out of the building, and if anything does make it out of the building that they don't like, there's an easy kind of response to it, which is ‘these kids they lie, they manipulate, that's why they're here.’”

    “I would hope that all of us reflect on in the wake of a situation like this the extent to which we as a society sort of buy that argument,” Moon said.

  • Last week, I received an unexpected call from Bill Mares, an old friend. Bill told me that he had terminal lymphoma and had only days to live. He was home in hospice care, which focuses on a person’s quality of life as they near death. And he had chosen to make use of Vermont’s medical aid-in-dying law, which passed in 2013.

    He had a few things on his mind that he wanted to share. He was medicated when we spoke but still sharp, thoughtful and funny.

    Bill died on Monday, July 29, just a week after our conversation. He was 83 years old. His wife Chris told me that his final week was filled with visits from over 70 friends. Bill regaled them with stories from his long and colorful life. No matter how serious the topic or dire the situation, he would find the humor in it. He believed deeply in the power of a good laugh.

    Bill Mares was raised in Texas and educated at Harvard, where he majored in history, and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts, where he received a master’s degree. He was a former journalist, state representative and high school history teacher in Vermont. For over a decade, he was a regular commentator on Vermont Public Radio.

    He authored or co-authored 20 books on subjects ranging from the U.S. Marines, to desert travel, to Vermont humor. His books include Real Vermonters Don’t Milk Goats (with Frank Bryan), and his latest, I Could Hardly Keep From Laughing: An Illustrated Collection of Vermont Humor (with Don Hooper). His memoir, Better to Be Lucky Than Smart, will be published posthumously later this year.

    Among the many nonprofit organizations to which he gave his time and talents, Bill was a board member of the Vermont Journalism Trust, the parent organization of VTDigger.

    Bill called me to talk about how he was approaching his last days. He especially wanted others to know that the end of life could be peaceful and beautiful with medical aid-in-dying. Vermont is one of 11 states that has such a law. In 2023, Vermont revised it to become the first state to permit medical aid-in-dying to qualifying patients from anywhere, regardless of the state in which they live. To qualify, a patient must meet strict criteria, including having a terminal illness with six months or less to live and have two physicians sign off.

    "I had the chance to drive the bus of my own disappearance," he said of how he was ending his life.

    Bill asked me if I would record our conversation. We both knew it would likely be the last time we talked.

    "I was never an expert in anything. But I was good enough to pass the giggle test," he told me.

    I asked him what his advice was for young people. "Start by serving other people. It said on the wall of my camp as a kid, 'God is first, others second, I am third.' And you can't go wrong with that."

    "You just have to remember those two beings, which is you and everybody else. You're sharing this planet with 8 billion other people. And that's enough work to do for anyone."

  • When the covid pandemic hit in March 2020, stores ran out of toilet paper. Then it was infant formula, personal protective equipment, computer chips and everything else on which our modern lives depend.

    What caused these worldwide shortages? In his new book, “How the World Ran Out of Everything,” New York Times global economics correspondent Peter S. Goodman explains how and why the global supply chain broke – and why it might happen again. In it, he says that inequality and corporate greed have left the world with a supply chain on the brink of collapse.

    “Most of us understood that the businesses that dominated the supply chain were making the economy more unequal, enriching executives who frequently abused the rank and file, poisoning our democracies and sowing toxicity in our political discourse, to say nothing of the natural environment,” Goodman writes. “To the extent to which we thought about it, we generally recognized that our mode of consumerism was threatening humanity with extinction via climate change, while exploiting labor from South Asia to Latin America.”

    Goodman has reported from more than 40 countries over the past three decades. He came to the Times from the Washington Post, where he was the Shanghai bureau chief. His work as part of the Times’ series on the roots of the 2008 financial crisis was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His other books include, “Davos Man: How the Billionaires Devoured the World.”

