welcome my name's bruce post and for the next hour you're going to be our special guests at a presentation on vermont's mountain apology i'll play just a bit part in this event the two stars are right next to me here at the table both have unique experiences in the green mountains we call home jeff ball is a civil engineer and a professional engineer licensed in vermont in about ecologist with her boots on the ground she's not in an ivory tower she's out in the field a lot of folks around syria been out in the field with her and jeff and sue will share their special insights with you over journalist historians who have a special concern about the health of our mountain at college and we've already had three special panel discussions on other public access t v stations and this is the first time we're here  mansfield community television so i want to extend a real special real sincere thanks to the staff of channel fifteen and channel fifteen itself for the just the hospitality you shown us in sponsoring this event and we tried this is our third try weather and other things intervene in the past and today it's finally going to come to bear before we get started so you were instrumental in starting peak keepers and perhaps you can give us a little background on the organisation well actually it was it was several of us and we really collectively felt strongly that the whole subject of of industrial wind on our mountain habitats was was a subject that was not being well represented to the public in the media at the time and there wasn't enough emphasis on the need to  some of the scientific questions that the other side had so to speak in other words we're all under the impression that industrial wind sites are one necessary to going to be great and do the job we're told they're going doing three you know are  necessarily going to have a terrible impact on habitats and there is another side to that story and so p k purpose was formed in part to to bring us together and and hear that other side and bring to panels like this one experts who have another view on the subject thanks before we get started with colloquy with me and jeff and sue i want to provide a little bit of a background on vermont's environmental history you know last week i heard a term i had never heard before it's called shifting baseline syndrome and what are the sensually means is that our experience when we first experience the natural environment  determines how we look at things for a long time but then my children see something different we were talking about the battle hill down in southern vermont which used to be a fantastic trousering and that's the experience many people have had for years but now it's a new normal but unfortunately for looking up at the milky way which i could see very easily as a kid now with light pollution it's a lot different so we see the national environment natural environment differently over time our expectations of it change but you know i think the real needs protecting in an environment that basically doesn't ship and that's what we'll be talking about right now show you a presentation that i did vermont's environmental history this will provide sort of a baseline of knowledge about were vermont has come environmentally over about the last two hundred fifty years in the pre settlement forest which about early seventeen hundreds the english columnist started coming to vermont but that pre settlement forest was pretty various many different trees different ages there was a lot of diversity in it but within a period of time after the settlers came they began to clear the forest they cut the trees they burned the trees for potash which was used in the production of wall they would ship that potash back to england people talk about globalization what we have globalization two hundred fifty years ago but it led to all sorts of problems here's a shot of a lot of drive in the connecticut river in around one thousand eleven but our trees went down the rivers and then went north to canada to after we had cut the trees we planted wheat wheat grew well for a while but then  because we had cleared the trees and the rains came the you miss flow downhill into the rivers and we replaced them with cheap it was called an aristocracy of sheep and it was grazing all over the state give you an idea of how extensive sheep flock was this map shows the concentration of sheep by town in vermont meet hundred thirty five the dark spots are towns that had between one thousand and five thousand sheep the gray or the slash line spots are towns with more than five thousand sheep were here in jericho i think you're close one of those towns and richmond  been that had more than five thousand sheep in around eighteen thirty five and that had tremendous environmental effects i want to nurture diversity and i used to see this photo hanging in a bank this is from the post square in  see the hills are still the new good in one thousand nine thousand nine hundred twenty they also cut the trees to stoke the steam engines that would pull and they'd stop every twenty miles to reload and of course it did have an effect and jeff will talk about this because in twenty seven we had the great flood which was unfortunately not the last great floods we had in her mind it largely happened in central for my in part because we didn't have that f simpler structure to protect our trees so unbelievably this is what j p was like in one thousand nine hundred four when the national park service was serving it as a potential part of a national park up there that could have been from twenty to fifty thousand acres but it could have been up to a million acres and they would vastly change the state well that's take a look at that because j p is vastly changed today and this is from the newport hundred sixty six when wire houser timber