Today we launched our ship from a small, deep-water lakeside village in the southern part of Lake Champlain. We have been cruising slowly northward, taking our time to get to know our new vessel. In selecting our crew from among our large family, we have been careful to include several with sailing experience. My daughter, Amelia, still a practicing biochemist at the age of 75, had sailed around the world in the late-2020s on a three-year educational and scientific expedition. My son-in-law, Queequeg, a retired registered nurse, had done a good bit of sailing in the Caribbean while sowing his wild oats, also in the late 2020s. (In fact, Anna and Queequeg met when her boat put in at an island where he was living and tending bar.) Both of my great-grandchildren, Uncas and Sacajawea, are accomplished and powerful canoeists, having spent years white-water canoeing on the Connecticut and White Rivers. However, none of us are really seasoned sailors, so we all have a lot to learn.
We have decided to keep to the middle of the lake, especially in its lower half where it is quite narrow, in order to avoid being recognized by anyone along the shore who might have met any of us over the many years our family has lived and worked in New Vermont. Still, with our professional quality holocam, we are able to capture detailed images of the shore communities and the land beyond them. For example, the holocom you may now be viewing is of the landscape on the southern portion of the eastern shore of the lake.
If you are successfully receiving our holocom, you should be able to hear my voice and see the 3-D holographic images we are holcoming. In case you are simply reading a transcript of our holog, you will have to imagine what I am describing of the landscape along the shores of Lake Champlain in New Vermont.
You should be able to see three important geographic features of the land:
1) a chain of bare, reddish-brown mountains etched against the clear blue sky
2) lush green farmlands that run almost to the edge of the lake
3) the shoreline, blanketed by a nearly continuous settlement consisting of block-long three and four-story red and grey granite buildings, running virtually the entire length of the lake.
Ship's Holog: June 2078, fragment #11
If you are successfully receiving our holocom, you should be able to hear my voice and see the 3-D holographic images we are holcoming. In case you are simply reading a transcript of our holog, you will have to imagine what I am describing of the landscape along the shores of Lake Champlain in New Vermont.
What should immediately strike you as different about what you are seeing compared with the holograms you have probably seen of New Vermont is that the mountains you see here are entirely treeless. The thick green forests that gave these mountains and our nation their now-anachronistic names (the Green Mountains of Verre Mont), have, as I mentioned in a previous holocom, long since been cut down. In place of trees, you should be able to see the wind and solar energy farms that literally blanket the mountaintops, leading many a wag to refer to them satirically as the High Tech Mountains.
About 100 meters below the mountain ridge, you should be able to see large plateaus on which are situated New Vermont’s famous granite processing complexes, dozens of inter-connected buildings constructed with a sturdy aluminum alloy and topped by a maze of what look like antique Erector Set-constructions for giants. These are the wind and solar-powered hoists and stone-crushers in which granite slag is made into crushed stone, used in place of petroleum-based asphalt to pave roads and streets throughout the eastern half of our continent. The lightweight, but durable construction materials enable the buildings and cranes to be disassembled and lowered each year as granite removal causes the plateaus to slowly but inexorably creep down the mountainside (several meters per year).
The buildings beneath the crushers are the sheds in which generations of skilled granite workers, using low-energy, hydraulic machines, have carved uniform granite building blocks of specified and carefully-measured sizes out of the rough granite hoisted out of the dozens of quarries that dot the mountainsides. Like the crushed stone, these blocks are used throughout the eastern half of the continent; in this case, in place of energy-intensive building construction materials like concrete and steel. Over the past fifty years, the granite mountains of New Vermont have helped make our nation one of the wealthiest east of the Rocky Mountain divide.
Note what appear to be narrow shiny stripes running from the granite sheds straight down the steep grassy mountainsides. These are actually sheet metal chutes down which are spilling endless streams of crushed stone that dump out at the bottom of the mountain into a slowly moving, line of connected containerized dump-wagons. These wagons run over low-friction narrow-gauge rails, moving by a combination of anti-inertial, low-power solar electricity and the pull of powerful oxen, walking on paths alongside the rail lines that trace huge circuits from the mountain to the lakeside where barges await their loads, and then back to the base of the mountains for another load.