    Goodman said that when people conclude "that the powers that be don't value them, don't prioritize their needs and the needs of their families, and at the same time you have trade animosities and then migration ...that is a very toxic prescription. That creates opportunities for parties that tend to demonize outsiders, immigrants, or in our case, Chinese workers supposedly stealing our jobs. And that doesn't go well."

    "Much of the West is engaged in a kind of process of looking for scapegoats, as opposed to looking at how we have allowed billionaire interests to dominate our politics and deliver scarcity,” Goodman said. “I think that's a very concerning combination."

  • A political tsunami rolled ashore on Sunday, July 21, in the form of President Joe Biden’s announcement that he was withdrawing from the 2024 presidential race and endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris.

    This move, about 100 days before Election Day, is unprecedented in American history. Biden’s withdrawal followed his disastrous performance in a debate last month with former President Donald Trump, during which Biden struggled to find words, trailed off mid-sentence and often stared blankly at the camera.

    Biden’s meltdown on national TV sparked panic among Democrats, who feared an electoral blowout that could cost them the presidency, Congress and statewide races.

    U.S. Rep. Becca Balint, D-Vt., participated in three weeks of fraught discussions among her colleagues over whether to urge the 81-year old president to get out of the race.

    Balint said that conversations in the Democratic caucus “were raw, they were honest, there was screaming, there was crying, there (were) people trying to see it from every possible outcome, thinking about their constituents and their relationships with both the president and the vice president.” She said that calls to her office ran 10 to 1 in favor of Biden quitting the race, but among her colleagues “there was a strong diversity of opinion. And we all felt an incredible responsibility to bring into the room what we were hearing from rank-and-file voters.”

    Balint pushed back against the charge that Harris has not been adequately vetted by participating in primaries. “She was vetted. She was the vice president…for years,” Balint said. “She's been out making the case for a set of policy priorities that she was right by the president's side passing them.”

    Balint advised Harris to “articulate a very forward-looking message for the nation. Because what you have in Trump and [Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, Trump’s newly named running-mate] is this effort to drag us back to another time when people did not have their rights guaranteed. And we see this not-so-coded language in the last few days around ‘DEI candidates.' They are basically coming right up to the line around racism and sexism. And so she is going to channel the anger and frankly the disgust that many American women feel around overturning Roe, trying to restrict access to mifepristone, threatening to enforce the archaic Comstock Laws.”

    Balint insisted that the presidential race “is going to be won and lost around bodily autonomy and freedom.”

    The first-term representative wanted “to just name the elephant in the room that is kicking around here where people say, ‘Oh, well, America is not ready to elect a woman — America is not ready to elect a Black woman in particular,’" she said.

    "Let's not have a failure of imagination here,” Balint said. “Of course we can elect a woman… And of course we can elect a Black woman. We have to stop parroting this notion that we are only as good as the most racist and sexist people in this nation. We're not. We're better than that. And we have to believe in what is possible.”

    In April, Balint, who is Jewish, voted against sending offensive military aid to Israel, and she boycotted Wednesday’s address to Congress by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “I am disgusted that he was invited,” she said, adding that Netanyahu leads “the most extremist government that Israel has ever seen.”

    “Netanyahu should be spending every waking moment bringing about an end to this horrible war, getting the release of the hostages, getting Israeli troops out of Gaza,” Balint said.

    Vermont’s lone congressional representative bemoaned “the cynicism that's taken hold in this country. And the sense that everyone's on the take or everybody's out to get you and that sort of permeates the work that I do here.”

    Balint said she is focused on “how to not give in to cynicism. And that's where I get a sense of renewal is thinking about the language that I use and how I interact with my constituents and also my colleagues so that we don't lose hope.”

  • Ethan Allen is lionized as the founding father of Vermont. But filmmaker Jay Craven has reimagined the story of the Revolutionary War figure and leader of the Green Mountain Boys to tell a fuller story of patriotism laced with greed and ambition.