company owned a pig and they blew off thirty feet of the summit to build the tram house that exists today it was that act and a few others that stirred the consciousness of  and vermont environmental spring began when great environmental activism occurred in our state crisis is a painting of camel's hump which we know is a very precious place well one reason is now here's a photo of mt man field that i took i think this photo is very interesting because we're all accustomed to seeing that sort of light that ruler line of snow across the mountain but this illustrates to me the sensitivity of our high altitude were filming today reported to the governor's commission on the environment and he called for limitations on development in the high altitude so this time he said twenty five hundred feet he actually felt that that line should have been but politics dictated it go up things are happening in vermont developed is happening without real much without much consideration and it got so bad that in this tabletop book that was done by vermont life  hundred sixty nine the editor walter hard jr wrote an essay at the end he said shelford mountains dot vermont was sopa siege by development that even vermont life magazine couldn't threatens enormous outlying communities quickly built with little thought given to habitat little thought given to storm water and solid waste and then davis went down there and this was the article streams and the rivers that went through stuff and eventually governor davis named the commission that was to get the commission and our act to fifty was born but act two fifty didn't solve all the problems we still had ski area development ski sprawl intrusion into the higher terrain and in the one nine hundred eighty s when madeleine kunin was governor she was involved with the battle over mont particularly with killing and of course then there's this j p where they plop down this water park that looks like it's you know from outer space and you can see where the mountain is blown off now i talk about baseline scenarios and shifting baselines scenarios and i think this celebrates you know where this is one take a guess well now lol wow you know so ten years ago even more recently maybe five years when a lot of mountain looked at this this was the normal i would pass it quite often and this is what lone mountain was and then somebody came up with a proposal to do something up there and it was the industrial wind plant proposed by green mountain power and they began to intrude on the landscape blasting bulldozing and this is what lowell mountain looks like  and i want to close with just this before and after photo because that illustrates what i was talking about at the beginning this shifting baseline syndrome people that knew the old bald mountain  misfit but people who see it for the first time think this is normal and if somebody proposes something like this for another mountain of say well what's so different about things that's what they do in vermont and that's one of the reasons we're here and we have this panel because we're trying to raise consciousness about the importance of our mountains mountains define what for money is and i don't think you can go anywhere in vermont and not somewhere so that's our environmental history now jeff yes first of all tell me a little bit about yourself oh i'm a i'm a civil engineer i have an undergraduate degree from rutgers university and a master's degree from the university was concert in madison hydro and we primarily design water resource management systems we complete studies we do investigations and we design stormer systems well how did you get involved in group actually i've come up to vermont on a number for a number of years for vacations but i was contacted by energised vermont and vermonters for a clean environment back in two thousand proposals on the table at the time and i was actually asked to come up and spend a week and hike several of the different mountains where wind projects were proposed including deerfield  lol i went up to sheffield that was already pretty much under construction almost completed we even went down to into deerfield and hiked up into that area and into the national forest and took a look around there now i'm i'm going to show you a picture this was taken an eighteen round hundred seventy it's a eally village which is in eastern vermont and it's near the top or mine that used to be over there and there used to be trees on those hillsides and they were just stripped the smelting operation hill them there they're coming back slowly i'm showing you this picture because i want to go back in history and a lot of her miners know george you know the name george  i don't think any living modern ever knew him but marsh is famous for the book he wrote man and nature which came out i think in eight hundred sixty four but in eight hundred forty seven he addressed the agricultural society of rockland county and he wrote this and i want you to listen to this and look at that photo and then talk to me about you know just high altitude environments and the importance of protecting them and woodlands retain a large proportion of the falling rains and get back to more easter in time of drought by a bachelor ation or through the medium of springs but then he went on recognizing what had happened in vermont and there were places that looked like flow swiftly over the smooth ground washing away the vegetable mold as they seek their natural outlets fill every ravine with a torrent and convert every river into an ocean now given our experience with tropical storm irene twenty eleven seems like a very prophetic thing that march said eighteen forty seven but it's still important today and i hear the term headwaters right what does that mean well ahead water is essentially the what we call the source