The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman

As the world contends with increasingly destructive and costly climate-fueled disasters, the Trump administration has announced that it is eliminating the government’s ability to fight climate change.

Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency is erasing the scientific finding, known as the “endangerment clause,” that permits it to take action to protect public health and the environment.

“Led by a president who refers to climate change as a ‘hoax,’ the administration is essentially saying that the vast majority of scientists around the world are wrong and that a hotter planet is not the menace that decades of research shows it to be,” reported the New York Times.

I turned to Bill McKibben to glean the significance and implications of this latest development. McKibben is arguably the world’s foremost reporter and organizer on the climate crisis. His 1989 book The End of Nature was the first book for a general audience about climate change, and he has gone on to author over 20 other books.

He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker, the New York Times, and to his Substack, The Crucial Years. He is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College. McKibben is also the founder of Third Act, which organizes people over the age of 60 for progressive change.

When cross country skier Ben Ogden won a silver medal in the classic sprint at the 2026 Winter Olympics in Italy, he broke a 50-year medal drought for American men. The last American man to medal in cross country skiing was Bill Koch, Ogden’s Vermont neighbor and skiing mentor. Ogden, who began skiing in Koch’s backyard as a kid, followed those ski trails right into the Olympics. He celebrated by doing a backflip off the podium. 

Ten days later, Ogden raced to a second silver medal in the men’s team relay with teammate Gus Schumacher. Ben Ogden is now the most decorated men’s cross-country skier in U.S. Olympic history. 

Ogden grew up in Landgrove, Vermont, and attended the University of Vermont, where he was a three-time NCAA cross country ski champion. This was Ogden’s second Winter Olympics.

Less than a week after standing on an Olympic podium, Ogden is back racing on the World Cup circuit in Europe. That’s where I caught up with him. 

When Rep. Becca Balint, D-Vt., traveled to Minneapolis on a Congressional oversight mission several weeks ago, she saw a city under siege. Some 3,000 masked federal agents dispatched by President Donald Trump were roaming the city, snatching people from their homes and streets, often without warrants or explanation. 

Balint fears Vermont could be next. 

“This is not a law enforcement effort, this is about power and control and submission,” Balint said of what she observed in Minneapolis. She said that the killing of American citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis “just absolutely shook me to my core, not just because of the violence and the loss of life, but also immediately the lying about these two people” by the Trump Administration. 

“This is about the president punishing states and municipalities that he does not feel like give him enough fealty,” Balint said. “Any state that did not vote for Donald Trump in the 2020 election, they're in the crosshairs. And we must assume that at some point this President will try to make an example of us, and we can't be caught flat footed.”

Last week, Balint said she and Senators Peter Welch, D-Vt., and Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., met with Gov. Phil Scott to prepare for that potential day.

Though in another sense, that day has already arrived. Just this week, FEMA denied disaster aid to Vermont for 2025 flooding in the Northeast Kingdom. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem “also oversees FEMA," Balint said. "And the President is using FEMA right now to pick winners and losers. And the winners are Republican states, and the losers are so-called democratic states,"

Young Bernie Sanders arrived in Vermont in 1964 as part of a counter-cultural wave. The tall Jewish kid with the thick Brooklyn accent who spoke of socialism and revolution fit right in with the communards and hippies, though he was neither. Sanders was then, as now, his own man, raging against the establishment while simultaneously seeking to lead it, albeit in a very different direction.

As author Dan Chaisson writes, the story of Bernie Sanders is also the story of Vermont. “To see how Vermont changed, simply look at how Bernie’s message, reiterated for fifty years, migrated from the fringe to the heart of Vermont’s political discourse.”

In the early days, Burlingtonians knew Bernie “as a perennial political loser” who typically garnered a slim percentage of the electorate in in the 1970s, recounted Chiasson. “But also he was just an indefatigable kind of force.”

Dan Chaisson is a Burlington native and the author of five books of poetry. He is a professor of English and chair of the English department at Wellesley College. A longtime contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, his new book is Bernie for Burlington: The Rise of the People’s Politician. Chiasson weaves together his own story of growing up in hardscrabble Burlington in the 1970s with Sanders' own, whom he observed throughout his life go from gadfly to mayor, to the most influential progressive political figure in the country.