    In Craven’s latest epic film, “Lost Nation,” Ethan Allen meets Lucy Terry Prince, a formerly enslaved woman in Guilford who scholars believe was the nation’s first African American poet. The improbable duo have a shared conviction to protect their land and people. Their fictionalized connection lies at the heart of Craven’s saga.

    “Lost Nation” opens with a quote from Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Alice Walker, who wrote, “All history is current.”

    “One of the questions we pose in the film is whether the promise of the American Revolution would be fulfilled,” said Craven. “There was a belief and a hope that slavery would be abolished as a result of the American Revolution. Of course, that did not happen. And some of the racial tensions of that time, unfortunately, have persisted … And today we're facing the problem of even banning African American history.”

    “Maybe this film itself would be banned, frankly, because it tells some African American history about struggle,” he mused.

    Jay Craven is one of Vermont’s cultural visionaries. He is a founder of Catamount Arts, co-founder of Circus Smirkus, and co-founder of Kingdom County Productions, which he runs with his wife, documentary filmmaker Bess O’Brien. Craven has directed 10 films, including “Where the Rivers Flow North” (1993), “Disappearances” (2006) and “Northern Borders” (2013).

    Craven is also artistic director of the Middlebury New Filmmakers Festival and a former professor of film studies at Marlboro College.

    Craven attended Boston University, where he was student body president and led protests against the Vietnam War. He formed a lifelong friendship with radical historian Howard Zinn and traveled with a student peace delegation to North Vietnam.

    Filmmaking is an extension of Craven's lifelong social justice mission. Some 45 students from 10 colleges were involved in making “Lost Nation,” part of his commitment to empowering a new generation of filmmakers through Semester Cinema.

    Making films “gave me voice, it gave me agency and also instilled in me a certain activism that became a guiding force when I moved to Vermont in wanting to work within the arts to connect communities and to work with this idea of community and culture,” Craven said. “Making movies based on stories from where I lived, as an alternative to the Hollywood narrative, was part of that activism.”

  • When flood waters tore through parts of Vermont last July, countless lives were upended. Barre, the Granite City, was especially hard hit. Parts of downtown were buried in thick mud, and the city public works department spent days sending snowplows through the streets to clear them.

    This week, virtually everyone I talked with in Barre expressed anxiety about heavy rains and potential flash flooding expected on Wednesday and Thursday.

    I stopped by Dente’s Market, Barre’s last corner grocery. The store dates back to 1907. Last year when I visited, the sodden contents of the store were heaped on the sidewalk. I found its owner, Rick Dente, standing on the porch of a house that he owns just behind the market. Locals affectionately call him the Mayor of North Barre.

    When I met Dente last year, he told me of his harrowing near-death experience during the flood. He was in water up to his neck, pinned to a door in the back of his market, his legs about to give out. Just when Dente thought it was over, three tenants who lived above his store came down, ropes around their waists. They banged open the door and rescued the exhausted shopkeeper.

    “Someone was watching over me,” Dente told me last year inside his mud filled market.

    Today, collectible glass milk containers and old Coke bottles once again sparkled on the shelves, and coolers offered an assortment of food and drink. Rick Dente was behind the counter in his usual post where he has been greeting his Barre neighbors for decades.

    Dente said that he has had health impacts related to the 2023 flood. “I've had some physical issues that I'm told can be the result of your body experiencing some serious, serious stress.”

    “Hopefully I can stay in good health and keep going for at least a few more years,” he said of his 117 year old family business. “Time will tell.”

    When I visited Vermont Bicycle Shop, I discovered that it had moved from its location on Main Street. The new store opened this week a few blocks away at a location that did not flood.

    “I always describe last year as both the best and worst thing that's ever happened to me,” said bike store owner Darren Ohl, whose basement stocked with over $100,000 in inventory was under 8 feet of water last year. Community members created a GoFundMe for the bike shop that raised over $26,000.

