REIMAGINING NORTHERN NEW ENGLAND

The last wave of social experimentation to sweep across New England came in the closing years of the Sixties and ran its course a decade later. Then, a wave of young people swept out of the cities and suburbs during the so-called “Back to the Land Movement”, triggered by writings by such counterculture stalwarts as Scott and Helen Nearing, and settled by the thousands in rural townships in Western Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine.

Over the last thirty to forty years, a wave in reverse has gained strength as young people have left northern New England, stalling and even reversing population growth in the northern tier of states. As traditional industries, such as papermaking, logging and agriculture, experienced free-fall decline, and high-tech industries coalesced around urban hubs, career opportunities dissolved. The youth picked up stakes and left for greener pastures.

But as the Millennials generation now understands, those pastures are no longer fertile elsewhere. Entry and mid-level wages are low and stagnant, raises are scant and have for been nearly a generation. Housing is increasingly unaffordable in the New England, when one can find an abode to buy or rent. Social safety nets are in tatters and debt loads for college and health care suppress all aspects of daily life. While Republican presidential candidates in 2016 bellow, “We’re going to make the nation great again,” middle class angst over declining fortunes won’t be remedied from the Oval Office or the corporate boardroom. And they won’t be solved by a political revolution, such as espoused by Bernie Sanders, unless citizens mobilize en masse and remain possessed by passion for galvanic change long after the swearing in on the steps of the Capitol.

Scanning this uneven playing field, there is a sense that a vacuum is waiting to be filled in northern and western New England, a void that stretches all across the nation, in reality, particularly across the states hugging the Canadian border.

There are a few points of light in that void that mark a pathway forward toward a renaissance in social and economic endeavor in the mountain folds and along the intervales of the rivers of northern New England. A few examples may help illuminate these first footsteps along the way in the forest fastness.

In Vermont, for instance, there are more micro-breweries per capita turning out beer than anywhere else in the nation. A generation ago, there were virtually none. Brewing beer, making hard cider, and aging heady spirits were once traditional industries in the state. Those industries dwindled away everywhere over the last two centuries. But lately the brewmaster’s craft has roared back to life. People have revived that moribund industry and are making real money doing something they love. They are meeting the demands of consumers who are sick to death of mass-market mega-production products, you know, the Budweisers and Coors of the world.

Once given up for dead except in the diary dells of the northern Champlain Valley and along the Connecticut River, agricultural activity today is fast evolving into a green revolution, particularly on small organic farms and in greenhouse complexes sprouting like weeds. State governments are rewriting laws, eager to encourage the expansion of local, small-scale agricultural endeavor. Farmers markets are proliferating as nowhere else in the nation. Savvy consumers in the Northeast are driving the market. Shoppers want unadulterated, unsprayed organic foods. A new generation of farmers, many tilling soil for the first time in their lives, has climbed aboard tractors and is pouring compost into tens of thousands of greenhouse pots. They are lazer focused on supplying the increasingly rabid market for better, fresher local foodstuffs.

The bio-mass energy sector is also a young and increasingly vital player on the scene in the Great Northern Forest of the Northeast. From northern New York to northern Maine, wood pellet plants have been built and are operating, turning out fuel for pellet stoves that have become as common as the ubiquitous woodstove in northern New England homes. While the region will always be at the end of the pipeline for petroleum products and natural gas, it is rich in biomass not only for heating but for generating electricity. Even the traditional firewood industry is getting a makeover, as small-operation entrepreneurs employ gang-saws, automated splitters, and waste wood kilns to dry wood to meet demand for seasoned wood.

The tight housing market has given rise to a host of new house kit industries in each of the states, small built-it-yourself, low-cost abodes offered by such small firms as First Day Cottage in New Hampshire, Shelter Kit in Maine, and Jamaica Cottage in Vermont, to name a few.

These four examples do not an economy make, but they are bellwethers, forerunners in the rethinking of rural enterprise and, therefore, rural living.