Chaisson traces Sanders’ politics to his experience growing up poor in Brooklyn “in an economy that was designed to kill" him and his family. "His mother died in her 40s of a congenital heart condition.”

Sanders attended the University of Chicago where he participated in civil rights protests. “He thought that things like racial and other kinds of traumas in our country stemmed directly from economics,” said Chiasson. “Moving to Vermont was a way of thinking, could we start society over?”

What explains Bernie’s appeal to conservatives in areas like the Northeast Kingdom? Chaisson said that Sanders admired and channeled George Aiken, the Republican Vermont governor and senator who famously opposed the Vietnam War, declaring that the U.S. should “say we won and get out.” Aiken “had a sort of similar kind of flintiness to him, a similar kind of orneriness or cantankerousness,” Chaisson said.

Sanders, a lifelong independent, has long reserved some of his harshest criticism for Democrats. “He feels that the Democrats are the party of the educated elite and he feels much more comfortable among working people.” When he disagrees with someone, Sanders “has a talent for steering the conversation away from those differences and towards places of common interest and common ground.”

Asked what he thought the legacy of Sanders would be, Chaisson said, “Just the tenacity, the temerity, the moral vision that Sanders laid out.” He quoted former Burlington Mayor Peter Clavelle, who described Sanders as “a moral visionary.”

“Somebody with Bernie's fight in him and with his sense that there are right and wrong sides of the question morally when we engage with politics, that makes me feel pretty hopeful.”

The Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in Minnesota has sparked furious backlash. Protests have been held around the country following the killing by federal agents of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Vermont Gov. Phil Scott characterized the immigration raids as “a deliberate federal intimidation and incitement of American citizens that’s resulting in the murder of Americans.”

Last week, a group of over a dozen Vermont faith leaders responded to a national call for clergy to come to Minneapolis to bear witness and support besieged local religious leaders. On this Vermont Conversation, I spoke with two Vermont clergy who have just returned from a tumultuous and emotional trip to Minneapolis. Rabbi David Fainsilber is the rabbi of the Jewish Community of Greater Stowe, and Rev. Dr. Becca Girrell is the pastor of United Community Church of Morrisville.

“Minneapolis is serving as a testing ground. That is true both for the operations of ICE and Border Patrol and other federal enforcement (using) pretty brutal tactics, but it's also true of the community response and resilience,” said Rev. Girrell. “What moved me and stays with me the most is the way in which the people of Minneapolis are drawing together peacefully and legally and in strong solidarity and support."

Rev. Girrell said that the brutal tactics of federal agents are “meant as a warning to people like me, to people of good faith or no faith all around the country, that we should not stand up for our neighbors, and we should not protect them with ourselves and our very lives if necessary. And what I saw was the people of Minneapolis will not comply with that order."

Asked whether he saw parallels between the actions of federal agents in the U.S. and how immigrants were rounded up in Nazi Germany, Rabbi Fainsilber said the link wasn't necessary. "You don't need to look far to see slavery, to see genocide. Let's look in our own backyard here and our history to make the point that today is not okay. What is happening feels like a direct line from American history to today.”

Fainsilber added that it is “time for people to raise their voices, to not sit on the sidelines, … to make sure that there's legal accountability when officers kill civilians, that there's no additional federal funding for ICE right now, for corporations to become Fourth Amendment businesses so that they're not aiding and abetting ICE activity.”

Rev. Girrell returned from Minnesota with a warning. “The violence we see in Minneapolis may come here to Vermont. But the strength of community resilience is already here, and we continue to build that, and we continue to know our neighbors well, so that if there is a crisis, we can respond immediately, and we can respond with strength and love for our neighbors.”

Jill Krowinski, D-Burlington, was elected Speaker of the House in 2021. It was the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, and state coffers were unexpectedly flush with federal relief money. But just as that federal pot of dollars has since dried up, property taxes have risen and voters took out their frustration at the ballot box. In 2024, Vermont Democrats lost the most Democratic seats in the country, and with them their veto-proof supermajority in the Legislature.