Slightly to either side of the crushed-stone chutes you should be able to see an even more unusual sight: the rocks on the mountains appear to be moving slowly downhill. In fact, they are… on huge natural-fiber gravitational conveyor belts, which carry the enormously heavy granite blocks. These belts, too, empty their cargo onto the dump-wagons for transport to barges, which will be drawn mechanically either down the lake and through the Champlain-Hudson canals to New York City for use along the Atlantic Seaboard or up the lake and through the canals of southern Quebec to Montreal for use in the Great Lakes Federation. If you look closely, you’ll see that running along the edge of the lake, as far as the eye can see, is a wide crushed-stone road, lined with enormous pulleys and cables, used by the drovers and their oxen to pull these barges up and down the lake.
What should immediately strike you as different about what you are seeing compared with the holograms you have probably seen of New Vermont is that the mountains you see here are entirely treeless. The thick green forests that gave these mountains and our nation their now-anachronistic names (the Green Mountains of Verre Mont), have, as I mentioned in a previous holocom, long since been cut down. In place of trees, you should be able to see the wind and solar energy farms that literally blanket the mountaintops, leading many a wag to refer to them satirically as the High Tech Mountains.
About 100 meters below the mountain ridge, you should be able to see large plateaus on which are situated New Vermont’s famous granite processing complexes, dozens of inter-connected buildings constructed with a sturdy aluminum alloy and topped by a maze of what look like antique Erector Set-constructions for giants. These are the wind and solar-powered hoists and stone-crushers in which granite slag is made into crushed stone, used in place of petroleum-based asphalt to pave roads and streets throughout the eastern half of our continent. The lightweight, but durable construction materials enable the buildings and cranes to be disassembled and lowered each year as granite removal causes the plateaus to slowly but inexorably creep down the mountainside (several meters per year).
The buildings beneath the crushers are the sheds in which generations of skilled granite workers, using low-energy, hydraulic machines, have carved uniform granite building blocks of specified and carefully-measured sizes out of the rough granite hoisted out of the dozens of quarries that dot the mountainsides. Like the crushed stone, these blocks are used throughout the eastern half of the continent; in this case, in place of energy-intensive building construction materials like concrete and steel. Over the past fifty years, the granite mountains of New Vermont have helped make our nation one of the wealthiest east of the Rocky Mountain divide.
Note what appear to be narrow shiny stripes running from the granite sheds straight down the steep grassy mountainsides. These are actually sheet metal chutes down which are spilling endless streams of crushed stone that dump out at the bottom of the mountain into a slowly moving, line of connected containerized dump-wagons. These wagons run over low-friction narrow-gauge rails, moving by a combination of anti-inertial, low-power solar electricity and the pull of powerful oxen, walking on paths alongside the rail lines that trace huge circuits from the mountain to the lakeside where barges await their loads, and then back to the base of the mountains for another load.
Slightly to either side of the crushed-stone chutes you should be able to see an even more unusual sight: the rocks on the mountains appear to be moving slowly downhill. In fact, they are… on huge natural-fiber gravitational conveyor belts, which carry the enormously heavy granite blocks. These belts, too, empty their cargo onto the dump-wagons for transport to barges, which will be drawn mechanically either down the lake and through the Champlain-Hudson canals to New York City for use along the Atlantic Seaboard or up the lake and through the canals of southern Quebec to Montreal for use in the Great Lakes Federation. If you look closely, you’ll see that running along the edge of the lake, as far as the eye can see, is a wide crushed-stone road, lined with enormous pulleys and cables, used by the drovers and their oxen to pull these barges up and down the lake.
Ship's Holog: June 2078, fragment #12
If you are successfully receiving our holocom, you should be able to hear my voice and see the 3-D holographic images we are holcoming. In case you are simply reading a transcript of our holog, you will have to imagine what I am describing of the landscape along the shores of Lake Champlain in New Vermont.
