Please consider reading this piece by Buzz Hoerr as published in the Burlington Free Press

A case could be made that after 11,000 years of human habitation around Lake Champlain, our 400 years here -- especially the past 150 -- have been a boon to those who have made a living here.
 

From game and subsistence farming to lumber to grains to wool, and eventually to dairy and a plethora of modern ways to earn one's keep, we have created a life most of us love.

But we also have come to a point in time where the cumulative effect of our activities threatens our most important resource: our waters -- our streams and rivers and lakes.

Most of us didn't see this coming. Our waters seemed inexhaustible, as they were replenished constantly from the skies. The philosophy of manifest destiny told us we could use them as we saw fit, and we did.

But the consequences of that approach have caught up with us now. We have become the biggest of the nonnative nuisance species in our basin, and it is time we recognize it fully and take personal steps to reverse our impact on our waters.

All of us contribute to the problems. We can blame the larger sources of excess nutrients and toxics (farms and factories), but in the end we all participate in a system that depends on those activities. We are all part of the problem.

As state resources are cut to the bone, Vermonters must make some hard choices about spending priorities. We no longer have the luxury of calling on government to force the "other guys" to reduce their nutrient and toxic flows.

Experts estimate the cost of reviving Lake Champlain could be between $500 million and $800 million -- an enormous amount of money for our state. But within that cost and plan, under the headlines, is a long list of individual and collective actions we've so far delegated to others, with outside funding.

We must look in the mirror and start with ourselves. We must make personal decisions about how we use and abuse our waters -- and probably spend some of our own dollars.

Is this such a big deal? Vermonters throughout history have taken great pride in self-sufficiency. We refused federal help after the flood of '27, saying we could handle it ourselves. Think about that: In the midst of a disaster of biblical proportions, we turned down outside help, on principle.

Think what a difference we could make if each of us committed to being an active part of the solution, just like we did when we said it was up to us to fix our own problems in 1927.

Is that spirit still within us? Can we make our own decisions to find out where our water goes and what substances we add to the problem?

Can we then pay the price to make the changes we need to return our waters to what they were before we came here?

Take another look in the mirror. This time, prepare to act:

 

Our native forbears knew that the greatest spirit in their universe made this place to sustain and nourish them, and they needed to treat it and everything that came from it with respect.

Can we come to that realization now?

History will be the judge. We spent last year reflecting on the impacts of European settlement over the past 400 years. What will we see when we look back in 2059, in 2109?

Will our great, great, great grandchildren be paying a far steeper price for our inactivity? Or will they look back and see how we took a tough situation in a tough time and made things a lot better -- on our own -- for Lake Champlain?

We have a story to write to our successors, and the next pages all are blank.