    “The flood was terrible to go through," said Ohl. But it "was wonderful was seeing how much our community came out. We had over 25 volunteers with over 20 volunteers for almost 30 days straight. So many people would just come to the shop and just write us a check and donate money. That was astounding to experience as a business owner. And without that we would have folded. We would have gone out of business.”

    “That community response is one of the things that holds neighborhoods and communities together,” said Pam Wilson, a founder of Barre Up, a group working on long term recovery. “That's how you survive an unpredictable climate future. It's based in community care.”

  • Democrats, stop freaking out.

    That is the message — or plea — of veteran campaign consultant Stuart Stevens following President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance last week. Numerous pundits on cable news, some Democratic donors and the editorial board of the New York Times have called for Biden to drop out and let a younger candidate take on Trump.

    Stevens thinks that dumping Biden is “insane.”

    "Is Joe Biden up to being president? I find it sort of an absurd question because he is president,” Stevens said. “And he's probably the most successful first term president since World War Two.”

    Stevens is among the most experienced and successful campaign consultants in the country. He was a top adviser on five Republican presidential campaigns, including for Mitt Romney, George W. Bush and John McCain, and he has been a consultant on dozens of GOP campaigns for governor, Congress and the U.S. Senate.

    Stuart Stevens has now abandoned the Republican Party, contending that it has become an authoritarian movement. He was one of the most prominent Republicans to come out against Donald Trump in 2016. Stevens has written several bestselling books about his political conversion, including his latest, “The Conspiracy to End America: Five Ways My Old Party is Driving Our Democracy To Autocracy.”

    Stuart Stevens is now a senior adviser to the Lincoln Project, which is working to defeat Trump in the 2024 election. He grew up in Mississippi but has lived for many years in Stowe.

    Stevens says the talk of changing candidates is “fantasy.” Replacing Biden and sidelining Vice President Kamala Harris, the first woman of color to hold the position, would "shatter the Democratic Party for at least a generation, maybe permanently," he argued, adding that it was "extraordinarily sexist and racist and offensive.”

    Stevens said that Democrats have a history of doubting and undermining their candidates, which he believes has cost them winnable elections in the past. "This sense of doubt, of timidity, of not being willing to rally around your candidate... has been disastrous," Stevens observed.

    Stevens noted that presidential debates have historically made no difference in the outcome of a race. He pointed out that "Hillary Clinton won every debate and lost" the 2016 election.

    The presidential race is “going to be about the future of democracy and about stability and about what kind of country do we think we are. And I think Trump loses all those,” argued Stevens.

    He said the campaign’s outcome will be determined in its final weeks, not in July. He ventured that Biden would win and “the race isn't going to be particularly close.”

    Stevens summarized his advice to Democrats in a recent New York Times op-ed, “Suck it up and fight. It’s not supposed to be easy.”

  • This Vermont Conversation with Jackson Beecham originally aired in July 2022.

    When the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade on June 24, it left each state to decide its own abortion laws. Many Republican-led states are reverting to the anti-abortion laws that were on the books before 1973 when Roe legalized abortion.

    Vermont legalized abortion a year before Roe. In 1972, the Vermont Supreme Court overturned a 122 year-old law that made it a crime for a doctor to perform an abortion, though it was not against the law for someone to have one. In practice, this meant that someone could legally self-abort at their own peril, but a doctor who performed an abortion could be arrested and imprisoned for up to 20 years.

    The case that legalized abortion in Vermont featured “Jacqueline R.,” an unmarried server who wanted to end her pregnancy, and an OB/GYN resident at the University of Vermont named Jackson Beecham.

    After New York legalized abortion in 1970, Beecham, a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War, joined a small group of women’s health advocates in Burlington who were exploring ways to legalize abortion in the Green Mountain State. Attorney Willis “Woody” Higgins, a lawyer for IBM who volunteered to argue the case, advised the group that they needed two plaintiffs: a pregnant person who wanted an abortion and “a courageous doctor.”

