The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman

This week marks a grim milestone in the Covid-19 pandemic as the death toll in the U.S. hit 800,000 people. One in 100 older Americans has died from the virus. Gregg Gonsalves says the Biden’s Administration’s attempt to vaccinate our way out of the problem is not working. Gonsalves,  a winner of the MacArthur genius award , is associate professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Healt...

New England is on fire – with Covid infections, not foliage. All six New England states are now in the top 10 for highest rates of Covid-19 infections. New Hampshire currently has the highest rate of Covid-19 infections in the country, followed by Rhode Island (No. 2), Maine (No. 3), Massachusetts (No. 5), Connecticut (No. 5) and Vermont (No. 10), according to the New York Times.  Hospitals throug...

The Earth’s coldest places are a hot mess. As a result of climate change, studies suggest that most ski areas in southern New England will be out of business by 2040. A recent climate assessment in Vermont says that  the Vermont ski season will be shortened by up to a month.  In the western United States, high elevation snowpacks have decreased by nearly 50 percent in the last four decades. In the...

Why would a woman walk away from a successful career as a journalist and professor, a comfortable home and a good life to become a struggling farmer? That’s exactly what Beth Hoffman did. She had spent decades as a reporter covering food and agriculture for outlets including NPR and The Guardian and taught at the University of San Francisco. Then in 2019, she and her new husband moved from their h...

'Tis the season of American capitalism. Online shoppers spent $9 billion on Black Friday and $11 billion on Cyber Monday this year. What is the impact of all this spending? And while everyone loves a bargain, is it possible that some items are just too cheap? Author Tanja Hester argues that while Americans buy a lot, we may be leaving something on the table: our power to leverage change based on h...

When the Tao of Physics was first published in 1975, few people knew its author, the Austrian-born physicist Fritjof Capra. That would quickly change. What began as Capra’s passion project to explore the connection between Eastern mysticism and Western science became a global phenomenon. The book sold millions of copies and has been translated into 23 languages. Fritjof Capra has gone on be a trai...

Vermont author  Kekla Magoon  has been going where few children’s authors dare to go, tackling topics such as racism and social justice in her books. She is now being recognized as one of America’s top writers for young adults. Magoon was a finalist for this year’s National Book Award, one of the world’s most prestigious literary prizes, for her new book for young adults,  Revolution in Our Time:...

When reports began emerging in January 2020 of a mysterious respiratory virus spreading in Wuhan, China, politicians, health officials and scientists were unprepared for the global pandemic that was soon to follow. As the scale of the calamity unfolded, the world’s best known pharmaceutical companies had nothing in their arsenal to deal with it. The scientists and drug companies that mobilized an...

This week, world leaders are gathered at the United Nations' COP26 summit in Glasgow, Scotland, to discuss what to do about the climate crisis.  Gus Speth  knows what brought us to the edge of this climate emergency. President Carter and all the presidents who followed knew, too. The United States government knew that climate change was an impending disaster. They knew that burning fossil fuels co...

It was the crime of the century. Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin — which is controlled by the billionaire Sackler family — was the hidden hand behind the national opioid epidemic that has destroyed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. The company deceived doctors and patients about OxyContin’s addictive properties and rewarded high-volume prescribers. In September 2019, Purdue Pharm...

What does a performer do when she can’t perform? For Karen Kevra , she becomes a storyteller. Kevra is a Grammy-nominated flutist and founder and artistic director of Capital City Concerts in Montpelier. When Covid-19 shuttered performance venues last year, she searched for a new way to connect with her audience. Kevra has performed throughout the U.S., Canada, and Europe, including performances a...

Vermont has committed to cutting its greenhouse gas emissions 40 percent from 1990 levels by 2030, and to meeting 90 percent of its energy needs with renewable sources by 2050. Are these energy goals a pipe dream, or are they within reach? The answer depends on where you live. The city of Burlington now gets all of its  power from renewable generation . And as President Biden struggles t...

When Bernie Sanders decided to pursue national politics, one obstacle stood in his way: He had to defeat Vermont’s Republican congressman, Rep. Peter Smith. In 1988, Sanders first ran for Congress against Smith and lost in a three-way race. Two years later, Smith was completing his first term when the former mayor of Burlington challenged him again. This time, the maverick socialist won handily. P...