Notice the grassy slopes that remain between the industrial quarries and their landscape-disrupting chutes and conveyor belts. There you can see a bucolic vision of a much earlier time: dozens of herds of goats, llamas, alpacas, and sheep, lazily grazing despite the mechanical noises surrounding them, tended by shepherds and dogs, apparently equally oblivious to the racket. These domesticated animals and those raised in the small interior valleys provide literally all the wool needed to clothe the entire citizenry of New Vermont and to provide our small nation with its second largest export, after granite and crushed stone: raw and woven wool.
Now, let’s look at the farmland in the middle of the landscape. Notice the tremendous variety of crops being grown, literally thousands of species, many of them super-hybrids developed at the University of Vermont’s (UVM) world famous College of Agriculture. There, at the turn of the century, agri-biologists and foresighted policy-makers joined forces to plan for and eventually enable the former state of Vermont to become food self-sufficient.
Most of the agricultural land you can see is divided into rectangular fenced plots that are exactly equal in area: ten by forty meters. If you look carefully, you may be able to make out the almost transparent netting wrapped around the horizontal fence pieces. This is thermo-netting, developed at UVM’s Cold Climate Agricultural Laboratory, and is used to extend Vermont’s naturally short growing season well into the autumn and to allow planting of most crops to begin in early May, when there is still lots of snow on the ground and killing-frosts occur almost every night.
In the first half of the century, of course, global warming had significantly expanded Vermont’s growing season so that it ran from March until November, but with the enormous decline in the use of fossil fuels over the past fifty years, some of the more obvious (and occasionally beneficial) effects of global warming have vanished. In fact, the northern hemisphere is currently experiencing a Little Ice Age with average annual temperatures ten degrees below what they had been in the twentieth century and the shortest growing seasons worldwide since the end of the last Little Ice Age in the mid-eighteenth century.
Despite a very short growing season, advances in cold-climate organic agriculture and the guiding neo-Socialist philosophy of New Vermont’s Constitution, which we call “Community Responsibility,” have made it possible for New Vermont to support a geographically concentrated population that has grown slowly, but steadily over the past one hundred years from 400,000 to just over four million.
New Vermont is very proud of its progressive food policies, which is why you can see that there is far less feed corn being grown in its fields than in low-population density countries like Quebec or Scandanavia where red meat is apparently still an important part of the diet. New Vermont’s non-red meat dietary policy was the result of agri-scientists recognizing in the late twentieth century that corn (needed for raising beef) was the ultimate unsustainable and habitat-destroying crop, due to its reliance on:
(1) petroleum-based chemical fertilizers, which put further pressure on diminishing supplies of fossil-fuels; in addition, runoff from fertilized fields polluted streams and rivers, killing off useful wildlife
(2) irrigation, which siphons off water needed for drinking and, in some areas, for food fish, like Salmon, to spawn.
Notice the grassy slopes that remain between the industrial quarries and their landscape-disrupting chutes and conveyor belts. There you can see a bucolic vision of a much earlier time: dozens of herds of goats, llamas, alpacas, and sheep, lazily grazing despite the mechanical noises surrounding them, tended by shepherds and dogs, apparently equally oblivious to the racket. These domesticated animals and those raised in the small interior valleys provide literally all the wool needed to clothe the entire citizenry of New Vermont and to provide our small nation with its second largest export, after granite and crushed stone: raw and woven wool.
Now, let’s look at the farmland in the middle of the landscape. Notice the tremendous variety of crops being grown, literally thousands of species, many of them super-hybrids developed at the University of Vermont’s (UVM) world famous College of Agriculture. There, at the turn of the century, agri-biologists and foresighted policy-makers joined forces to plan for and eventually enable the former state of Vermont to become food self-sufficient.