This month, as Gov. Phil Scott declared his roadmap for the Legislative session, Krowinski’s skills as a diplomat are being tested as never before. Scott unveiled a $9.4 billion state budget this week, and declared that he would essentially hold that budget hostage — that is, unless the Legislature comes up with a plan to consolidate Vermont’s 119 school districts into a few larger districts.

Krowinski bristled at the governor’s approach. “Our goal here is to ensure that our kids are getting the best education at a price that Vermonters can afford. I will say that threatening a budget veto is really not helpful at this time, we need to be working together to find solutions and not making threats.” 

The governor also plans to end Vermont's emergency motel voucher program to combat homelessness, and re-invest in affordable housing development and social services. Krowinski said the move falls short of the current, critical need.

“We don't have the shelter capacity right now to help the thousands of Vermonters that are unhoused, and we have 1,000 kids right now that are unhoused, and that really is going to keep me up at night thinking about this weekend” when sub-zero temperatures are forecasted. She noted that money allocated to nonprofit housing organizations had not been distributed by the Scott administration, and said he House will be investigating the matter to “ensure that we're not leaving money on the table.”

The governor must now win over Krowinski and her legislative colleagues as he attempts to pass his agenda.

"We're not coming in just starting from fresh," Krowinski said. "The progress that we've made on issues like child care that's made a huge difference in affordability for Vermont families, the tax credits that we've put out there to help to help older Vermonters and to help families with kids, looking at our long term investments in housing, how we've been able to bend the cost curve some on health care.”

Krowinski has also seen the impacts of the Trump administration's immigration crackdown across the country. “I am so completely outraged, disgusted, frustrated with what's happening across our country. I actually witnessed an ICE arrest while I was in Washington, DC, and the illegal excessive force used was shocking.” Krowinski said that Vermont is prepared in some ways and unprepared in others.

The turmoil is also personal. Last June, the 45-year old Burlington Democrat was deeply shaken by the politically-motivated assassinations of her friend and colleague, former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband.

“It is important for Vermonters to know that these threats do happen in Vermont,” said Krowinski, who in 2022 was stalked by a man with a gun in his car at the State House. “I'm just angry about it,” she said of the threats. “I'm not changing anything. … I'm not going to let them control my life or change it in ways that I don't want it to be changed. It took me some time to come to this place, but I'm fired up now, and it's important for me to offer this type of support to other members or elected officials who have gone through it.”

“Who can draw when the world is burning?” asks celebrated Vermont cartoonist Alison Bechdel in her new graphic novel, Spent.

This tension between the political and personal has been a deep well for Bechdel in her art. Bechdel has been cartoonist laureate of Vermont, as well as a recipient of a MacArthur "genius award" and a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship.

She garnered a cult following with her early comic strip, “Dykes to Watch Out For.” Her best-selling graphic memoir, Fun Home, was named Best Book of 2006 by Time. It was adapted into a musical that won five 2015 Tony Awards, including Best Musical. Fun Home tells the story of growing up in a family that ran a funeral home, and how, after Bechdel came out as a lesbian, her closeted gay father died in a presumed suicide.

The cartoonist is also known for the Bechdel Test, which rates movies on whether they include at least one scene in which two women talk to each other about something other than men.

Bechdel is now a professor in the practice at Yale University. She divides her time between teaching for a semester at Yale and living and drawing at her home in West Bolton, Vermont. Bechdel’s wife Holly has been the colorist for her last two books. 

This week, she had an op-ed cartoon featured in the New York Times about how to stand up to tyranny.

She spoke to me from her home in Vermont.

President Donald Trump marked the new year by launching a military assault on Venezuela and abducting President Nicolas Maduro. Some 75 people in Venezuela were killed in the Saturday attack and 7 U.S service members were injured, according to the Washington Post. Many Democrats and some Republicans have denounced the act as unconstitutional, while Trump has followed up by threatening more military action against Cuba, Mexico, Columbia and Greenland. 

This week also marks the fifth anniversary of the January 6th insurrection on the U.S. Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters who were attempting to overturn Trump’s loss in the 2020 presidential election. 

