The Best Technology in Troubled Times

[Social trust] is our greatest asset by far, and the one we should guard most closely.

If you wanted one fact to understand our strained century, it might well be this: warm air holds more water vapor than cold.

That’s why, in the arid areas of the West, we get more evaporation and hence drought, and then when it gets hot enough we get firestorms on a scale we’ve never seen before. But once that water is up in the atmosphere, it is going to come down, and so it does in places such as Vermont. Gullywashers—storms that drop more than 2 inches of rain in 24 hours—are up sharply at our latitude, but unless we’re farmers, we only really pay attention when it gets out of hand. This summer felt like the raindrops were hurrying out of the sky to make room for more, as a hot Atlantic fed the endless chain of thunderstorms. Climate change may come for us in other forms, but for now, global warming in the Green Mountains takes the form of sog.

We can, and should, keep the trouble from getting even worse by staunching the flow of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere; if a solar farm or a wind turbine annoys you, try thinking of them as flooding prevention devices. But we’re going to be living with at least our present level of chaos for quite a while, and so I want to discuss another crucial piece of technology: the neighbor.

Modern Americans have not really needed this tool for the last 75 years; maybe for the first time and place in human history, neighbors have been largely optional. If you have a credit card, someone will deliver everything you need to survive to your doorstep, no contact required. Only a quarter of Americans know their neighbors well. Half of Americans don’t know their neighbors’ names.

But Vermont, thank heaven, is an exception. A nation-leading 70 percent of Vermonters say they know most of their neighbors. And while only 38 percent of Americans say they mostly or completely trust their neighbors, a 2018 Vermont survey found that 78 percent of residents think that “people in my neighborhood trust each other to be good neighbors.”

This high level of social trust comes, in part anyway, from our settlement patterns: Vermont is a place of small villages, the most rural of all 50 states. Our history helps too: government by town meeting has always both required and bred a kind of trust and cooperation. But whatever the cause, it is our greatest asset by far, and the one we should guard most closely.

Because neighbors, it turns out, are a fantastic technology. They’re a huge help when you’re having a pandemic, for instance. Vermont finished the Covid emergency with the lowest percentage of its people dead, and by a large margin. And that’s because neighbors, as opposed to strangers, don’t mind wearing masks to prevent sickening their community. They understand that whatever tiny personal risk a vaccine might carry, its net effect on the people around you is overwhelmingly positive.

Those neighbors, of course, are just as helpful when the water comes pouring down. They show up to shovel mud out of your basement, and to chainsaw the tree that fell across your driveway; they help find you a new home if a landslide shoved yours off its foundation, and they raise money to make sure you can replace your car. Neighbors are also nice (a lot of the time). You can eat dinner with them, go for walks, and see them at Hannaford. Yea neighbors!

It is, of course, ludicrous to have to make a case for neighbors. But then it’s ludicrous to have to plan for walls of water falling on the gentle hills of Vermont, and ludicrous to spend half the summer breathing smoke from the burning pines of the Canadian north. We’re in a crazy new moment in human history—which is all the more reason to rediscover this oldest of technologies.

I think most of our legislative efforts in Vermont should center on making sure we keep these bonds intact, and build them deeper. Keeping our schools open and strong is a way to make sure that we keep neighbors of diverse ages; buying local food is a way of making sure we have neighbors who know how to grow things. Robert Frost, in his curmudgeonly way, insisted that good fences make good neighbors. But in truth, good neighbors make good neighbors. So make good neighbors!