Valley Futures

Thinking Like A Watershed: A Vision For Our Mad River Valley

We, citizens of the Mad River Valley, express our commitment to our neighbors, this landscape, and our common future by sharing this vision for sustaining a successful, whole community within our one watershed.

To think like a watershed is to understand that everything is connected.  To achieve a healthy, whole Mad River Valley means seeing the relationship between buying local food and sustaining our culture, and between affordable housing and seeing young people in our valley, or between conserving our land and wildlife and building a resilient business community.

This vision prohibits nothing, but says strongly what kind of community we are for:

• a secure place for people of all ages and incomes, old-timer and newcomers.
• a community that respects differences, likes to engage in hearty debate, and doesn’t fear dialogue among all people.
• a community that takes care of itself and produces a growing percentage of its own food and energy.
• a community with strong local businesses who are supported financially and politically.
• a community that honors its already long and beneficial relationship with skiing and year-round tourism.
• a community that recognizes we live in the same watershed: what happens in Waitsfield affects life in Warren and vice-versa.
• a community with a clean, swimmable, fishable Mad River.
• a community that can grow in human population, and equally in bear and bobcats, and knows that it can only get there through valley-wide planning and decision-making.
• a community that is known for its strong relationships, among its people who are connected to the river, the mountains, and the woods

This Is Our Future To Make Or Break

Our valley is not getting any bigger but our population is – and change will never stop coming. No community lives in isolation, and none of us want to wake up one day and say to ourselves “what happened. This is no longer the place I feel at home in.” We are committed to working together to choose our future. Our Mad River Valley has a long tradition of Yankee-ingenuity beginning with agriculture and forestry, then tourism and skiing, planning and architecture. Today, we have the opportunity to lead the way in creating a healthy, resilient watershed community. Because of our still relatively small population, and because we are defined by a river, we have the right scale and geographic identity to anticipate, create a vision, and enact a better future for ourselves.

Remember …

Men and women like Floyd Fuller, Alden Bettis, Fletcher Joslin, Rupert Blair, Thelma Neill, Everett Palmer, Kit Hartshorn, Sewall Williams, and Willis Bragg, among so many others, lived and worked in our Mad River communities; good people made in the image of our valley. Like their ancestors, they were of the soil, trees, waters and mountains of this watershed, and they did their best to make this valley thrive for their children and for us. Everyone living today in the Mad River Valley stands on the shoulders of people who came before. With this vision, we’re circling back to the same ethics, hard work, creativity and love of place that these people lived and embodied.

Imagine …

You walk on foot trails from Warren to Moretown and along the way see dozens of small-scale farms. People of all ages are out walking and riding bikes because it’s easier and more fun than driving a car. You pass through fields and along the Mad River, but also through a thriving densely-packed downtown that had shops, farmer’s market, mixed housing and business start-ups. Here you can get your tractor or your laptop fixed, buy a coffee, meet your neighbors, and walk to work. You can pick your child up after school and then ride the micro-bus with them back home. You didn’t need house keys because the door is never locked.

At home, you eat great locally grown food, just like your children do at school, because everyone knows where their food comes from and who’s growing it. Years back, 100 private land-owners were organized to open their land to new farmers, a loan fund was created, and many small farms got going. Then a milk bottling plant was started and “Mad River Milk” became what everyone loved to drink. That made people proud, and soon everyone was figuring out how to produce and buy local food, wood and energy. We always loved our Mad River landscape, and this gave us a more intimate relationship. And it created all kinds of new businesses. Many of the sixty small businesses thriving in the valley emerged out of our decision to harness the sun, wind and water to become a net producer of energy. This created meaningful jobs for our young people and leadership roles for our elders.

Our children know when the swallows and the peepers return. We have a community where a child can be a child, and where parents feel confident their kids will be able to afford to live here in the future. We have a strong local economy, that isn’t overly dependent on anything we can’t create ourselves, where people make things and are eager to serve one another.

Our valley did grow tremendously, as everyone knew it would, but we are clear about our values and desires for the future so we were better prepared to the respond to the changes that came. We value the newcomers because they add to our vision of the future. We work hard to honor the uniqueness of our towns while taking positive steps to do things that are bigger than any one town. Our commitment is always to stay local while understanding that everything in our valley is related: what affects one, affects the other.

Reaching The Vision

This vision is a citizen effort that anyone can participate in. We become part of this future when we sign our names to this document, which started July 4, 2008. You can begin today by volunteering your expertise to any one of a number of projects underway in the valley.

We encourage VFN to choose projects that:

• Build the whole community
• Create positive examples for others to emulate.
• Tie together our Valley communities.
• Honor the process as much as the product.
• Lead from behind, and build upon what others are already doing.