I spoke with Vermont Sen. Peter Welch about these escalating domestic and international crises under the Trump administration just before he returned to Washington. 

The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

David Goodman  

Let's begin by getting your thoughts on the US actions against Venezuela this weekend.

Peter Welch  

It's reckless and it's wrong. I mean, let's acknowledge the military did a very professional job, but the decision the President made to depose the leader of another country, authoritarian that he was, and then to say that this is about us running Venezuela, and then to say that he wants our big oil companies like Exxon to take over Venezuelan oil brings us back to gunboat diplomacy. It's very, very dangerous. I’m adamantly opposed to what the President did.

David Goodman  

What did you as a United States senator know about this operation in advance?

Peter Welch  

Absolutely nothing. I'm a United States senator and the United States Senate is the institution that has the authority to authorize a military action. This was an act of war. We were never consulted. We were never involved. So we knew no more than any other citizen who woke up that morning. And what you're seeing is that the President is completely acting beyond the authority of an executive. In my view, Congress has to stand up and resist that. But we don't have Republican support, and we need that. I am a co sponsor of a resolution condemning this and I'm going to be urging my Republican colleagues that we not relinquish our authority and have a president who is exceeding the powers that the Constitution gives him.

David Goodman  

How is this supposed to work? For example, what happened when President George W. Bush invaded Iraq in 2003?

Peter Welch  

The President comes to Congress and asks for an authorization to use force, and in the case of President Bush, he did that before he went to Iraq. I was opposed to that and many members of Congress were, but a majority supported him. But the President did come to Congress. There's a reason for that. When we're going to put our men and women in harm's way, that's a major decision. Deciding to use military force is an easy decision for a president like Trump, but the consequences of it are paid for by our country and by men and women who are willing to serve at the call of the Commander in Chief. That decision should be deliberated. There should be a discussion, there should be a debate. There should be accountability by members of Congress that they said yes or they said no to this request by the President. What there shouldn't ever be is the arbitrary capacity of an individual who happens to be president to plunge us into a war.

David Goodman  

President Trump said in his address to nation on Saturday that this is all going to be free. It's going to be paid for by Venezuela. Do you believe that?

Peter Welch  

No, absolutely. He said that about the (border) wall too. Let's just discuss this. There is a decision that only the President made. Number one, the decision was to take out Maduro. Number two, everybody in Maduro's government is still in power. Number three, the President says we're going to run the country. How are we going to do that? Number four, he says our oil companies like Exxon are going to take over the Venezuelan oil fields. None of those things can happen and none of them should happen. So the President is saying, “they're going to pay for it.” This same president won't lift a finger to extend the health care tax credits that have already expired and where we're going to have about 25,000 Vermonters without health care as a result of that. No, this is bogus.

David Goodman  

Right now there are Vermonters in the Caribbean, the Vermont Air National Guard. What do we know about the role that they are playing in this operation?

Peter Welch  

First of all, we are all so impressed and appreciative of our Guard. They got 11 days notice right around the Christmas holidays and had to pick up and leave their families behind. There was no notice for them. What we do know is that none of them have been injured, and I am so pleased that that is the news that we have, and we are awaiting a report about what role they did play. But of course, we have the Air National Guard and they have air assets, and obviously those were a big part of this operation, so we'll find out. But I don't know exactly what they were requested to do.

David Goodman  

The President has described the strategic principle here as the “Donroe Doctrine,” his update of the 200 year old Monroe Doctrine. What do you understand Trump’s doctrine to be?

Peter Welch  

The Monroe Doctrine was an assertion by President James Monroe that European powers could not colonize countries in this hemisphere. What the “Donroe” Doctrine is is the United States can impose its will on countries in this hemisphere. Totally different. It's more about gunboat diplomacy. It's more about imperialism. These are the President's words: “we're going to run the country in Venezuela,” “we're going to have our oil companies there.” That has absolutely nothing to do with the Monroe Doctrine. If the President is, in a kind of pathetic way, trying to make a new word of “Donroe,” the Don is more like a mob boss than it is a diplomat or a statesman.