water of pretty much all rivers streams rivers lakes in the ocean it's centrally at the top end of a watershed and it's where the rain drops fall they run into run over the land surface until they get to the point where they concentrate into channels and in those areas they'll form small little reveal its  weapons just a lot of little pocket areas that collect in there very small little tiny watershed so collect them individually they're very small but collectively they can take up the majority of the river system it's  so they're very important cumulatively the impact on those headwaters areas can have a negative effect on the health of rivers downstream and wetlands downstream as well and because some of the locations in headwaters don't have to just be in mountains they can be pretty much down anywhere in the on the landscape that's at the edge of a watershed but on mountains there are particular particularly sensitive because of the short growing season at the high altitude if you see that photo i think it was of miamians field where you saw the snow line up on the top of the mountain and so the growing season is much shorter on the top of those mountain so it takes a lot longer for vegetation to actually make a comeback on in those areas so they're much more susceptible to impacts so if you have a loss or loss of a standard trees it's going to take much longer for those trees to grow back then down in the valley areas i really like what you said about sort of hum effect i mean we have a lot of mountains we have a lot of headwaters and i've seen maps of watersheds and it looks like veins stretching out into the mountain tops and then coming down collecting th falls everywhere i was on the select board in essex and i learned something about something called impervious surface with my thought was about my brain but i guess it's it's about these hard surfaces from which water runs off and i heard about t m d l's which is a new buzzword maximum billy loads because we've got the problems with lake champlain so i mean is that every community for itself out there are there  rules by which you have to play the question and that is a good question in the storm order is whenever we develop a piece of land and we change the hydrology or add asphalt or concrete or even a building and add what we call impervious services impervious services are essentially any any area of manmade land that actually water can no longer infiltrate and what that does is it actually is is there is there over the years there's a been a a large impact of urban development as well as agricultural development as well on the on our water resources and so the clean up that's where the clean water water and basically through the clean water act and as a part of that has to develop a number of different rules and regulations that controls land development so that that land of element mitigates the impact of land development on water quality i see many gates as opposed to eliminates because it really doesn't eliminate the impact there are standards that must be abided by but they're not they're basically you have to they're all what i call actually what is called  the industry best management practices best management practices are basically the state of the yard storm or management types of systems that are used to control storm water runoff well word and i said i'd like to get it across folks to we're just not talking about industrial wind installations mountaintops and there are a number of ways that are our mountains i believe it's my point of view oh are are under siege again we have ski area sprawl water parks we have high priced real estate with that with the roads spreading over the flanks of the mountains and so i have a photo here i think it was taken by  with your head down i'd like to know what that means and if you can look at the photo two of this is lol mountain what does that say to you in terms of infrastructure and its effect on this  to me what is going on what the proposed project is at least in my realm of water resource engineering i'm looking at runoff in a road is a road is a road and so whether you're going up on a ridge line or you're going you have a road to access a ski resort or you have a road access a residential development or an industrial facility they all require specific types of infrastructure and so one of the things that for example on a ridge line wind or in s that matter there's a lot of infrastructure that has to be constructed in brought up to that area to basically get construct the facility well is that an example yes that is and i got behind this convoy and there was this thing and you know opened up my sunroof and stuck up my camera just firing away so this is just maybe the base of one of those four hundred fifty six foot winter is from base to top tip so it has to get up there somehow so that is correct in so that in order to build these structures you actually have to build a series of roads that actually extract sess the ridge line you have to not only construct the roads to bring up the turbines and the in the towers you also need those roads to it to be able to accommodate cranes to lift and construct those but regardless there are large pieces of equipment so you literally have to build a road or a road you could probably take your car on and drive up on if you wanted to some of these are about between thirty and sixty feet with the not including you know grading inside slopes and in order to accommodate the slopes for these these facilities to get those vehicles up because they can't go up a very steep slope you actually have to excavate fill and you have the blast and basically  inscribe into the hillside essentially a road system that is able to get the equipment up the mountain and by doing that that's what triggers the storm order rules because you're now