Vermont as New Jersey

Tom Morse has been making maple syrup in East Montpelier, VT, for a long time. So has his father. And so did his father. 

Tom is my neighbor. Or rather I am his neighbor, me arriving seven years ago. Tom's family has been here for five generations. We live in the Morse School, one of several one-room schoolhouses that served the town in the early 20th century. So you could say I am kind of a guest in Tom Morse's town.

The Morse Farm Maple Sugarworks is the kind of place that glues a community together. It is the place every tourist goes. And every local. It is always featured in the local newspaper, the Times Argus, for its legendary creamies. The high school kids working the counter remind me of my own childhood. You see your neighbors there picking up some milk and bread after work.

The farm is my daughter-in-law's favorite place on Earth. She is from Egypt, so any weather below 70 degrees is considered Artic. But the maple candy and other stuff at Morse Farm keep her coming back. Every guest at her wedding received a Morse Farm maple candy.

Stop in during sugaring season any spring, and watch Tom's father Burr boiling off sap to make syrup sold worldwide. Tom and his crew are in the woods, fixing pipeline and trucking sap to the sugarhouse. 

This is a real place. Not yet bought out by a New York hedge fund, resistant to the crass consumerism that infects us all, yet smartly profiting off people's deep desire to reconnect to something real on the land. There is a video you can watch inside a shed of the family's sugar-making history. Burr's wood carvings are scattered about. 

What's best for me is that the place and its family have a long history. And you can stare that history right in the face and sit down with it and chew the fat about the weather, politics, and family. It's old school in the best way. Not enough money to buy the estate in Florida. But enough to sustain a life for several Vermont families over generations.

When it comes to politics, Tom is either a moderate Republican or a fairly conservative Democrat. You know the type. Suspicious of government regulation, partial to people who work with their hands, preferably in the woods. He can fix your car and pull you out of the ditch while splitting 10 cords of firewood for the stove. 

Tom strongly supports Phil Scott, our moderate Republican governor. I didn't ask him. But if I had to guess, I think he voted for Howard Dean. He might have even voted for Bernie Sanders. It doesn't really matter.

But something is very very wrong at the Morse Farm. And it's climate change. Whatever disagreements Tom and I might have about politics, we agree on this. Climate change is real, and it threatens everything from his business to the world. And when Tom's business is threatened, so are his employees, so are his customers, and so is an entire industry and an entire state's economy.

"It's changing," Tom says. "It's changing in front of our eyes. And we are doing little about it. It's crazy to me."

I'm no sugar farmer. But I know you need freezing nights and sunny days to make sap flow from maple trees. Vermont makes more sap than any state in the country, and its maple syrup is prized worldwide. My kids live all over the country and they refuse to eat pancakes with non-Vermont syrup. The same goes for Cabot cheese by the way. 

You have to boil 40 gallons of sap down to get one gallon of syrup. This year Tom Morse and his Dad boiled 90 gallons of sap to get one gallon of syrup. That should scare us. 

"The sugar content of sap needs to be about two percent," Tom says. "This year it's about one percent. We need freezing nights."

Last week Tom posted on Facebook a photo of an ancient maple tree he has tapped his entire life, uprooted by heavy winds.

"This was alive, productive, and healthy 20" rock maple, growing on a dry ridge in my woods that uprooted like it was a 12" fir growing in a swamp," he says. 

Those three days of 70-degree weather ruined Tom Morse's sugaring season. 

The Morse family has done what it can to get more sustainable. They installed a small solar tracking system in their field across the road to offset the farm's power usage. They burn 20 cords of firewood instead of oil for heat. They source as much product locally as possible.

"But when your sugar percentage is that much lower, it means more boiling, more trucking, more pollution," Tom says. 

In 25 to 50 years, Tom says, Vermont will have the climate of New Jersey. And he doesn't need a scientist to tell him that.

"Sugaring will be obsolete," he says. 

But what can little Vermont do to reverse a worldwide phenomenon? 

At least we can agree that this is happening. So while Republican senators are in Washington denying the existence of climate change, Tom Morse and his family see the reality on the ground, in the woods, every day. 

And in the woods, there is no politics. Just trees and soil. And it's all warming. 

"It's going take convincing the hard-headed Republican business types this is happening," he says. 

From his Facebook post: "I'm seeing this more often than we ever used to. Yet some folks still get pissed off at the mere mention of climate change - even when no blame is being attached. Vermont's 2021 sugaring season has once again been drastically shortened by a couple 70 degree days in late March - freakishly warm weather for early spring. Yet some folks still see climate change as being political!"

For me, there is the possibility - a moderate Republican farmer calling out the Republican party for their denial of climate change. And that means liberals like me have to realize that we might not be able to tax ourselves to fix a global problem. 

Tom and I agree that a Vermont carbon tax might not be the best way to go. Vermont is too small. It's tax base too shallow to tax ourselves to remedy a climate world that we don't control.

Any good liberal like me supports a carbon tax. But without a worldwide price on carbon and a tax to drive us away from fossil fuels, I'm not sure it's wise for Vermont to go it alone.

And that's where Tom Morse and I can agree.

Let's first agree the climate is warming, and we as humans can do something about it.

"The most important thing is to get the dialogue going at the state level," he says. 

He speaks highly of the Vermont Sugarmakers Association, the lobby group for the industry. 

"We need to be a collective and unwavering voice that these negative impacts are happening - have been for years - and appear to be getting worse at an exponential rate, and now is the time to act if we don't wanna be Jersey in 50 years."

As he said in his Facebook post:

"It's happening, my friends, and once again, I'm not assigning blame, but I believe that recognizing the problem is the only way to start dealing with it."