As the Covid pandemic grabs headlines, another deadly epidemic is quietly ravaging communities: addiction has led to a record spike in overdoses. Nationally,  there was a 29% increase in overdose deaths  last year. In Vermont, opioid deaths rose by 38% in 2020, with 157 people who died by overdose. For town librarian  Brett Ann Stanciu , these statistics had a name and a face. In 20...

This week, the U.S. government narrowly averted shutting down. Now, a debt default crisis looms on the horizon. This brinksmanship has been driven by Senate Republicans, who threatened a shutdown and are blocking raising the debt limit as part of a strategy to undermine President Biden’s economic agenda. Unless an agreement is reached by Oct. 18, the U.S. will default on its debts for the first ti...

It is the greatest fraud in Vermont’s history. The  EB-5 scandal  has the elements of a true crime novel: A shady grifter. Secret meetings. Duped investors. Complicit regulators. A panicked whistleblower. A tenacious journalist. Whispers of blackmail. Millions of dollars lost. A dramatic raid by Federal agents that brings it all crashing down. In 2012, when VTDigger founder and editor&nb...

Where will homeless Vermonters live? That question has come to the forefront as more than 540 households were slated to lose their rooms in motels this week. Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020, Vermont’s general assistance housing program has utilized vacant motel rooms for Vermonters who would otherwise be homeless.  VTDigger has reported  that some 70...

John Killacky has had a front row seat in America’s culture wars. As a gay man and a dancer in the 1980s, he lost over 100 friends to AIDS. As an arts administrator in the 1990s and 2000s, he confronted police who threatened to shut down artists who they deemed to be obscene. And as the former director of the Flynn Theater in Burlington, Vt., he agreed to allow a visit by presidential candidate Do...

The issue of resettling refugees has been a flashpoint in Rutland. Five years ago, then-Alderman David Allaire fiercely opposed the settlement of 100 Syrian refugees in the city, declaring that the program should be  “slowed down, if not stopped.”  His opposition to resettling refugees was a central issue in his campaign against Mayor Chris Louras. Six weeks after Donald Trump was inaugu...

Bill McKibben has a new target for his climate activism: his fellow Baby Boomers. McKibben, the founder of the global climate action group  350.org  and a bestselling author, announced last week that he will end his weekly “Climate Crisis” column in The New Yorker and instead launch his own Substack newsletter,  The Crucial Years , and a new organization,  ThirdAct.or...

A Texas law that  effectively bans abortions after the sixth week of pregnancy  went into effect on September 1. The law signed by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, known as SB8, bans abortion before many people know they are pregnant. It took effect after the U.S. Supreme Court, flush with three Trump appointees, refused to grant an emergency request to block it.  SB8 has a novel p...

Is Vermont squandering its hard won gains keeping Covid-19 in check? That’s the argument of Anne Sosin , a public health specialist and Policy Fellow at the Nelson A. Rockefeller Center for Public Policy and the Social Sciences at Dartmouth College. She recently wrote an essay for Time Magazine titled, “Vermont Offered the U.S. a Textbook for Reopening Schools Safely. Why Is It Throwing Out the Le...

Less than a week into the school year, cases of Covid-19-positive students are popping up in schools all around the state.  Gov. Phil Scott so far has declined to mandate face masks in schools, but he recommends that students and educators wear masks. It has been left to each school district to decide whether or not to mask. “We’re going to always do whatever it takes. We’re going to keep kids as...

A curious hallmark of the Covid-19 pandemic is the backlash that it has spawned. Right-wing politicians and their media allies are emboldened as they rage against masks and vaccines, spout conspiracy theories and attack doctors and scientists. Republican governors in Florida and Texas, where infections are raging among children, are blocking schools from mandating that children wear masks , a simp...

An extremist movement led by angry and entitled white men is spreading throughout the country, and Vermont is providing fertile ground for their violent hatred. That’s the contention of Michael Shank, a resident of Brandon, who says that he is moving in order to escape armed white extremists who have been harassing him and been tolerated by local authorities. Shank made his case in an op-ed articl...