David Goodman  

The United States does not have state-run oil companies, but President Trump is saying that private American oil companies are going to rebuild the infrastructure of Venezuela's oil industry. Does that make sense to you?

Peter Welch  

No, absolutely not. I first started getting interested in Latin America during the President Kennedy administration. There had been a history of the United States companies essentially toppling governments to their own advantage. United Fruit in Nicaragua, of course, the United States toppling an elected government in Guatemala in 1954. What President Kennedy did was really started moving us to where we were promoting democracy. The Alliance for Progress, the Peace Corps -- they became the United States engagement in Latin America and South America, which were more premised on the ideals of democratic participation and democratic rule. President Trump has repudiated that totally and completely. What he wants to do is have transactional engagements with these countries that benefit him or benefit American companies. The aspiration for democratic rule or facilitating the path to democracy is totally rejected by this President. It is completely the wrong way to go.

David Goodman  

In the first year of President Trump's second term, the United States has taken military action against seven different countries, including three that we've never waged war against. After attacking Venezuela, Trump threatened action against Cuba, Mexico and Greenland. What can or will constrain him?

Peter Welch  

It has to be Congress and the American people. But right now, the biggest dilemma we have in Congress is that my Republican colleagues have abdicated the constitutional authority that we have as members of Congress in so many areas that the President is acting more like a king. Under Article One of the Constitution, Congress has to vote on war making and authorize it in Appropriations. It's up to Congress, the power of the purse. The President is disregarding that. In area after area, my Republican colleagues have been willing to abdicate their authority and their responsibility and delegate it to the President. So you're having this undemocratic concentration of power in a president who knows no limits and thinks that because he is president, he can do whatever he wants. That's a real threat to our democratic governing system.

David Goodman  

This seems to have opened up some cracks in the MAGA coalition. We are hearing about opposition from Marjorie Taylor Greene and Representative Thomas Massie, also Senator Rand Paul, who have opposed this break with the idea of “America First.” Do you think this could cause other fractures within that coalition?

Peter Welch  

I do. Americans do not want us getting involved in foreign wars. They support our military, and we need our strong military to make certain that we're defended. But this action in Venezuela is not to protect us from a threat to our country from Venezuela. His talk about taking over Greenland is not to protect us from a threat by Greenland or Denmark, and likewise, Colombia. Most Americans know that asking our citizen soldiers to go to war for presidential preferences is absolutely wrong. We've got to take care of things that are really tough for everyday working people in our country. Right now, Vermonters are losing health care. The President hasn't lifted a single finger to extend those tax credits so that Vermonters and Americans won't lose health care. The president ran as a person who was against these “forever wars” and now he's embracing these wars, not just in Venezuela, but also the threats In Colombia, the threats in Greenland and in Cuba. Why?

David Goodman  

Why do you think h...

For 90 years, Yankee Magazine has been telling stories of and about New England. And for more than half of the magazine’s life, Mel Allen has been Yankee’s foremost storyteller. Allen wrote his first stories for Yankee in 1977, then held various editorial roles before becoming Yankee’s fifth editor in 2006. He retired as editor earlier this year after 48 years with the magazine, which is based in Dublin, NH. 

I first got to know Mel Allen in the 1980s, when I began writing for Yankee. I had never had an editor quite like him. He didn’t just assign stories. He coached, shaped, cajoled and encouraged me and countless other New England writers to do our best work. He even came to Vermont with his two sons to go backcountry skiing with me. They loved it, (he, not so much) and a friendship was kindled. 

Allen has taught magazine writing and creative nonfiction for the past 25 years at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and teaches in the MFA program at Bay Path University. In 2018, Mel Allen was inducted into the Folio Magazine Hall of Fame for editorial excellence.

Mel Allen, 79, recently published a book of essays, Here in New England: Unforgettable Stories of People, Places, and Memories That Connect Us All. The stories take us along on his journey to meet the last horse-and-buggy egg delivery man; the tragic search for a lost boy in Maine; to a town in Maine that refused to die; to meet Stephen King, the “King of Horror”; and to the son of an undocumented Mexican immigrant who graduated at the top of his class at Bowdoin College and worked to bring his mother back home to Arizona where he was raised. 

