15 years ago
January 2009 issue
Dummerston Selectboard Chair Andrew MacFarland, writing to his town's Planning Commission, recently noted an "inevitable tension."
The planning process, which seeks the common good but might well not accommodate the wishes of particular individuals and groups, must coexist with the political process, which "must take into account the personal, interpersonal, social and emotional responses to the plan," MacFarland wrote.
Even with broadly shared goals among affected parties, the difference between a town plan's vision and the means of its realization can be considerable.
Such is Dummerston's conundrum, with its revised town plan stuck in draft form as a result. Its current town plan expired last August.
The Planning Commission has held a number of meetings to inform citizens about the evolving plan, hoping to incorporate suggestions and have a draft that, once submitted to the Selectboard, would be in a form that would be largely acceptable.
"We tried really hard this time," Planning Commission Chair Steve Mindel said.
10 years ago
Jan. 21, 2015 issue
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. served as a leader in the Civil Rights Movement five decades ago, said Lise Sparrow, pastor of the Guilford Community Church, but the social justice issues he worked for still resonate.
Sparrow views Martin Luther King Day as a time for the community to recommit to issues of social justice.
For almost a decade, Sparrow, along with members of the Brattleboro Area Interfaith Clergy Association, and Mikaela Sims, diversity coordinator at Brattleboro Union High School, have commemorated King through a youth event and fundraiser.
Money raised from admission to the event, held on Jan. 19, 2015 at the Centre Congregational Church, goes toward a youth trip to the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Donations made during the event benefited the Root Social Justice Center and the Vermont Partnership for Fairness and Diversity.
Local youth groups, the Brattleboro Area Interfaith Youth, and the AWARE Multicultural Student Association from BUHS collaborated on preparing the night's spaghetti dinner.
5 years ago
Jan. 22, 2020 issue
Vermont author and climate activist Bill McKibben believes humanity is in a race it cannot afford to lose.
"It's not that we're going to eventually have wind and solar energy. By the time you're my age, we will because it's cheaper," the author, scholar, and activist told Hilltop Montessori School's middle school students on Jan. 15, 2020.
"That's not the problem," he said. "The problem is, will we do it fast enough?"
McKibben, the co-founder of the global environmental advocacy group 350.org, was in Brattleboro to give an evening talk and a book reading. Before he spoke to the standing room audience, he stopped at the school to talk with the students, who are in the thick of the climate crisis.
With so much of the movement's energy coming from young people, McKibben warned adults to not get complacent and not to "take the biggest problem in the world and offload it onto the shoulders of high school students."
The transition away from coal, natural gas, and oil to generate electricity and to power our transportation is happening, but happening so slowly that in 50 years, "the world that will run on sun and wind by [that time] will be a broken world."
Thus, he said, the only way the transition can be sped up is by putting pressure on the people who hold the political and financial power.
This News item was submitted to The Commons.