Concerned about wind turbines on ridgelines or chloramine in your water supply?
If so, chances are you’ve heard of Annette Smith, the no-nonsense director of the grassroots organization Vermonters for a Clean Environment. Smith has made a name for herself advocating on behalf of local communities fighting unwanted development, and now her supporters hope that Smith’s name recognition will come in handy in an upstart write-in campaign in the August 28 primaries. They’re urging Vermonters to vote for Annette Smith of Danby as the Progressive Party’s candidate for governor — not so much because they love Smith as because they hate the other guy.
“Too often we’re all in a position of holding our noses and voting for whoever we think might not be as bad as the other guy or girl,” says Stephanie Kaplan, a Calais environmental lawyer organizing the write-in campaign. She says it’s an attempt “to let people who are dissatisfied with Shumlin know that there’s something they can do in the primary election.”
Why the disdain for Gov. Peter Shumlin? Kaplan says she and her cohort are fed up with Shumlin’s “cozy” relationship with big corporations in Vermont, singling out his support for wind developments, the F-35 beddown, smart meters and the Green Mountain Power/CVPS merger as particular points of concern.
Party chair Martha Abbott of Underhill has the Progs’ formal endorsement, which she won at the quarterly state committee meeting last weekend. But Morgan Daybell, the executive director of the Progressive Party, isn’t complaining about the write-in campaign — far from it.
“It’s nice to have a contested primary because it gives people a reason to vote in our primary,” says Daybell.
Smith says that she’s not involved in the campaign in the least. In fact, when Seven Days called and explained that we were “hoping to talk to [her] about the write-in campaign,” Smith responded, “Well, I’m happy to talk about my work.”
The plan arose first as a way to voice dissatisfaction with Shumlin — and Smith, Kaplan says, seemed like a natural person to nominate in the process. “She really would make a great governor,” Kaplan says, though she admits the write-in campaign is more about jumpstarting a discussion than running in earnest.
“If she doesn’t win, fine, we’ve made a statement,” says Kaplan. “If she does win, great. Then … we can have some public discussion.”
This article appears in Aug 15-21, 2012.
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This will be a good race to gage support or non support for wind farm development in the Progressive community. I look forward to seeing the results!
Statement on wind power by Martha Abbott I wholeheartedly support wind power as one alternative to fossil fuels, to nuclear and to fracking. Wind seems to me to be a very reasonable alternative to fossil fuels, greenhouse gas emissions, oil spills, the destruction of the Gulf of Mexico, nuclear meltdowns in Japan and wars in the Middle East. I think we should build wind and solar and set a goal of making Vermont energy self sufficient. I would like to see Vermont find ways to develop its own resources (wind and sunlight and water) in ways that don’t involve big Corporations exploiting VT resources for profit. That is why I was a vocal advocate for the State buying the dams on the Connecticut and Deerfield rivers a few years ago. In Denmark, in order to encourage investment in wind power, individuals were encouraged to purchase shares in wind turbine cooperatives which then invested in community wind turbines. By 1996 there were 2,100 such cooperatives in the country. Now 86% of Danes support wind energy when compared with existing fuel sources. And if we are going to build infrastructure of any kind, anywhere in Vermont, we should insist on using Vermont Union Labor to do it.
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One angle missing in this account is that these
controversies–the merger, destructive industrial wind, smart meters and the
F-35 basing–have a strong common thread:
they all involve the powerful corporate-military complex really
colonizing Vermont . As with the historic European colonizers in the Third
World, today’s powerful complex
co-opts and uses our Vermont elites–the Peter Shumlins, the Kimball, Sherman,
Ellises, our Public (dis)Service Board, our whole Washington delegation. For the most part they don’t even have
to beat us into submission any more (though to keep in form, they pull stunts
like the police violence against the recent Burlington demonstrators).
Our present-day corporate empire-builders are generally
cooler than all that: instead they
invent hideously complex projects like the CVPS merger which are almost
impossible for the press or anyone else to even understand; they sleepwalk us through the charade
of a permit process which is likewise byzantine and fixed; they constitute themselves as experts
in a realm where common folk can only flounder around. And they pay the bills for politicians
like Peter Shumlin to conduct largely meaningless campaigns based mostly on
empty media ad buys.
Looking at VCE’s website, I see a lot of what they are opposed to, but I don’t see anything about what they advocate for. I simply can’t put stock into organizations that oppose projects but don’t advocate alternative solutions (and when I say advocate, I mean putting the same level of time and energy they spend on opposing projects into advocating for alternatives). It will be interesting to hear what Smith has to say about what she thinks we should do, as opposed to what she thinks we shouldn’t be doing.
“She really would make a great governor,” Kaplan says,
No, she’d make a terrible governor. She is anti-everything, except hearing herself talk.
I went to one of the statewide series of conferences Annette organized on industrial wind AND ALSO the alternatives. She and her organization seemed full of ideas about what we should do. In any case, I see tremendous value in people like Annette who consistently provide intelligent and independent critiques–and not just of corporate misbehavior but also of the group think which seems to take over the enviro world periodically. Plus, Annette not only advocates interesting theoretical alternatives, she has carried many of them out in her personal life, growing most of her own food on a farm that is entirely solar-powered, etc.
And anyway, it’s often meaningless to try to characterize negative and positive: when Annette is trying to get justice for residents of a polluted trailer park, is that supposed to be a negative or positive action? A polluting corporation and its buddies in the press and government would have one view, their victims another.