Philip Baruth for VT State Senate

You’ll hear a lot of statistics this election cycle, but there’s one that hits me harder than any other: the number of 20- to 34-year-olds in Vermont has shrunk by almost 20% since 1990. One out of every five young Vermonters — gone. Experts call this Vermont’s “lost generation.” A huge problem, but a symptom of a larger one too: our young people are leaving because we’re disastrously positioned in a global economy, and they sense it.

What can we do about it? Court traditional manufacturers but bank on high-tech, smaller digital start-ups; educate a cutting-edge work force; lay fiber optic statewide, as quickly as possible; kick-start green businesses and practices, then export that technology aggressively; enact a single-payer pilot program, to prove the concept and spur small-business growth statewide; make stewardship of the land and the lake a true mission, backed with serious resources and legal teeth.

Some of these things are now being tried, but most aren’t. Sandbar Beach was closed to swimming the last time I drove my family there. And Governor Douglas promised universal internet within our borders by 2010. We’ll be lucky to make it by 2030.

Fiber optic should be a godsend for Vermont. It can create digital downtowns, preserving village life while discouraging sprawl. Wind power too seems tailor-made for a mountainous state like ours. But Montpelier has hesitated for too long in laying an information infrastructure, and powering it responsibly.

We need to move forward — but always in scale with the community. We can’t replace Big Oil with Big Wind. Our wind projects should rest on solid input at the town and regional level, and return defined profits to the community. The Douglas Administration has allowed corporations to sell power or extend digital access mostly as they see fit — so it’s no surprise that Fairpoint is failing, and Entergy is maneuvering to avoid the billion-dollar clean-up of Vermont Yankee. We need to demand more: more oversight, more corporate responsibility, more defined public benefit.

After writing about these issues for the last fifteen years, and speaking out about them on the radio for the last ten, I lost patience with the pace of change in Montpelier. So I’ve launched an early campaign for the State Senate, to let me spend real time in every town and village in Chittenden County.

When I ran to become an Obama Delegate in 2008, I promised the statewide convention that if elected, I’d be their eyes and ears in Denver, letting sunshine into a famously closed event. And I delivered, every day, on the front page of the Free Press. Montpelier needs sunshine, too. To take just one example, people need to know that Entergy seems intent on gaming the regulatory system, and that the system seems powerless to stop them. Only that knowledge can force true change. I’m hoping you’ll join us. It won’t be boring, I can promise you that.