    The prosecutor they faced was a young state's attorney, Patrick Leahy, and the landmark case that legalized abortion in Vermont was known as Beecham vs. Leahy.

    “I didn’t even think about winning or losing,” Beecham said of the case. He just felt “this is the right thing to do.”

    When the Vermont Supreme Court ruled for Beecham in January 1972, Beecham said, “I was floored.” Within a few months, legal abortions were being performed in Vermont.

    Beecham went on to a distinguished medical career as a gynecologic oncologist and cancer surgeon. He founded two gynecologic oncology programs at the cancer centers of the University of Rochester and at Dartmouth College, and he was a longtime associate professor at Dartmouth Medical School. Beecham, who is now 80 and lives in Shelburne, retired from practicing medicine in 2008. He continues to be a champion of reproductive rights and is a strong advocate for Proposal 5, which would make Vermont the first state in the country to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution if it is approved by voters in November.

    Beecham reflected on his role in legalizing abortion in Vermont.

    “I was honored to spend four decades in women’s health as a cancer surgeon. But I think … getting this law changed is the single most important thing I ever did. I’m still moved by it. I’m very, very grateful that I could be part of helping others,” he said.

    He said that he is “just horrified” that the U.S. Supreme Court has returned the country to where it was before Roe vs. Wade.

    “I’ll be on the sidelines, fighting like everyone else that feels in support of women,” Beecham said.

  • Is our car-centric society ready to ditch automobiles for bicycles?

    It is already happening in a number of cities, and it may be part of the solution to the climate crisis. This is the case made by Daniel Piatkowski in his new book, Bicycle City: Riding the Bike Boom to a Brighter Future. Piatkowski, a former New York City bike messenger, is now a professor of land use and transportation planning at Oslo Metropolitan University in Norway.

    Piatkowski says that e-bikes have revolutionized the way we think about bicycles. Increasing numbers of people commute on e-bikes, especially when cities provide incentives to reduce auto congestion. Cargo e-bikes are even replacing SUVs and delivery vehicles.

    Piatkowski argues that what was once viewed as recreation is now the future of transportation.

    “The bicycle is a bridge to help reduce that immediate reliance on a car every day,” asserted Piatkowksi. “Making places more bike friendly makes them more people friendly.

    It makes them more transport friendly. “I look at bikes as the necessary first step, but certainly not the last step in that transition that we need to get away from not only driving our cars all the time, but building cities that have to accommodate cars,” Piatkowksi said.

    Bikes “are the starting point to …revolutionary changes in how our cities can function.”

  • In 1969, with the country in the grips of protests against the Vietnam War, Rob Mermin took a different path. He ran off to join the circus. So began his career as a performer that has touched the lives of thousands of people.

    For the next decade, Mermin performed in circuses throughout Europe, above the Arctic Circle and behind the Iron Curtain of the Soviet Union. He studied with the legendary pantomimist Marcel Marceau, who would become his mentor and friend. In 1987, Mermin came to Vermont and founded Circus Smirkus, now one of the country’s top traveling youth circuses.

    Over 40,000 people attend Circus Smirkus performances each year, and the troupe has held cultural exchanges with 32 countries.

    Mermin, now 74, was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease a decade ago. He responded by founding the Parkinson’s Pantomime Project, helping people with movement disorders manage their symptoms with pantomime and circus techniques.

    Mermin has won numerous awards, including the Vermont Arts Council Award of Merit, and the 2008 Governor’s Award for Excellence, Vermont’s highest honor in the arts.

    Mermin has written a new book, "Circle of Sawdust: A Circus Memoir of Mud, Myth, Mirth, Mayhem and Magic" (Rootstock Publishing, 2024).

    “You have to have fun with whatever you're doing, whatever you're dealing with,” said Mermin of his approach to life’s challenges. “What gets me through is a sense of curiosity about it, a sense of humor….(and) a sense of play. You have to keep playing through life.”

  • Harvard professor Steven Levitsky is the co-author of the 2018 international bestseller, “How Democracies Die.” It’s a book that President Joe Biden has cited often.