changing the land cover your you're triggering the regulatory requirements that are or mandated by vermont to implement to basically take wrote the runoff that's now going to be generated from those roads and control it treat it reduce its potential flooding impact before it leaves the site well i want to go into the different ways you control storm water but before we knew that i would like to publicly on environmental history topics and i  show some of the photos of the blasting up at low mountain and there are some things that are much worse than this photo i've showed you and somebody got up in the audience once and they said to me gosh you're just showing the worst of it i mean this stuff gets you know it gets heals and and so when you do this this is something that doesn't heal itself overnight does it not really and that's why you have to install storm or control because if you knew it was going to be a temporary impact then you wouldn't necessarily need any type of storm or control so the storm water controls are there because of it needs to control the permanency of the changes that are occurring in these areas so if you look at the foot this photo it essentially shows these turbine pads that have been feet correct that's pretty serious stuff yes yes so it's a well i mean serious i guess is is is that is not actually a technical term but it's a relatively large excavation that you have to promote and plus when the roads are going up and you have to cut into the hillsides it actually creates what we call hydrologic modification so if you look at this photo you essentially are are seeing a road being called into the landscape and when when that occurs it actually changes the flow pattern and if you can envision water running down the hillside but once you put a road cut in there it intercepts that flow and change the direction of that water now and so now it runs down in needs to be collected managed and discharged in a way that actually again mitigate impacts on downstream water resources so i don't want to get too technical here because i'm i'm a historian i'm not an engineer i'm not a scientist but i've heard discussion recently i think there was a supreme court case in vermont recently talked about practice featuring vermont in just does a little bit of to step back a little bit stormwater treatment practices or what we call s d p's in the industry or centrally those methods to intercept storm water collect manage it in some manner either either clean it infiltrated or reduce its peak flow going down stream before it's like go and that's that's what we call it as to you pay your b n p a best management practice level spreaders were proposed for lol for the specific purpose from power to to try to minimize the amount of disturbance that was going on in the mountain the issue was those level spreaders on steep slopes are have been found through resources that we researched throughout the united states and through the not only individual states but the federal government that highly and strongly recommend that level spreaders are not used on steep slope because of the difficulty of which it is to maintain them in a perfectly level manner if you look at the table it would have actually have to be completely level that's why they call it a level spreader and out of the field it's very difficult to achieve that and so those are what called alternate treatment practices which is what the state of the state of vermont has a section in them in the storm order management annual to propose that kind of practice the supreme court said this was ok  the recent decision the peel i believe by energize for mine it was appealed up to the supreme court on the issue of the use of not just the level spreaders but i think the approach that the level spreaders were approved at the agency of natural resources and there were some interpretations that were made that basically said they gave deference and it's pacifically quotes the supreme court gave quote deference to the agency of natural resources and they always give deference to the agency of natural resources just as the public service board did and so therefore they felt that the agency had the ability to interpret the the the rule for the installation of these levels brings in their experts i knew of a physician who told me the experts always disagree so who gets the benefit of the doubt what experts get the benefit of the doubt when you go before either regulatory agency or in this case support well that's a good question experts tend to disagree on a number of issues and it's because a lot of times there's different ways to interpret the rules from at least not  the rules but the engineering approaches and it's really the experts who get up and say here's why i think there's a concern or here's why i think that this is a good thing this is why the work and there's a number of different ways that  these the engineering designs can be built in constructed there's also different ways that things can be analyzed and so there can be differences of opinion on how things are it's just like you know when you win when you see on t a you know a court case and you have two different experts saying you know you know testifying about what actually happened and they have to convince a regulatory body or a judge or a jury  why they're correct do you do you think i mean this is subjective and i don't want to put you at speed c local folks or whatever somebody challenging a project do they have  higher burden of proof when they go before a state agency that they have to overcome sort of the momentum that the developer might bring to the agency again that's that's a that's a tough question to answer it  depends i don't know you know i don't know what was going on in the head of the public service border or the or the supreme court so i can't make you