Category: environment
CORNWALL — To fully appreciate the local, sometimes you have to go global. That’s what Cornwall resident Jon Isham found when he traveled to Copenhagen, Denmark, in December for the United Nations Climate Conference.
Isham, who teaches economics at Middlebury College, was in Denmark for the second of the conference’s two weeks. Running from Dec. 7-18, the conference pulled together world leaders, scholars and civilian climate activists alike.
MIDDLEBURY — Again and again on Tuesday, participants at an Addison County “farm to plate” summit pointed to the biggest roadblock impinging the expansion of a local foods movement in Vermont: the infrastructure for aggregating, processing and distributing locally grown food is all but nonexistent.
MIDDLEBURY — On Monday night, 15 Middlebury College students and community members huddled in a windswept circle in front of the college library. The candles they held flickered and went out almost as soon as they lit them, but soon a handful of battery-operated candles surfaced. These stayed lit against the biting wind.
RIPTON — Ensconced in a former farmhouse tucked away amid the tree-filled slopes of Ripton, one could already argue that attending classes at the North Branch School is akin to going back to nature.
But the more than two-dozen students and faculty at North Branch took that concept a step further last week, as part of their contribution to the more than 5,200 worldwide global warming action events that occurred on Oct. 24 through the efforts of 350.org.
ADDISON COUNTY — Every couple of minutes last Saturday afternoon, a crowd formed on the footbridge below the Otter Creek falls in Middlebury. The gathered people watched the groups of whitewater kayakers shooting the 15-foot drop over the falls and riding the current at the bottom. Then the crowd would disperse as the kayakers climbed out of the water, portaged back above the falls as another crowd gathered to watch them drop the falls again.
BRISTOL — Conservationists in Bristol are looking to protect a 194-acre parcel of land in the northwest corner of town, which they say provides a large chunk of habitat for the Indiana bat, Vermont’s only federally endangered mammal.
The parcel would also extend the scope of the Waterworks, a 664-acre park conserved in the 1990s by the Watershed Center, a Bristol non-profit that converted the land from the one-time Vergennes City reservoir into a popular recreational and wildlife refuge on Plank Street.
ADDISON — The numbers of snow geese making annual stops at Addison’s Dead Creek Wildlife Management Area have dropped dramatically in the past decade, according to a Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department official who staffs the site.
This fall, the count of snow geese at the Route 17 location peaked at about 2,500, said department wildlife biologist David Sausville. That’s down from roughly 7,500 in 2006 and 2007 and from an estimated 20,000 in the year 2000.
Instead, Sausville said, more snow geese are congregating in corn stands in southern Canada and northern Vermont and New York.
We shouldn’t even have to tell you where you’re having lunch this Saturday, Oct. 24, or what you’re bringing. You should already know. I’m bringing a pot of hot pumpkin soup and maybe my apple crisp, the kind with the crunchy topping flavored with maple syrup. Can’t beat it when it’s hot. Where are we going? To the gigantic Middlebury potluck lunch, and while the food will be delicious, the cause is the driving force.
