Remarks at the Statehouse Rural Vermont Rising Rally, 10-10-26

Editor’s note: the author is the developer of Whole Systems Design, LLC in Waitsfield, described on its website as “a land-based response to biological and cultural extinction and the increasing separation between people and elemental things.” He is the author of the award-winning book The Resilient Farm and Homestead (Chelsea Green, 2013, 2024). The remarks below were given at the Saturday, October 10 Rural Vermont Rising rally at the Vermont State House. They also appear on his Substack page. Both Falk and VDC welcome sharing this article on social media.

by Ben Falk

“A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community.”

I’ve spent twenty-five years trying to put Aldo Leopold’s “land ethic” into practice on a beat-up, abandoned sheep pasture. Here’s what it’s shown me.

First, “sustainable” was always the wrong word. Doing less bad was never doing good. Second, when you aim for revitalization instead, things start to make sense. You see that you were meant to be here. You’re not the one creature that only destroys and never heals. You belong to a place. Not just to a human community, but to the whole land community, to the watershed. Land health is integral to thriving human habitat.

I started with the water and let its dynamics organize everything else. In ecological design we say, “you can’t get anything right if you get the water wrong.”

So first I dug swales and some shallow ponds. Then I planted fruit trees, nut trees and berry bushes on contour, along with herbaceous perennials. Everything was built to slow, spread, and sink water, and to encourage biodiversity, food, beauty, and medicine.

Then came August 28th, 2011: tropical storm Irene. Over twelve hours, more than half a foot of rain came down.

By that night my village, Moretown, was under eight feet of water. Our fire department was one of the first buildings to flood, in the same floodplains where Act 181’s maps encourage even more development. “Tier 1.”

I woke up Monday to a changed Vermont, almost all of it for the worse. But before I knew that, I walked the land. Every pond had filled with crystal clear water. The swales were brimming, trickling slowly over their sills, totally clear. Not a speck of ancient soil or newer hard-earned soil was moving.

Six inches of rain on twenty-five acres, our ten plus fifteen above us that flows onto our land, is about four million gallons. We banked it in the groundwater, filled our storages, fed our soil. In one event we removed more than twice as much land as we manage from flood contribution.

Here’s the irony: Vermont’s Acts 59 and 181 say they want three things: more carbon stored, more biodiversity, less flood damage. My hillside does all three faster than a “nature preserve” devoid of humans, while generating economic yield, improving local food security and being prime human habitat: my family’s home.

Carbon: Soil organic matter has gone from 2-3% over most of our ground to 4-12%. Each percentage point is about sixteen tons of CO2 per acre in the top six inches. Across our ten acres, that adds up to hundreds of tons held in the ground, which fuels better plant yields and stormwater absorption.

Biodiversity: The place is now prime bear and turkey habitat. The bears have been climbing my fruit and chestnut trees and have become almost pests. When people ask what we plant for wildlife I just laugh. What don’t we plant for them? A graduate student in entomology at UVM visited a few years ago and said, “I’m seeing insects I haven’t seen on one site in Vermont before. Do you have an unusual amount of plant diversity here?” The birds arrive earlier and stay later.

Flood resilience: If we did this on a small fraction of our landscape, our rivers would be noticeably less flood prone. Keeping water in the hills is a no-brainer. We’ve seen multiple new springs form. And drought resilience matters as much as flood resilience, as dry spells grow more frequent.

This is nothing more than a land ethic applied to one’s home, but it takes time, energy and funding. And nobody digs swales or plants white oaks for their grandkids when they’re drowning in regulatory hurdles. They need the creative space that livability enables.

Current Use/UVA ties its tax relief to acreage and sales income, permit costs and regulatory hurdles favor scale. Go big or get out.

Laws that view people as the problem throw away the maximum leverage for reaching their own stated goals. Vermont became a place worth protecting because of the relationship between people and land: a working landscape, not a wilderness preserve. The mutual flourishing of people and the more-than-human world has married Vermonters to this land for generations. No one is regulated into good husbandry. Vermont can become a shining example of thriving human habitat if our legislature supports rather than hinders long-term land tenure.

We might ask the following of those seeking to represent us.
What are you doing to:

Help Vermont be an example of small is beautiful, not competing at the bigger, faster, more “efficient” corporate industrial model, but doing it with more care, craft, resilience, and beauty?

Support diverse land uses, through tax policy that values subsistence homesteads, not just commercial farms?

Encourage cottage enterprise and zoning for rural industry?

Harness the landscape, legacy and brand that have made Vermont unique in all fifty states, and play our own game rather than compete with outside forces at a game out of scale with the reality of this place?