know i don't know that answer ok i can tell you that the decision did give specifically stated they gave date deference to a in are as as the expert for the state so in that on court case it basically said that we believe that they have the right to make that a billet that that interpretation well i guess before we turn to sue  after irene u k i see many publications that come out and i don't think you know week without seeing some press release from the age of natural resources a governor's office and that word is resilienc and i hear it so much it usually describes us you know we're resilient we're going to recover from these floods we're going to build systems that so these things don't intrude on us but you're  forests our plants but our fauna our wildlife in the mountains of vermont you know when you hear that term resiliency you might think of it differently then all those press releases that come out to me about that well indeed i do and all appropriate humility i'm i'm i'm very concerned about the industrial footprint on our higher elevation habitat in throughout new england because that it seems to me is compromising the very hope for resiliency that these habitats might have in the future there's no question that climate change is real there's no question that it's going to wreak havoc on ecosystems from now on that's just the reality that we have to live with and but to then try to propose that we're going to become energy independent or we're going to make green energy whatever that is by despoiling still more core habitat flies in the face of reason core habitats need to be large expansive whole and the word is an fragment you know if you take the turkey platter out of the covered and you get ready to put the wonderful meal on it and you carry it into the dining room and drop it it doesn't function anymore it doesn't imperative that ecologists and conservation biologist all over the world get we cannot continue to fragment habitats so what are we doing with all of this vermont i haven't a clue but it's wrong  well you and i have both been in vermont for about the same period of time you've spent much more time in these core habitats than i have and i talked about this you know shifting base line yeah in areas so you know and you've been all over the this for us i know you have a tremendous photocells well even before that i will say a quick answer that question is i'm just dumb struck at the fact that across the nation not just here in vermont but across the nation and  that matter canada to central and south america too i can't speak for the other side of the globe this this push to go grab that energy in whatever form is really gobbling up a lot of land that's all you know it's all well intentioned you might say but it's really mr directed in the sense that it's destroying a lot of habitat and i have some photos photographs here to sort of set the context for what i'm going to say and then and then really get at this issue from from a variety of perspectives first of all this little bear this little bear is an animal it's a living creature and i think all too often in this process of deciding how we're going to get our energy and how we're going to continue to live effectively in appropriately to use energy wastefully odd infinite and we forget this little guy we forget that it has needs to it and all of the other living things out there in the ecosystem have needs they have energy needs and will get it that this bobcat the same this bobcat here looking fearful is going to help me introduce a point that i think is really important for us to remember and that is that energy animals have energy budget to us and if they don't mind their energy budgets they perish basically they're there they're not going to make it one of the things that gets in the way of an animal's energy budget maintenance is if it's with respect to our impacts our perturbations our intrusions is that if it's continually frightened it's blowing energy in ways that it can ill afford especially in the hard seasons when food is not always assured everybody in vermont knows about the need to stay out of the deer winter range areas in the winter when they're sequestered in these soft what have a test trying to trying to just save their energy trying not to use metabolically use what stored on their backs and fat well all of these animals are the same it's not just the white tail the moose all of these animals really don't do well when they're continually harassed by us so roads up into the middle of our remote mountains or anywhere in america i'll demonstrate a minute fly the face of reason if what we're trying to do is to help these animals live normal peaceful lives as best they can i mean there's danger out there without our roads and i'm not going to minimize that but we can't add to it the way that we are caribou for example  this caribou here are looking fearful on this caribou in the woods caribou throughout the world are declining and i just attended a caribou international caribou conference and white horse and lo and behold paper after paper author after authors to crying the degree to which habitat loss and habitat intrusions by the human animal are are big part of that decline in cariboo numbers of always come up and down but not that not at the rate they are today in some scientists are really worried that they will not recover the way they have been able to in the past in today's world because our insults are perturbations are just urban centers are so ever present in their lives that they they just won't be able to to make it this wrote i was all up in could back when i took this picture of the caribou turning right at the right at the road sign later on you'll you'll see that animals don't always stop at these  these animals are a bane to turn rights on but notice they're running and