Vermont Public, VT Digger, and Seven Days have done their legislative session wrap-ups. In the year rural Vermonters found their voices, these outlets are mostly disinterested in rural perspectives.
A cross-partisan grassroots movement of many thousands rises from nowhere, forces the reversal of large parts of a gargantuan law months before its rules take effect, and offers a hyper-articulate set of underrepresented economic, cultural, and policy interests. In an objective newsroom, that is the story of the year. At Vermont Public, the news side of VT Digger, and at Seven Days, coverage of that movement has seemed begrudging.
This week, Vermont Public dedicated an episode of Vermont Edition to a recap of the legislative session. All of the presenting reporters aligned on a framing of the just-concluded legislative session as a “retreat,” briefly citing the rollback of Act 181 explicitly. Retreat from what? Retreat from whom?
What was implicit was that rural Vermonters (who are time and again conflated with Republicans by reporters at Vermont Public) got in the way of certain priorities. This structural conception is plainly biased in favor of institutional interests over the lives of regular people.
On multiple occasions, reporter Carly Berlin has assumed a bemused wonder at Vermonters investing themselves in a land-use regime that she has referred to as “wonky.” She called it wonky again on Monday. Perceiving monumentally consequential land-use changes to be little more than obscure policy minutiae reveals a profound disconnect with rural Vermont. That disconnect is rampant throughout Vermont’s most popular media.
Consider the definitive session round-ups from Vermont Public, VT Digger, and Seven Days published in the days after the Legislature adjourned on May 29. In those retrospectives, rural Vermonters barely existed.
Vermont Public devoted one sentence to Act 181, folded into a paragraph about what got “undone.”
VT Digger described it as “perhaps the most surprising U-turn of the session” and the grassroots movement is only mentioned as the source of “vitriol” that “drew such” online ugliness that House leadership issued a statement condemning “truly reprehensible” personal attacks.
Seven Days didn’t mention S.325, Act 181, or the citizen movement at all in their recap.
Looking back on media coverage of the legislative session, Vermont Public and VT Digger’s dedicated State House reporters, Peter Hirschfeld and Shaun Robinson, dedicated ZERO standalone stories to the pushback on Act 181 and the grassroots movement delivering it. When the governor held a press conference on land use policy on April 23, those two had no questions for the governor or the presenting farmers germane to the grassroots or their concerns.
To their credit, in April Vermont Edition did host the ecological design practitioner and landscape architect Ben Falk, LURB member Alex Weinhagen, and me. It was a rich conversation that focused on Act 181’s implications for equity and alternative ecological positions. And yet, in the first twenty minutes of that episode and in subsequent coverage, Vermont Public’s Carly Berlin inexplicably insisted upon contextualizing the movement as mostly conservative opposition to environmental protection and property-rights self-interest.
Some other media venues were more curious. Vermont Business Magazine provided some of the best State House coverage through its Boots on the Ground column by Maggie Lenz and Gwynn Zakov. They stand out as the only writers who accurately described the substance, scale, and impact of citizen-led engagement in the legislative process. Paul Hayes at the Caledonian Record and Paul Heintz for the Boston Globe actually took an interest in the humans behind the movement. Local radio tuned in. Kurt Wright and Anthony Neri’s Morning Drive on WVMT, Dave Zuckerman’s Vermont Viewpoint on WDEV, Guy Page’s Hot off the Press also on WDEV, and Bill Sayre’s Common Sense Radio on 106.3 The Notch all went deep on the topic, inviting diverse regular voices on air.
But Vermont Public, VT Digger, and Seven Days failed to meaningfully elucidate the issue for their audiences. When they covered it, they offered the barest, most reductive political explanations, selected a few lawmakers to provide the bulk of comment and contextualization, and called it a day.
To perhaps understand why the grassroots story keeps getting demoted by those outlets, look at the type of story that keeps getting promoted in its place.
Four days after adjournment and just six days after the partial repeal of Act 181 cleared the Senate, VT Digger published a lavish feature headlined “As Vermont is a key link in global species movement, state and partners build out conservation networks and wildlife passages.”
The framing is global and biological: Vermont as a corridor in a continental migration, “on par with the Amazon Basin” and the “Borneo Lowland Rain Forests.” The central authorities quoted four separate times are staff of The Nature Conservancy, identified as “an international conservation organization.” The logic is that climate change is pushing species north, so the state and its partners must acquire and connect land.
Here it helps to know what The Nature Conservancy actually is. It is the largest environmental organization in the Americas by assets and revenue. Its fiscal 2024 report records total support and revenue of $1.8 billion in a single year and net assets approaching $9 billion. It is the national pioneer of the conservation easement, the legal instrument by which a landowner permanently sells or donates development rights, often for a tax preference, to an organization like TNC or to the government. The group holds millions of acres of such easements across the country. It is one of the most capitalized non-profits in the United States, and it operates a sophisticated, tax-advantaged land-acquisition business.