Allen is sometimes a participant observer in his stories, as immortalized by Stephen King. “I may be the only writer who not only helped King round up pigs for the market when they escaped, but who also ended up as a character named Mel Allen from the Portland Sunday Telegram in 'The Dead Zone,'" Allen writes in his book.

Allen believes in the power of stories to build bridges. These “are stories that transcend the current climate of disunity. That's why I believe these stories can connect us,” Allen told The Vermont Conversation. He said that there a “sense of place in New England that I don't know exists anywhere else.”

I asked Allen what makes a good story. “You want to keep turning the page,” he said. “You want to know what's going to happen to this person. You want to care about the person.”

With journalism in a state of upheaval, I asked Allen what his advice is to young journalists. “You are drawn to tell stories because of something in you. It's not something that somebody puts on your shoulders and says, Now I want you to go out and to tell those stories,” he said. “If you're called to do that, you follow that calling.”

“Plastic is everywhere — wrapped around our food, stitched into our clothes, even coursing through our veins.”

That’s how Judith Enck begins her new book, "The Problem with Plastic: How We Can Save Ourselves and our Planet Before It’s Too Late," co-authored with Adam Mohoney. 

A former regional administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency, Enck warns that plastics are a toxic industry that are poisoning people and the environment. Plastic production has gone from two million tons per year in 1950, to 450 million tons per year today. 

The plastics industry has spent millions selling the material as safe and sustainable, but only 6% of plastic is recycled. Plastic recycling is a “false solution,” Enck said. “Plastic recycling has never worked. Never will work.” 

The plastics industry has “spent millions of dollars advertising, telling us, 'don't worry about all the plastic you're generating,' just toss it in your recycling bin. That is deceptive, and it is so deceptive that the Attorney General of California Rob Bonta sued the nation's largest maker of plastic, the little mom and pop company known as Exxon Mobil, for deceptive claims around plastics recycling and chemical recycling.”

Plastic never breaks down. It breaks up into smaller microplastics, circulating in the environment for centuries, said Enck. “16,000 different chemicals are used to make plastic, and the chemicals will sometimes hitchhike on the microplastics. So we're having the physical presence of microplastics in our bodies, but also the presence of chemicals that are used to make plastic, including PFAS chemicals, lead, mercury, formaldehyde.” Microplastics have been found in lungs, testicles, blood, breast milk and semen. They are associated with a rise in reproductive cancers, cardiovascular disease and diabetes, among other ailments.

The plastics industry has deployed an army of lobbyists to beat back attempts to limit the use of plastics. As an example, Enck cites New York’s effort this year to consider “a comprehensive packaging reduction bill that will reduce all single use packaging by 30% over 12 years.”

“This was the most lobbied bill in the 2026 legislative session in nearby Albany,” said Enck, noting that “there were 106 registered lobbyists against this bill, and 24 in support. I have never seen so many special interest lobbyists wandering the halls of the State Capitol in Albany, including the final night of the legislative session, where they killed the bill on the assembly floor after it passed in the State Senate.”

That experience has led Enck to conclude that "reducing plastic in our bodies, in our environment, in Lake Champlain, in the ocean, is more of a political science issue than a science issue. We have enough science to act.”

Judith Enck was appointed EPA regional administrator by President Obama and she has served as deputy secretary for the environment in New York. She is now a professor at Bennington College and the founder and president of Beyond Plastics, a group that works to eliminate plastic pollution.

Enck insisted that in addition to political action, individuals can take steps to minimize their exposure to plastic. “I suggest that people start with their kitchen, because that's where most of the plastic is, and that's where the greatest risk is in terms of exposure in your food. Do not put plastic in your microwave. Get rid of black plastic utensils in your kitchen drawers, because black plastic is made from recycled electronic waste. Get rid of your plastic cutting board. Replace it with either wood or steel. Do a little audit of what's your heaviest use of plastic. For instance, if you drink a lot of juice, instead of buying it in plastic jugs, buy frozen concentrate and make it in a glass pitcher. There are steps like that we can take.”