here again this next shot they're running pal now because one vehicle has entered this world called the trends take a highway and they're scared to death and how many runs like that can they take in the winter season when they're already struggling and have that not really affect them in ways of releasing these elk here these elk lizards are normal for elk and wyoming or moose and vermont or deer in vermont that's normal but if you combine that with constant harassment on our part how much are we predisposing these animals to not having enough when they run out this bull here that's all skin and bones will never stand up again he's run out of his and his energy budget maybe he blew it during the rut but maybe he was also harassed in ways that you  know ultimately got him down so i like to think this meal there i call this picture mountain man i like to think this animal really symbolizes what i hope for for wildlife everywhere vermont included that big wild habitats will remain places for a number of species in north america pronghorn and and mule deer in particular go from miles and miles away to get to this place because winter is less hard felt there and now suddenly they're confronted with all these wells and and every one of them has a road to it and every one of them is visited every day and and so you have and like i said twenty five thirty five years ago you couldn't you couldn't walk on that land it's analogous to know there's a shifting baseline here that i think some of our early pioneering environmental leaders in vermont would would really be very troubled by so the last two pictures in this series i mean what are the chances of being out there and having to dearer in the critical winter habitat run in front of an oil truck well to today's world the chances are great and that shouldn't be and i really feel that my role in this today and forevermore not on behalf of keeping track but just simply on behalf of myself and my environmentally conscious dictates that we've got to get busy each and every vermonter it's got to stand up and and let their voices be heard that this is not what we want for her anywhere in the nation i think something that really sort of frightens me scares me a little bit more than a little there was a  a special news event at the university of vermont the other day talking about the potential effect of climate change on vermont and and what could happen afterwards one of the what well it's what that do to provide it's well you ask yourself that question everybody in the audience ask yourself that question you know we're not just talking about the facilities themselves but we must remind ourselves we're talking about the transmission lines that are going to carry that energy hither and yon and if you've seen maps of what that projected footprint would look like that that'll scare you so you know that's we're not just talking about massive establishment of wind or solar we're talking about how it's going to move around well you know i know you've got some other photos you want to share with folks but i want to introduce it this way i won't mention the political candidate who said this two years ago it was one of our state white campaigns and his candidate criticized folks that opposed these kinds of things called them cavers i think committees against virtually everything but here's the thing that stuck with me says you know they're worried about a few bats in a few bears and you know i'll say all these things have no effect on babson bear habitat what's your perspective on the well i'm not a bad experience but i've been i've had in addition to boots on the ground my nose is in the books of people who know me know that i do a lot of reading the technical papers and such where bats are alone are concerned just in two thousand and twelve an estimated six hundred thousand bats were killed in one year under whose bodies were found under wind towers all right so we do know that there is a severe issue with bats and it appears to be keyed to by grating bats are really issue that has not been addressed by the industrial realisations that are building these facilities very much i mean they've hired lots of students and other biologists to go out and count the dead bodies under the towers and and so on but and i'm not saying there isn't some effort to think about how to do things differently but what troubles me is we've built these facilities and these mortalities are being felt now and that coupled with white kno syndrome is a significant mortality affecting bats just in the northeast alone for example where white nose syndrome is the most hard felt so it seems to me crazy to even consider building these things  in knowing what we know about what bats are already having to experience in terms of losses can you just explain a little bit more about white nose syndrome i've read about it and i heard it's had and it's quite an effect it has bad yeah it  affected millions of bats at this point across across wherever it exists in north america all over at this point now not just restricted to new york where it was first found and new england it's moving westward and southward  and is all over so it's it's a very very serious disease that has cost millions of bats their lives all i can say you know bats if you look at look at the here's the dead bad under the turbine and that's very very sad to look at but what you realize in these next couple of inches is that it's not just bats it's birds that are being impacted and  and when these animals are flying by the thousands of along along their migration or pathways for example which happened to correspond many times with these ridge line corridors that you're really putting them in harm's way to put these things up there and we know i think scientists all over the world know that but it's not limited to bats