Most of the agricultural land you can see is divided into rectangular fenced plots that are exactly equal in area: ten by forty meters. If you look carefully, you may be able to make out the almost transparent netting wrapped around the horizontal fence pieces. This is thermo-netting, developed at UVM’s Cold Climate Agricultural Laboratory, and is used to extend Vermont’s naturally short growing season well into the autumn and to allow planting of most crops to begin in early May, when there is still lots of snow on the ground and killing-frosts occur almost every night.
In the first half of the century, of course, global warming had significantly expanded Vermont’s growing season so that it ran from March until November, but with the enormous decline in the use of fossil fuels over the past fifty years, some of the more obvious (and occasionally beneficial) effects of global warming have vanished. In fact, the northern hemisphere is currently experiencing a Little Ice Age with average annual temperatures ten degrees below what they had been in the twentieth century and the shortest growing seasons worldwide since the end of the last Little Ice Age in the mid-eighteenth century.
Despite a very short growing season, advances in cold-climate organic agriculture and the guiding neo-Socialist philosophy of New Vermont’s Constitution, which we call “Community Responsibility,” have made it possible for New Vermont to support a geographically concentrated population that has grown slowly, but steadily over the past one hundred years from 400,000 to just over four million.
New Vermont is very proud of its progressive food policies, which is why you can see that there is far less feed corn being grown in its fields than in low-population density countries like Quebec or Scandanavia where red meat is apparently still an important part of the diet. New Vermont’s non-red meat dietary policy was the result of agri-scientists recognizing in the late twentieth century that corn (needed for raising beef) was the ultimate unsustainable and habitat-destroying crop, due to its reliance on:
(1) petroleum-based chemical fertilizers, which put further pressure on diminishing supplies of fossil-fuels; in addition, runoff from fertilized fields polluted streams and rivers, killing off useful wildlife
(2) irrigation, which siphons off water needed for drinking and, in some areas, for food fish, like Salmon, to spawn.
Ship's Holog: June 2078, fragment #13
If you are receiving our holocom, you should be able to hear my voice and see the 3-D holographic images we are videoing. In case you are simply reading a transcript of our holog, you will have to imagine what I am describing of the landscape along the shores of Lake Champlain in New Vermont.
Finally, notice the third major feature of this part of Lake Champlain: the now-familiar chain of granite buildings that line the shore. These buildings contain a mix of residential, retail, and workplace space, enabling most of its residents to live, shop, work, and spend their leisure time all within walking distance of each other. Residents of these buildings who work in the quarries or tend herds catch a lift on the rail cars to and from work in the hills and mountains.
The large sign over the wharf area tells us that this is the river town of New Brandon. The original town of Brandon is actually some fifteen kilometers inland from here, but that town is now sparsely populated, serving primarily as a quarry outpost at the foot of the mountains. It is also a depot for the occasional pack-trains that carry goods through the Brandon Gap to the shepherd and logging communities of the Randolph Valley and return laden with wood for furniture-making and wool for spinning and weaving in the workshops of the lake communities.
In our next holocom, rather than my telling you about life in New Brandon, I’m going to let my young (45 year-old) grandson, Noah, show it to you, as he and several other expedition members take a trip ashore to take on needed provisions for our journey.
Finally, notice the third major feature of this part of Lake Champlain: the now-familiar chain of granite buildings that line the shore. These buildings contain a mix of residential, retail, and workplace space, enabling most of its residents to live, shop, work, and spend their leisure time all within walking distance of each other. Residents of these buildings who work in the quarries or tend herds catch a lift on the rail cars to and from work in the hills and mountains.
The large sign over the wharf area tells us that this is the river town of New Brandon. The original town of Brandon is actually some fifteen kilometers inland from here, but that town is now sparsely populated, serving primarily as a quarry outpost at the foot of the mountains. It is also a depot for the occasional pack-trains that carry goods through the Brandon Gap to the shepherd and logging communities of the Randolph Valley and return laden with wood for furniture-making and wool for spinning and weaving in the workshops of the lake communities.
In our next holocom, rather than my telling you about life in New Brandon, I’m going to let my young (45 year-old) grandson, Noah, show it to you, as he and several other expedition members take a trip ashore to take on needed provisions for our journey.
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