What is striking is how the coverage frames it. When TNC’s state director explains that Vermont is “on the cusp of a large-scale transfer of lands to younger generations, so the state and local groups are seeking out willing landowners to place land along these corridors into conservation,” the article presents it as stewardship.
The demographic crisis that is hollowing out rural Vermont and the aging out of a generation of landowners are being positively framed as an acquisition opportunity by a billion-dollar institution. The generational land transfer that ought to be the central drama of rural Vermont’s survival is advanced as a pipeline for easements.
The feature dedicated just one sentence to a countervailing point of view offered by forester Bill Sargent as he indicated support of rural working landscapes.
That is the stark asymmetry at the heart of all of Vermont Public’s, VT Digger’s, Seven Days’, and, to a less sophisticated extent, WCAX’s and NBC5’s coverage of land-use issues and rural Vermont. Environmentalism that flows money and influence toward institutional and corporate stakeholders is taken at face value and represented uncritically, while regular people in rural Vermont who have a different vision for their communities are relentlessly framed as “conservative,” “textbook libertarian,” animated by property rights, agitators of a rural/urban divide, divisive, or simply ignored outright.
The land trusts that grow their holdings, the state agencies that have metastasized in scale and purview, the renewable-energy developers who benefit from laws tailored to their business models are treated as science, as the future, as Vermont’s environmental conscience. Rural Vermonters are definitively painted as obstacles. These outlets almost openly bemoan rural Vermonters as the cause of “retreat,” things being “undone,” or things not getting done.
The environmentalism of Vermont people who actually live on and work the land has been banished from the reporting. Not a single pixel has been expended by Vermont Public, VT Digger, or Seven Days on the alternative human-guided ecology that has been practiced by Vermonters for generations.
No Vermont Public or VT Digger reporter reached out to the agroecologists who have demonstrated that the healthiest northern New England ecology is one with humans actively involved in it. What ink has been spilled this year on the potential capacity of intensive rotational grazing to achieve greater net sequestration of carbon in the soil than an unmanaged forest? What about the evidence that well-managed woodlots are more diverse than neglected ones? That edge habitat and silvopasture are ecologically richer than closed-canopy forest? What of human needs? The starkest absence of all is food. Vermont is a state with explicit, legislated commitments to feed itself, and you would never know it from a season of State House coverage.
In 2009 the Legislature created the Farm to Plate program; in 2019 it reauthorized the effort by statute and directed the creation of the Vermont Agriculture and Food System Strategic Plan 2021–2030. Its targets include growing food-system economic output by $3 billion, adding 5,000 food-sector jobs, and raising local food to a quarter of all in-state food spending by 2030. The origin of that plan defined the obvious threats: the high cost of farmland, a “generational transfer of assets,” and “land use pressures.” Vermont’s own food strategy identifies the same farmland-affordability and land-access crisis that Act 181 would exacerbate and Act 181’s opponents have been articulating relentlessly through the winter and spring.
Yet Vermont’s dominant media doesn’t explore the friction point. It seems unwilling to investigate that the Legislature and the NGOs heretofore calling the shots have invested an inordinate amount of time and money asserting a land-use law whose road rule and Tier 3 overlay would have made it harder and costlier to start the kind of small farm and food enterprise the state has committed, by statute, to multiply.
A press attuned to working Vermont would have seen the collision of priorities immediately: a faction’s maximalist conservation ambitions versus the state’s own food ambitions, and the people who do the farming.
Vermont’s landscape is discussed constantly by the media. But it is mostly only framed as “sensitive ecosystems” or a recreational amenity. Food security, farm viability, the right of a new generation to get onto land and grow something on it—these topics are barely reported. The actual content of a working landscape and the crisis of rural community viability seldom appear.
If you assembled rural Vermonters’ actual priorities from their own words this spring you would arrive at affordability, an aging population, property taxes, the drain of young people, and the slow death of farm and forest enterprise. And you would have a near-complete account of the gravest facts about this state. And you would notice that the legislative session coverage treats almost none of them as critical problems in their own right.
Vermont is the third-oldest state in the country, with a median age over 43; by 2030, roughly one in three Vermonters will be over 60, and the state already records more deaths than births each year. It was, by early 2026, the fastest-shrinking state in the nation, having lost population two years running. Its working-age cohort is contracting. Its dairy farms have been disappearing for multiple generations and are not being backfilled with anything. Vermont’s modest hill farms have more often than not become expensive second homes; Vermont’s prime ag land is being turned over to residential development and now solar installations.
