The Vermont Experiment

on hinge moments and making it new, again

Last night, I hosted Dan Chiasson at Middlebury to discuss his excellent book Bernie for Burlington - a deeply researched hybrid of memoir, biography, and ode to place and time. Dan and I had a candid & joyful pre-event dinner, and bumped into Bill McKibben, all three of us acknowledging the intense political nature of the night.

Slim Aarons, Vermont skiiers

In fact, I had just read Bill’s latest newsletter minutes before while drinking a glass of Pinot at the bar. He wrote:

While we wait to see what variety of war crimes Donald Trump decides on following his 8 pm deadline tonight, I think we can assess one outcome of this stupid war already: both the emotional valence and the structural understanding of different energy sources has shifted, and for good. Meaning takes a very long time to erode, but when it does the switch can come quickly; we’re living at a hinge moment, and on the other side of the door is a different world.

Living at a hinge moment. Those words, this feeling.

It felt poignant and heavy to be talking about a political book as the sitting president unleashed an unhinged genocidal rant, and yet moments before our event began, the deal was announced, and an uneasy calm settled.

The gracious and lovely Julia Alvarez was in the audience as Dan read about her early adulthood in Burlington, launching her politically-tinged art as Sanders navigated what Dan beautifully termed “a change within a change.” Dan’s characterization of the Burlington of this era - in flux, youth popping off in punk culture, the conscious redistribution of power, hope - made my pulse quicken. Change starts small; it reverberates.

Alvarez served as a source for Dan’s book, and coming together in conversation last night at Middlebury felt like belonging to a beautiful web of history, art, politics, protest, meaning.

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This morning, my friend Gus Speth forwarded Jeremy Lent’s words on “Breaking the Consensus Trance” - essentially encouraging the public to further wake up to the system. Lent writes:

We are collectively marching toward what author Amitav Ghosh calls omnicide — “the desire to destroy everything,” the unrestrainable excess intrinsic to a vision of the world-as-resource. It is Windigo’s omnicidal compulsion that explains how, even as climate breakdown threatens the foundations of human civilization, governments spend over a trillion dollars a year subsidizing the fossil fuel industry, and banks have channeled over three trillion dollars to fossil fuel companies since the Paris Agreement, while the funds needed to protect living ecosystems go almost entirely unraised.

In short, why do we always forget we can make it new?

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There is a way in which nights like these—full of language, memory, and a shared sense of place—can feel almost separate from the larger forces moving around us. But they are not. They are part of the same fabric. The same questions.

What Dan’s book captures, so quietly and precisely, is that change does not arrive fully formed. It emerges unevenly, hyper-locally, often through small acts of attention and insistence—through people willing to imagine a different structure for the world, even when the larger system resists it.

And yet, as Lent reminds us, the system is not abstract. It is active, funded, sustained. It requires a kind of collective agreement—a trance—that allows us to look away from what is plainly before us. And we are so good at looking away. So good at numbing ourselves. So good at believing it is simply out of our hands.

To write, to teach, to gather in rooms like the one we sat in last night, is not separate from that reality. It is one way of staying awake to it.

And staying awake, at this moment, means also saying the harder thing.

It means naming where our institutions fall short, even when we are part of them. It means refusing the softer narratives that allow us to feel aligned without actually changing anything. It means, at times, speaking plainly about the contradictions we live inside—something I’ve recently been connecting with the Conservation Law Foundation about.

Because if we are, as Bill writes, at a hinge moment, then what matters is not only what we believe, but what we are willing to see clearly—and to say out loud and act upon.

Last night felt, in its way, like a reminder: that art, politics, and place are not separate domains, but overlapping fields of attention. That meaning is made, and remade, in community. And that even now, even here, there remains the possibility of a different world—if we are willing to imagine it, and to name what stands in its way.

xo
MMB

PS - You can read more about my thoughts on honesty vs efficacy here.

PSS - Listen to the brilliant Nathaniel Rich lecture about the formula of activism, the dominant motifs in communication (“it’s not too late to act”), at the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference I direct.