by Dave Soulia, for FYIVT.com

Amber is striking because it preserves a moment forever—a leaf, a wing, a fragment of life suspended in golden resin. It allows us to look backward through time, capturing a world exactly as it once was. But what makes amber so mesmerizing is also what makes it dead. The moment inside can never change again.

Vermont today shares that same uneasy beauty: a state so determined to preserve its ideal image that it risks sealing away its living future.

A State Stuck Between Memory and Motion

From Act 250 to Vermont’s stormwater permitting requirements and the Three-Acre Rule, from the Global Warming Solutions Act to an ever-expanding web of land-use regulations, Vermont’s laws began with understandable intentions. They were meant to protect the landscape from reckless development while preserving the rural character that makes the Green Mountain State unique.

Half a century later, however, many of those same laws function less like safeguards and more like a straitjacket.

Each new regulation adds another layer of amber. Zoning boards, environmental commissions, permitting reviews, and overlapping state agencies have transformed what should often be a straightforward process—building homes, opening businesses, or expanding communities—into prolonged bureaucratic rituals. The consequences are increasingly visible: a worsening housing shortage, a shrinking workforce, rising construction costs, and a cost of living that continues to outpace reality.

The question is no longer whether Vermont should protect itself. The question is whether, in trying to preserve everything, it has begun preserving too much.

The Myth of “Natural” Control

What makes this moment remarkable is the contradiction at its heart.

Vermont’s political culture celebrates the “organic,” the “sustainable,” and the “natural.” Yet the regulatory system built in those ideals has become profoundly unnatural.

Growth is not disorder. It is the defining characteristic of every living system.

Forests don’t ask permission before expanding into open fields. Rivers don’t submit engineering studies before carving new channels. Species adapt. Ecosystems change. Communities do the same. Families move where opportunity exists. Businesses expand where demand grows. Towns prosper, decline, reinvent themselves, and sometimes surprise everyone.

To stop those natural processes requires continual intervention. Rules must be written. Boundaries enforced. Exceptions reviewed. Permits granted or denied. In other words, preventing change often demands far more centralized control than allowing it.

The language of “planned communities,” “smart growth,” and concentrated development is presented as environmentally responsible progress. In practice, it assumes a relatively small circle of policymakers, consultants, and advocacy organizations can better determine Vermont’s future than the thousands of Vermonters whose individual decisions would otherwise shape it.

Nature, left to itself, doesn’t freeze.

It adapts.

The Cost of Preservationism

The housing crisis is perhaps the clearest consequence.

Vermont needs thousands of additional homes simply to stabilize prices, yet barriers to construction remain firmly in place. Lengthy permitting, environmental reviews, zoning restrictions, and overlapping regulations delay or prevent projects altogether. Rather than removing the obstacles creating scarcity, the state’s response has too often been to subsidize its symptoms with additional grants, studies, commissions, and programs.

The irony runs even deeper.

Black-glass solar arrays now blanket former hayfields once celebrated as pristine landscapes, while a young family trying to build a modest duplex or starter home can spend years navigating regulatory hurdles. Industrial-scale projects often receive expedited treatment in pursuit of climate goals, while individual initiative suffocates beneath environmental bureaucracy.

That isn’t preservation.

It’s embalming.

The Loss of the Living Vermont

The Vermont we inherited wasn’t designed from a conference room or a statewide planning map.

Its villages, farms, crossroads, and business centers emerged over generations as people adapted to geography, opportunity, markets, and necessity. Some communities flourished because industries grew. Others faded as transportation changed. Still others reinvented themselves around tourism, manufacturing, agriculture, or education.

That continual evolution wasn’t a flaw in Vermont’s history.

It was Vermont’s history.

Today, that natural feedback loop is increasingly broken.

The cost of building pushes young families elsewhere. Housing shortages drive prices higher. Population stagnation weakens the workforce and erodes the tax base. Employers struggle to fill jobs. Schools lose enrollment. Small businesses find fewer customers. Yet each new problem is too often met with another layer of regulation intended to correct the unintended consequences of the last.

Layer by layer, the amber thickens.

If that trajectory continues, Vermont risks becoming exactly what amber always preserves: the perfect image of life, long after the life itself has disappeared.

Melting the Amber

Breaking free doesn’t require embracing chaos or unchecked development. It requires restoring trust—in local communities, individual initiative, and the natural ability of living places to evolve over time.

Preservation and growth are not enemies. In nature, they depend upon one another. A healthy forest survives because it continually renews itself. A healthy community does the same.

The choice has never been between wilderness and sprawl.

It is between a Vermont that breathes, adapts, and occasionally makes mistakes—or one that slowly encases itself beneath layer after layer of regulation until it becomes a beautiful artifact, admired for what it once was but no longer capable of becoming what it might yet be.