    In it, Levitsky and fellow Harvard professor Daniel Ziblatt documented the rise of authoritarian movements and the decline of democracies around the world. But Levitsky was still shocked when Trump supporters launched a violent attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

    He thought it wouldn’t happen here.

    The Jan. 6 insurrection inspired Levitsky and Ziblatt to look at why American democracy has receded so quickly. They have a new book, “Tyranny of the Minority,” that seeks to answer this question.

    Steven Levitsky is the David Rockefeller professor of Latin American studies and professor of government at Harvard University.

    Levitsky also did not expect that he would witness a crackdown on civil liberties on his own campus and on universities around the country.

    "These were overwhelmingly peaceful protests, and we get an extraordinary wave of police repression and the arrest of 3600 peaceful protesters,” Levitsky said. “And I think what terrified me the most was there was a consensus ... in the mainstream establishment that this was OK. It was appropriate. Because a national narrative had emerged that these protesters were violent, that they were chaotic, that they were antisemitic, that they were pro-terrorist. It was overwhelmingly not the case. But that justified the repression."

    Levitsky argued that colleges have long tolerated peaceful student protest but that today’s students were being unfairly subject to a “Palestine exception.” During the past month, he tried to mediate between student activists and Harvard’s leaders to ensure that students were not punished for speaking out. His efforts failed when Harvard suspended five undergraduates and placed at least 20 more on probation, including barring 13 seniors from graduating in late May.

    Levitsky says the national erosion of democracy has been accelerated by "the fact that so many mainstream politicians are willing to set aside any commitment to democracy in order to get ahead, to continue their political careers and pursue their political ambitions. That was a terrifying lesson."

    Lebistky insists that democracy is threatened by minority rule, which is enshrined in the U.S. constitution and institutions like the Electoral College, which is "biased towards sparsely populated territories, and this is allowing the Republican Party to govern without winning national majorities. And when that partisan minority is an increasingly authoritarian party, watch out. We now have a set of institutions that are protecting and empowering the authoritarian minority party."

  • Are the kids all right?

    This question is foremost on the mind of parents, educators, and young people themselves.

    Students today are still grappling with the lingering effects of the covid pandemic, during which their schools closed and their education continued alone — or in many cases, their education and development stalled. Significant covid-related learning gaps continue to pose a challenge for many students.

    As graduation and summer approaches, the Vermont Conversation wanted to hear from students in their own words about their lives, concerns and challenges. We spoke with four high students from around Vermont, all of whom volunteer with Up for Learning, a nonprofit that brings together youth and adults to transform education with a focus on equity and justice.

    The student guests are: Auishma Pradhan, a junior at South Burlington High School who is a member of the Winooski Antiracism Steering Committee; Harmony Devoe, a freshman at Harwood Union High School, who was recently named Vermont’s first Youth Poet Laureate; Jacoby Soter, a sophomore at Bellows Free Academy in St. Albans who is a student member of the Maple Run School Board; and Mea Ree Jan, a junior at Winooski High School and the Center for Technology at Essex who is also a member of the Winooski Antiracism Steering Committee.

    The students made clear that the problems of the world do not stop at the school house. Failed school budgets, racism, and Israel’s war in Gaza were top of mind for many of them.

    Soter said the effects of covid on learning “is honestly much bigger than the actual covid crisis that was two years long. We're going to be feeling this for the next 10 years.”

    He said he sees a “disconnect between (students) that were that were able to have people in the house and help them with covid learning and everyone else. …There are a few kids who are really thriving and excelling socially, emotionally and in their academic career, and then there is everyone else who is really far behind.”

    Among the problems Soter sees are an increase in vaping and substance abuse that contribute to “behavioral problems inside school and many students not feeling safe around their peers because of those behavioral problems.”