and birds i mean there are there was a recent article that came out that apparently in denmark  a fur farm lost sixteen hundred make practically overnight after the installation of a win facility and apparently the the mink had miscarriages and many mink that were being born dead had no eyeballs and it was horrible and they've also acknowledged in other cases or cultural cases that the installation of these wind farms has caused the animals in their care whether it's to name two different very different examples to become aggressive and to fight with one another and to cause harm to one another and so on so these are just a few things that we know about there's hundreds of other things that we don't know about and i  for one don't feel that it's our right really to continue to despoil the natural world while we continue to use energy and appropriately i would argue that before we do any of this we should be aggressively exploring how are we conserving the natural resources that we've been so wasteful with in the past i have question maybe for both you and i'm not a climate change denier and i believe a lot of the research i read one of the i've heard two terms around dealing with climate change one is mitigation the other is adaptation also mitigation for a minute you sure you know mitigation means but but you have talked about this new kind of renewal energy or second panel discussion tom butler who works for the foundation for deep ecology and he lives here in vermont in huntington published a book on what energy sprawl and he talks about a lot of renewable energy as opposed to some of the  has to spread over acres or across mountain tops and this same wind entrepreneur has said publicly that he he thinks there could be two hundred miles of oh right  as is and so they have a certain treatment target that they have to meet so the cumulative impact of a lot of development can have eventually negative effects on  their infrastructure to are there that is they are a structure there foreign to the environment and i mean i mean it would be good business for civil engineers if i imagine if we had two hundred miles of ridge top wind machine but that's i just philosophically i'm sorry again i'm not a scientist philosophically i wonder if we're just chasing our tail thinking we can mitigate or use tesla concern the idea that we could trade for the trade off of the ruination of one habitat we could preserve another you know for some might have a positive ring to it but how about the animals what do they think if the if animals over hundreds and hundreds of years have gotten used to using ridge lines as preferred travel routes for local and distant migrations how's it feel to not have that anymore are they are they going to get it and  left at some point and go down into a valley and go across that conserve space i don't mean to sound too cynical here but i i don't think that's the answer i really think the answer is to stay out and if we want resili we want wildlife so tough to hope to be able to endure the horrible changes that we have brought to help on this planet i think we do we need to let evolution do it we need to let time do it we need to let space do it there needs to be space for these animals to play out the successful scenarios that they're going to need to pull off in order to survive as a species over over space and time but we just have a few minutes left  and i'd like to just turn it over to you each one of you individually and i may add a few words in closing jeffrey if you were to sum up your experience with this in vermont if you have any cautionary notes or not these projects can be built and really minimize impacts on the on the surrounding water resources the regulated water resources which is what they're supposed to these stupid storm water features are supposed to protect  and right now yeah i have a i have some disagreement with how some of the approaches are taken and i think with hopefully with a revision of some of the stormwater rules and regulations that that will improve but it's going to take time soon some closing thoughts from you wisdom well whatever i can really think it's got to come from the people we we in vermont as we always have got to just i think more clearly about what we want for our state what we want for our culture and you know not just our human culture but our but our natural resource base and we need to be heard we need to take action i think a lot of people have been fooled into believing that this is the right answer for vermont and that this is the right answer for the nation to be doing all this stuff whether it's wind farms or fracking or you know solar solar farms in the desert well that might sound like  easy answer but ask the inhabitants of the desert you know we need to stop taking from nature and we need to start giving back thank you and thank you both for being here today jeff i know you travel a little distance to get  panels of p keepers i think you're the only one and then and everyone know that i think it's time for to say i want to thank channel fifteen again for for hosting us for really happy to be here and if i i just want to leave a few words as the moderator i showed those photos of camel's hump and mount mansfield dean davis's actions in the sixty's as sixty's i call that vermont environmental spring you know we hear about arab spring in the in the shoots sometimes take and then they wither in my great concern here in vermont is the organizations like p keepers i hope we can keep it alive and if you want to learn more about what p q does you can go to its web site i think it's peak keepers dot org and if you have any questions you can direct it to us then and go out get away from you can try pleasing your cars in stands in this beautiful environment we call home and think about what we talked about today thank