When we think about what resilient communities look like in 2025, much of what we are speaking about boils down to how, as Vermonters, we fight the onslaught of climate change. In Vermont, massive and frequent flooding events are at the top of the list of ways climate change has impacted the state, but there are many little impacts can be seen everyday in Vermont, from our roadways experiencing more erosion and damage to an increase in tick and other insect-bourne illnesses as well as the economic impact of a changing climate in a state that relies on the outdoors to drive tourism.

And at the heart of this issue of how to cope with and reverse the effects of climate change is the question of how to build climate resilient communities in Vermont. To hear more about this topic, we spoke with Daivd Mears, An Environmental Attorney and former Executive Director of Audubon Vermont. 

Louise Lintilhac: How do you think smart growth principles like sustainable housing growth and downtown revitalization and transportation help reduce climate change and promote climate resilience?

David Mears: There are the direct benefits, like reduced commute time, less driving, fewer single occupancy cars, people able to find homes and places to live near their work. I think there’s a degree to which thinking about communities as walkable or accessible by bike—the joys of a more livable community—and helping people whether they’re younger or more senior in life appreciate that is important. I also think there’s a chance to move past the arguments that people often get into about not wanting to lose the freedom of their car or somehow lose the ability to live in a more rural landscape. But I see secondary benefits to creating housing and livable spaces in communities as being that you then have much less need or pressure to develop in the open spaces in the farms and the fields and the forests.

This shift has been important to our climate resilience and climate (carbon) storage. Both the mitigation and resilience aspects of climate are dependent on our natural open lands here in Vermont. The more that we can create public policy that pulls people into livable communities where they can afford housing and have reduced commute times and easier access to schools and services, the less pressure there is on our surrounding landscape. In the environmental community, we’ve often focused on discouraging developing open spaces, which I fully support. I spent a career working to make sure that we’ve got strong land use requirements and to support Act 250. But we need both the livable community as well as the open space to really be achieving our carbon and climate goals.

We can’t have the landscape that we want without healthy community centers. The other critical aspect of this is developing a sense of community that then stimulates engagement and investment in our community democracy. The disconnectedness of people from each other as much as from the landscape creates long-term dilemmas in trying to build sustainable public policies about what this landscape should look like.

LL: What are some of the challenges that you see affecting climate resilience in Vermont?

DM: Well, I think the number one substantive asset the state of Vermont has for climate resilience is the landscape. It’s this landscape of forests and farms and open space and healthy wetlands, headwaters, and floodplains. Those are our greatest assets. And the greatest risk to our climate resilience is that we’re spending those assets steadily.

And we have to not just stop that but reverse it. The loss of biodiversity has a direct impact on human communities and resilience, and the rise of pestilence from insects, from disease, from loss of forests, the increase of invasive species and crop loss, livestock disease, all these things are connected. When you have a collapse of these ecosystems, it’s not just the physical, ecological functions, it’s the biological functions that they provide that shut down.

We have to take a much more ecological mindset to thinking about how we protect those assets, and part of that ecological mindset is recognizing that we have to consider how people fit into the landscape. We need to balance the benefits for the community through economic support from recreation, tourism, forest management, farming, and natural resource activities that are extractive in some way. These things are a part of human systems. We have been successful with policies like Act 250 in part because we have a broad political consensus or near consensus that we want this landscape to continue to exist. There’s a lot of disagreement about how humans should live on it, And that’s a place where I think VNRC can play a really critical role in helping folks understand that there is a very human impact on our natural system.

LL: What in your mind are some of the key points that we need to communicate to folks to help them understand how Act 181 is directly impacting their quality of life?

DM: I think describing an alternative as opposed to saying, “Here are the things that you have to give up.” We could flip the script and say, “Here’s what you gain.” There are so many things that we gain from intact forests. Our forests are for the most part, even aged. They’re a hundred to 120 years old, and they’re not that diverse. By allowing and encouraging sustainable forest management of those forests, we create healthier ecosystems. That’s really powerful in terms of a biological engine. It creates habitat for critical species and that in turn creates a richer experience for people who want to recreate on it.

It also has benefits for Vermonters in terms of managing invasive species and pests. A couple of years ago, there was a burst of fear that the equine encephalitis or malaria and some mosquito-borne illnesses were going to devastate us. The solution was to get out there and spray everywhere. But it turns out that the species of mosquito that carries most of these diseases is one that really loves suburbia. It loves manicured lawns. It loves all the little puddles and pots and pans and things in people’s suburban yards. If we really care about addressing this in a serious way, we should be thinking more seriously about how to restrict and reduce sprawl.

We often think about flood resilience as the central climate adaptation priority, but this summer demonstrated how completely unprepared the state is to deal with drought. If we have another recurring drought, or a drought happens over a  multi-year period, the state’s completely unprepared for it. We need to talk about how our forests, open spaces, and farmland are the single most important investment. Wetlands, headwaters, all those springs that people are relying on depend upon being protected. And we allow people to wipe them out, build new roads, new subdivisions, their 50-acre farm—That kind of development is working against the resilience that we need to build here in Vermont to help us thrive over the long term.