    Auishma Pradhan said that she is deeply concerned about and affected by Israel-Gaza war. “This is the type of education that should be taught in school where it's very immediate and it's happening right now.” She said that “students would want to know about" it. "It's not okay.”

    “We should be able to show support,” she added.

    Mea Ree Jan agreed and said that she empathized with suffering Palestinians. She noted that her family “comes from a long history of ethnic cleansing from Myanmar.” She is now studying health care and hopes to work with a group like Doctors Without Borders. “I would like to be able to directly help.”

    Several of the students attend schools that have had their budgets voted down multiple times. Soter said that people are protesting rising taxes by voting against school budgets but “it only affects students because people in Montpelier, they don't take those no’s as negatively as the students do.”

    Vermont Youth Poet Laureate Harmony Devoe read one of her poems. “It's about being Asian and being proud of my heritage,” she explained. “I wrote it when there were a lot of Asian hate times in the news. And that just affected me mentally.”

    Almond Eyes

    By Harmony Belle Devoe

    You are born

    And into this life of

    Almond eyes

    Caramel skin

    Dark chocolate hair

    A trifle of color

    You grow

    And into this life of

    Switching of tongue

    Beads of phrases strung

    “Where are you really from?”

    You hear of gunshots

    In the streets

    Adzuki bean sweets

    The surrenders and defeats

    Bow down to the white man’s feet

    They gave you your life

    Now you pretend

    You don’t feel the cuts of the knife

    They colonize their Asian wives

    Now we rise

    They must do more than just apologize

    Their wrongs will never be rights

    We realize

    We must fight for these rights

    We descend

    Like the gods

    And we grow

    Like the cherry tree

    We dissent

    We’re not robots

    And we know

    We cannot be controlled

    We die

    And from this life of

    Almond eyes

    Caramel skin

    Darkest chocolate hair

    We leave

    Our legacy;

    Be proud

    Of your Asian heritage

    We will build the bridge

    You will tread it

    Might have to mend it

    Mentally

    But eventually,

    This will be

    Our legacy

    I stand in my Asian soul

    Full

    Of the foods and smells of the kitchen

    Kare-kare

    Scallions

    Halo-halo

    Perfume

    Golden sun medallions

    Sesame oil

    We toil

    Endlessly

    Relentlessly

    For the Western’s greed

    Now

    For equity, equality, and peace

    I stand in my Asian soul

    My head held high

    My almond eyes

  • “Imagine one day you receive a letter in the mail that informs you that a large energy company is planning to build a massive pipeline through your property. That surveyors will be coming out soon. That they have the legal right to do so, whether you like it or not, because this project is in the 'public interest.'"

    That’s how journalist Jonathan Mingle describes the letter that people in rural Virginia received in 2014 from Dominion Energy, one of the biggest power companies in the country. Dominion was planning to construct the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, which would carry natural gas over some 600 miles. What happened next is not how most David vs. Goliath stories end. People in the rural communities organized, mobilized, and fought back. The battle raged for six years until the pipeline was canceled in 2020.

    Jonathan Mingle tells this dramatic story of climate change and resistance in his new book, “Gaslight: The Atlantic Coast Pipeline and the Fight for America's Energy Future.”

    Mingle, who lives in Lincoln, has traveled to distant corners of the world to chronicle the impacts of climate change and those who are fighting to stop it. In 2015, he published "Fire and Ice: Soot, Solidarity and Survival on the Roof of the World," about his travels to the former Buddhist kingdom of Zanskar in northern India. He wrote about what is happening as Himalayan glaciers dry up and drought spreads.

    Mingle has also reported on Vermont’s struggle to fund its rural schools and about how the July 2023 floods showed that Vermont is not immune from climate chaos.

    “This idea that you could somehow escape the impacts of climate change is a delusion,” he said about Vermont’s recent experience with flooding.

    Mingle said that the people who fought and won against the Atlantic Coast Pipeline demonstrated that “the most overlooked climate solution is solidarity. And we're going to need it to adapt to climate change.”