The Core is exploiting the Periphery

By Susan Culp

I spend a lot of time thinking about land use issues in Vermont.  As a local elected official, I have been working with my fellow community leaders to grapple with recent legislative changes to land use regulations and our response.  As a candidate for state office, I have been listening to rural communities and property owners as they push back against increasing overreach from the state and regional level that is affecting people throughout Vermont.  The grassroots group Rural Vermont Rising is growing in membership and influence as more people have become aware of the impact of state decisions.  

In particular, the provisions of Vermont’s Act 181, the “road rule” and the Tier 3 rural land use restrictions set off a storm once people became aware of what was actually in the bill.  It became clear that the law was crafted with insufficient input and collaboration with the communities and people that would be most affected by it.  The outcry forced lawmakers to scrap the most controversial provisions of their so-called “grand bargain” to overhaul Vermont’s land use regulations.  One of the bill’s proponents even distributed a statement recognizing that “…over the past couple of weeks, it’s become clear that the rollout of several Act 181 provisions (notably the road rule and Tier 3) has fundamentally broken trust with too many Vermonters.”

This is not an isolated incident.  It reflects a broken relationship between those who live in rural areas and the interest groups and decision makers of predominantly larger, more affluent communities and state level bureaucracies.  

During my graduate work in land use planning and development, I studied core-periphery theory.  It is a theory of development where one sees the concentration of wealth and influence into dense, mostly urban, centers (the “core”), which then exploit the “peripheral” exurban and rural areas for raw materials, agricultural and forestry products, and cheap labor.  Over time, disparities in political power and wealth magnify as rural areas are drained of resources to enrich the core and are increasingly deprived of a voice in the political process.  Those who live and earn their livelihoods from working landscapes are left increasingly impoverished and with fewer opportunities over time.  

This theme is writ large throughout our country these days.  And it explains a lot about what is happening now in Vermont. Though our urban cores are nothing to the scale of what is seen in other states, the dynamics are the same. 

A tragic example recently involved a noted conservation organization who acquired a historic farm.  After subsequently neglecting the structures on the property for decades, a plan was announced to “restore” the property by demolishing the historic farm buildings.  One article refers to the organization and its plans as “elitist,” and while that perhaps oversimplifies the issues, it is hard to argue with. To erase the history of all human habitation from a place, returning it to a pristine, untrammeled state (that exists mainly in the imagination) has become a predictable pattern among those who view rural areas more as a “playground” for occasional recreational excursions than as a place to live and put down roots.  As with Act 181, the proposed solutions to the many challenges brought about by a changing climate, loss of species, and ecological change is to pack as many people into dense settlements as possible, and remove them from “natural places.”

This is one of the most persistent delusions of our culture – that “humans” and “nature” are separate.  Living in rural Vermont, we learn that people are part of the ecosystem too, and the lack of human presence does not equate to ecological health.  It all depends on how we interact with that landscape.

The late, great Wendell Berry, one of the most eloquent voices of our time about our connection to the land and to each other, wrote in The Unsettling of America, “We have given up the understanding…that we and our country create one another, depend on one another, are literally part of one another; that our land passes in and out of our bodies just as our bodies pass in and out of our land; that as we and our land are part of one another, so all who are living as neighbors here, human and plant and animal, are part of one another, and so cannot possibly flourish alone…”

For our country’s population centers to thrive, there must be people living and working on the land, producing the goods that are enjoyed by everyone in our society.  Rural communities must receive adequate resources in exchange for that labor and those resources, and must be able to plan and care for the long term health of the land, including natural open space and places for wildlife.  We are all necessary to this landscape.  

The relationship between rural communities and urban areas in this country is badly broken, and Vermont is no exception. If we are going to achieve our lofty goals for sustainability and resilience, we need to forge a new urban-rural compact that respects and values all the participants in the landscape.  If rural communities are to thrive, if we are going to have lasting protection of the natural resources and working lands that sustain us, we need to be listening to the people who live on the land when they tell us how that can actually happen, and what they need to accomplish those goals.

We need a different way of thinking about our communities, our relationships with our neighbors and our relationship with the land.  The two-party system has failed us in making meaningful progress to unite urban and rural communities.  Democrats have too often prioritized urban problems over rural; Republicans have too often enabled big corporations to exploit rural communities as well.  Whether it’s “Vote Blue No Matter Who” or “MAGA”… the poisonous divisions that political party leadership have set in motion continue to drive us further apart.

Reforging these relationships is a task that will take humility, a LOT of listening, openness and freedom from ideological pressures and party-line platitudes.  From all that I’ve seen, neither Democrats nor Republicans are up to the task.  To succeed, we will need Independents to help bridge the divide.

The author is a Newbury resident and independent candidate for State Representative in the Orange-Caledonia district. Her public service includes serving as the Chair of the Town Selectboard, and in past roles on the Newbury Planning Commission and the Tucker Mountain Town Forest Management Committee. She runs a consulting practice focused on land use and recreation planning, community engagement and organizing, and nonprofit management. She has a master’s degree in public administration and policy, and earned her bachelor’s degree in marine biology. She and her husband, Peter, manage nearly 600 acres of forested land.