By the end of decade of the 1990s, trickle-down economics and disastrous international trade agreements had begun to grind down the economies of the northern New England states. Go-go New Hampshire’s growth stalled in the golden triangle south and east of Manchester. Maine’s economy began a worrisome decline that continues to this day. Vermont agricultural, health food product, and tourist based economy held its own, but incomes were dead flat and had been for several decades.

Then the World Trade Center towers in New York dropped from the sky after having been rammed by jetliners piloted by jihadists.

Everywhere across the country, the events of that day triggered a soul searching among the populace. Many concluded that they were highly vulnerable to terrible events, manmade or natural. Citizens of a highly technological society were at risk, surely. No one grew and stored one’s own food to eat. No one could ensure a fuel supply for heating and transportation. Could electrical grid towers or control systems be brought down by a terrorist attack, domestic or foreign?

Maybe, with the new century underway, it was time to rethink everything: the role of government, the lack of agriculture in the region, the fragility of the energy supply, the outflow of jobs to foreign capitals, the health and sustainability of the soil, the forests, fresh water, even the oceans lapping at the coastlines.

The very local resources that made New England an economic and educational powerhouse in the earliest years of the republic were reevaluated and found to be great and critical assets going forward into an uncertain future. Northern New England still had its vast forests intact; in fact, nearly 90 percent of the landmass was covered in trees. And those forests harbored copious clean, fresh water and healthy wildlife populations. The ocean in the Gulf of Maine was still relatively pristine and productive. Although not blessed with twenty feet of Midwest topsoil, the region still boasted substantial acreage productive acreage in northwestern Vermont and northern Maine and river bottom land along many hundreds of miles of river course.

And northern New England had critical human assets, too. Unlike other regions in the nation, this corner of the world was brimming with citizens who had college degrees or at least some college credits. Being ever so close to the greatest concentration of institutes of higher learning in the world sequestered around Boston and harboring no small number of colleges of its own, the three northern states had a good deal more than their share of bright and learned souls within their ranks. This heady bunch didn’t need, as Bob Dylan once penned, “a weatherman to see which way the wind blows.” If they were going to make it in this world, they were going to take to the woods, tap the local resources of northern New England, spin off ideas fresh from their college and garage labs, and make a go of it themselves. No, not like the parent-supported hippy children of the Sixties, but as pragmatists who decided they could fashion a better life by getting their hands dirty building their own homes and their own businesses from scratch.

Today, the birth and adolescence of this reassessment is in evidence around us. More farms have been started since Year 2000 than at any time in the last 100 years. The foods are showing up in supermarkets and the many farmers markets. Walmart, Market Basket, Shaw’s and Hannaford’s want locally grown foods.

The state of Vermont is ranked #1 in craft breweries per capita, as noted earlier. Maine is #4. New Hampshire #11. Craft distilleries of hard liquor are not far behind. This industry is now the poster child for the resurrection of traditional rural livelihoods.

Techies aren’t far behind. Hot beds of technological and medical innovation and research ring the towns of Hanover, Middlebury and Burlington. Venture capital firms orbit these communities, as well. Work is underway in startups whose products are as diverse as protein synthesis, carbon-footprint tracking software, designer yeast, and alternative energy turbines.

While the majority of Millennials have drifted into America’s urban strongholds, some have fled to our northern backwaters to stake their claim. These outliers do not wish to commute everyday for 20, 30, 40 or more miles on ever crowded highways. They don’t want to be sandwiched into tiny apartments, often sharing the space with others because the rents are too difficult to manage alone. They want to make an impact here, in the outwash valleys of the ancient northern Appalachian mountains.

They are doing just that in northern New England. Sitting by a pellet stove at night inside a kit home they just completed, sipping small-batch craft whiskey from the next town over, and eating salads of baby greens grown in new greenhouse bank two doors down, the one heated with waste tree bark, these young pioneers are making their own opportunities. They want change for the better and are changing everything.