Thanks to Seven Days, Vermont's liveliest alternative weekly newspaper, for giving Bill McKibben (arguably Vermont's most prominent intellectual) a platform to hold forth on Vermont independence this week. in his "Independence Fray" article.

I could spend time quibbling with some of Bill's observations here. To name but three:

1. His selective re-telling of the winter 2007 SVR/LOS brouhaha and Mr. Odum/GMD's role in it...(no comment - time to move on.)

2. Or his dismissing of President Abraham Lincoln's 19th century re-invention of the U.S. Constitution as relatively unimportant...(then again, I am a historian by training.)

3. Or his call for "less theater"...(Jeezum, public statesman and erstwhile "terrorist" Ethan Allen, Vermont's mythical founder, proved one of the 18th century's single most gifted showmen/actors).

But time is too short for nit picking, and we've got good work to do, and Bill mostly gets it right, I think.

We started Vermont Commons newspaper in the spring of 2005 because a number of us believed that peaceable secession and the re-invention of Vermont as an independent republic, working in concert with the rest of the world, was an old idea ready for reinvigoration.

And we needed to create blueprints (or, greenprints, perhaps) to get us there. We needed to rethink food, and energy, and agriculture, and education, and transportation, and our media culture, and dozens of other things - good food, good beer, and good compost, among them - and figure out how to move us forward here in the Green Mountains.

We have been fortunate to have Bill and many other talented thinkers (good human beings, all) write for us - for free - giving us and our readers the gift of their good ideas, vociferous criticism, and forward-looking (and often visionary) solutions-oriented thinking.

And (like much of the planet)  - we're just warming up.

Like Bill, I find Barack Obama compelling in many ways. But I also know that the U.S. Empire eats its own - and the sheer size and scope and "ungovernability" of our nation/empire, the most powerful one on earth, makes the kind of political change we so desperately need pretty much unattainable, at a time when emerging 21st century crises - climate change and peak oil among them - stand at the door and knock.

The solution? McKibben knows, mostly - and so do a growing number of us.

Independence Fray indeed.

Let's get busy.

Free Vermont - long live the Untied States.

On vacation through early August.

Web Editor Rob