These are the conditions the Act 181 movement is describing. They are narrating their own emergency. At Vermont Public, VT Digger, and Seven Days, this entire universe of concern has been presented mainly as a property rights tantrum. And the only allowable proffered solution in the discourse is more housing in designated growth areas.
Vermont’s most important media outlets are themselves now a story. The story is one of bias in favor of credentialed institutional stakeholders. It is a story of a lack of imagination, as every single mention of this topic reduces a heterodox grassroots movement to “conservative.” It is a story of insufficient attention to Vermont beyond Chittenden County and the political sports of Montpelier. It is a story of gross malfeasance over a year and a half, as these outlets did no work whatsoever to forewarn Vermont about the impacts of Act 181. It is a story of laziness, as regular Vermont citizens in between their own jobs analyzed the GIS datasets, the mapping, and the rulemaking, and produced the investigative journalism that definitively proved disproportional impact on Vermont’s rural working class. But it is deeper than that. Most of Vermont’s press corps are no longer of the culture they cover, and that informs what they choose to report or not report on. They have set themselves apart.
John Berger’s Pig Earth (1979) is a wonderfully instructive book for the dynamic at play and the behavior of these Vermont outlets (and most certainly the NGOs driving policy, and most definitely the portions of the Legislature doing those NGOs’ bidding).
Berger had moved to a small farming village in the Haute-Savoie of France and lived amongst the people who worked and sustained that village for generations. His book captured the profound changes and losses experienced as traditional life gives way to modern forces.
The core of Berger’s book runs like this. For most of history the great majority of human beings have worked the land, and yet they are almost never the authors of the stories written about them. They appear in the record as a backdrop, rarely as individuals with a culture of their own. Berger’s whole project in the village was to insist that this culture exists, that it is coherent and intelligent, and that, like rural communities everywhere, it has been systematically ignored and marginalized by modern institutions.
Berger argued that rural people have always been oriented toward continuity. This includes the perpetuation of the farm, family succession, community bonds, and the rural practices that let life in a place persist across time. Dominant institutional culture, by contrast, is a “culture of progress,” oriented toward replacing that way of life with something it perceives as more important. Modern institutions cannot see rural people as contemporary. They can only see them, if they see them at all, as a remnant standing in the way of what should be next.
In short, rural people don’t really need to be consulted because they aren’t part of the future being planned. Berger saw that this assumption dehumanizes: it licenses planners and reformers to act on the rural population rather than with it, because you don’t provide standing to people you’ve already mentally consigned to the past.
Berger also explored the economic mechanism beneath the cultural attitude. He noted that rural people have always been subject to a class that does not work the land, be they the gentry, the state, merchants, or now the institutions of global capital and self-interested NGOs. The struggling farmer does the work of feeding the society that ignores him or her. The modern version of this is the steady absorption of rural land into a planning logic that originates elsewhere, drawn up by people who have never set foot on the ground in question.
Vermont’s rural dispossession is invariably presented as conservation and environmental protection these days, but it is more honestly the same old corporate and institutional financial schemes. In Vermont, carbon markets, renewable energy development, and NGO management of easements are set to displace traditional economies and of course they favor powerful elite interests. Vermont is being subjected to the transfer of control from those who live on the land to those who administer it from a distance for their benefit. Vermont Public, VT Digger, and Seven Days cheer it on, wittingly or unwittingly.
What rural Vermonters asked for this year is not complicated, but seems to be beyond the ability of Vermont’s press to understand. Vermont’s rural grassroots movement is not being conservative or liberal in its orientation, even in the face of initial dismissal, hearty resistance, and ample condescension heaped upon them by a large segment of Democrat lawmakers this past session.
Rural Vermonters are asking for landscapes that include the people who work them. They are asking for barriers to viable rural lifeways to be lifted. They are asking for greater access to farming and homesteading for everyone who would take it up, which is precisely what the state’s own food plan says it wants. They are asking that Vermont’s crises of affordability, livability, and opportunity be central to the work of its institutions. Above all, they are asking for something Vermont’s dominant media coverage has blatantly withheld: to be treated as full participants in their own democracy, with stories worth telling, and arguments worth engaging.
Rural Vermonters defeated the road rule and Tier 3. But it is time for those of us who live with the consequences of aloof institutions to pivot to something larger and more consequential yet. The summer and fall must belong to the Vermonters who continue to be treated as though they do not exist on the land they own, rely upon, and love.
Rural Vermont’s aspirations deserve to be at the center of public conversations and the litmus test for electoral candidates. A press that spent the session misrepresenting those aspirations or ignoring them has shown rural Vermont exactly where we stand in their imaginations. The answer this year, and in the years to come, is to expand the imaginations of Vermont Public, VT Digger, and Seven Days, or to do the job they won’t do instead.