'Use it up, wear it out, make do or do without' is the new survival code

Letter from Vermont: This snowy white and very pleasant land has seen far too much green this winter.

Letter from Vermont:This snowy white and very pleasant land has seen far too much green this winter.

Vermonters, aghast at the effects of a warmed up climate on the state's tourism, maple sugar and snowmobile industries, have watched snow and ice storms rampage across Texas and Oklahoma while their own mountains, valleys and backyards continued mellow and autumnal until mid-January.

All very unseasonal, the famously low-key Vermonters agreed and then got on with life, as Vermonters famously do.

Now they're calling it Al Gore weather and it's a burning topic. Even now that the snow has arrived, in flurries and great showers, no one is complacent and no one is satisfied.

READ MORE

It's all too little and too late.

The recovery of life and the economy needs the impossible - a return to the way things were when winter, with glorious, shining predictability, arrived in November to blanket, protect and finance the state's snow-ploughers, ski-resorts and innkeepers until, often, the end of April.

Everyone accepts that El Niño, currently warming up the Pacific Ocean, is partly to blame. So are cyclical changes in the environment.

But in a rural and fiercely independent state where tradition, community and the environment are what life is about the feeling pervades that things have changed utterly, that the long-hovering threat of climate change has, at last and much too soon, taken Vermont in its terminally warming grasp.

And so, in lieu of the impossible and in the face of dire warnings from the state's scientists, environmentalists and politicians, Vermonters are facing the reality of changing the way they live. The word is that unless everyone gets behind a shift from a fossil fuelled economy, Vermont's climate in less than 10 years will be the same as Connecticut's and, in no time at all after that, it will have the climate of the Virginias.

It's enough to have proud Vermonters shivering in their work boots.

The warnings have been around for a while but, like the rest of the US, the Green Mountain State has been slow to take serious heed. But this year's damage to the $550 million snowmobile industry,is hard to ignore. A month after the 4,600-mile snowmobile system should have been up and running for the season only one, 30-mile stretch of trail was open.

Only 35 per cent of the terrain used by the ski resorts was in use by New Year's day.

Loggers and log yard operators, fishing derby and sleigh rally organisers have all been thrown out of seasonal kilter.

The warmer weather has caused sap to run from Maple trees, something not usually seen until March, and has brought sad confusion to hibernating black bears.

So it is that when the Brattleboro Reformersays that a return to "the values that are intrinsic to Vermont - the use it up, wear it out, make do or do without ethic and the inventiveness and resourcefulness that this ethic fostered - are what will save this state and ultimately the nation".

The Reformer's words are echoed by those of governor James Douglas, who has called for the joining of "the best of our past with a resurgence of Vermont's well-known resourcefulness and inventiveness".

Both are simply reflecting a stoic preparedness for change in the hearts of those they serve. Vermont is, after all, the liberal outpost whose 620,000 population last November elected Bernie Sanders as the first ever socialist member of the US Senate.

Then there's Peter Traverse, a farmer whose family roots go back to the early settlers and who has more than his share of the Vermonters' heady mix of passion and common sense.

He claims lineage to Ethan Allen, creator of an independent Vermont in the 1700s, and to a great-great-grandfather from Cork.

"We'll survive this winter," he assures. "Vermont has a big history of sticking it out - in a way that people in Ireland can appreciate!"

He agrees that the climate is changing, but fiercely contends that, in Vermont and globally, "we've become disconnected from the evolution going on in our natural environment. There's a difference between climate change and evolutionary development, and I don't believe we know the difference.

"We've been given the faculties of observation and should use them. The world's incredibly alive and dynamic and constantly moving and we don't recognise this for what it is; we should be listening and looking, learning in the way farmers in particular have learned and passed on knowledge for generations and generations."

Traverse is convinced that "our moral conviction these days is to our lifestyle and not to our neighbours" but has all the faith in the world in Vermonters: "We're hardy stock, a combination of unicorn and donkey with an almost mystical will to survive and a streak of pure ass stubbornness!"

Or, as another dyed-in-the-wool Vermonter put it, modestly and without prejudice: "this state comes as close to sanity as anywhere does in this country".

It's hard, without prejudice, to disagree.