Officials from the Vermont Department of Fish & Wildlife are warning that a viral video showing two black bears in a Waitsfield backyard — one of which appears to be relaxing on a hammock — isn’t as cute as it looks.

Instead, it’s an example of increasingly common human-bear encounters in Vermont, which can turn dangerous for both bears and people. In May, a game warden euthanized a bear in Underhill after it repeatedly displayed aggressive behavior toward a person.

Noah Dweck, the videographer and homeowner, told VTDigger that he was sitting in his home office on Tuesday when he heard the chains of his hammock jingling in the backyard, and he knew immediately that it was “the bears.”

With his home situated in a mountainous section of the Mad River Valley, Dweck and his wife, Kristen, are aware that they live in bear country. They have taken a number of measures to keep bears away — a piece of context viewers wouldn’t know from the video, which the Associated Press published on Wednesday. Bears have tried to get into their dumpsters, which are secured with bear bars, Dweck said, and they’ve climbed into their truck bed.

Dweck said the couple keeps the garbage and recycling secure, does not use bird feeders, and takes care not to leave food in cars or outdoor areas.

“We definitely make sure that we don’t have anything that’s attracting them,” he said. “They’re just around.”

David Sausville, who leads the department’s wildlife restoration management and research section, said he was particularly concerned to see the Waitsfield bears’ apparent lack of fear when Dweck approached them and yelled at them to leave. Dweck said he was concerned by this behavior, too.

“I came out, and was like, ‘Hey!’ and they just kind of stared at me, which is what they like to do, because they’re so used to us,” he said.

After catching a video of the bear swinging in the hammock, Dweck said he used an air horn, which he keeps handy, to scare the bears away.

Sausville said the Fish & Wildlife Department has logged more than 400 human-bear encounters already this year, and he expects this year’s number to exceed last year’s 880 recorded encounters.

Department officials recently told VTDigger that, up until 2016, members of the department anticipated roughly 130 reports of bear encounters each year. In 2020, there were 1,700 reports, and in 2022, there were 1,400.

“There’s a lot of cubs that have been brought up, through the years, with these females that know where the food is, and now they’re out on their own,” Sausville said. “So we’ve got a whole generation of bears that have learned, ‘humans mean food,’ and that’s not a good situation.”

Sausville said bears are commonly attracted most by garbage and recycling left unsecured, bird feeders left up in the summer, grills and food residue outside and compost that isn’t handled properly and creates smells.

Although seeing a bear can be exciting, scaring the bear away and making it uncomfortable near humans will help to keep the animal safer, he said. He recommends using an air horn, yelling or banging pots and pans to scare the animals.

“There have been cases out west where they’ve shown, when those communities come together, everybody — the homeowners, the restaurants with their dumpsters, the trash haulers — they’ve actually reduced substantially the number of bear incidents,” he said.

Most of that success comes from small behavioral changes on the part of humans, he said.

People can report bear encounters and learn more about preventing bear-human encounters at the Vermont Fish & Wildlife Department’s website.

Read the story on VTDigger here: After Vermont bear video goes viral, officials warn that such encounters aren’t harmless .

Cedulie Benoit-Smith is a reporter with Community News Service, part of the University of Vermont’s Reporting & Documentary Storytelling program. 

Chickens moseyed around the yard of Karen and Brian Wiseman’s Worcester house on a warm May afternoon. But the free-range flock is only one piece of the couple’s homestead just down the road from the town center. The focal point of their business, Peaceful Harvest, instead sits inside a humid, metal-lined room in the barn out back: medicinal mushrooms.

The Wisemans grow and process seven species of mushrooms — none of them psychedelic — to turn them into an array of products: powders, tinctures, baggies of dried strips. Some products are blends of species. All of them, the Wisemans say, can boost immune systems, improve memory and energy and spur a range of other healthy body functions. They’re closing in on a decade in business, and their products line the shelves of over 30 co-ops and wellness stores across Vermont — and appear in shops in 10 other states.

“We just want to help and serve others and just help people with their health and their wellness,” said Karen.

She and her husband belong to a wave of mushroom-minded businesses that have opened nationwide in the last decade, part of what’s been termed the Shroom Boom. You can see it in Vermont too, where over a dozen outfits grow and sell mushrooms.

The Wisemans haven’t always lived like this. The homestead is the ever-fruiting result of a move from Dover, New Hampshire, around 12 years ago. The Wisemans moved to Worcester looking for a lifestyle that matched their morals — or, as they might put it, morels. 

“We need to get out of this whole corporate world and show up in the world differently and try to be the change we want to see,” Karen remembered thinking.

The corporate world they left behind had yielded wild success. For nearly 20 years Karen worked as a chemical engineer for a large biopharmaceutical company, while Brian worked in supply chain management. When the couple decided to start their family, they were comfortable financially, Karen said. Brian was able to be a stay at home dad in their large, seacoast house. 

But when the Wisemans looked at the world around them at the start of the 2010s, they thought, “Oh, our world is going to hell in a handbasket pretty quickly,” Karen recalled. 

“We didn’t want to participate in it anymore,” she said. “We wanted to get closer to the land, and honestly, we want(ed) to raise some chickens.”

So they moved to rural Vermont. They had no grand plans of starting what would become their farm, said Karen. Mushrooms came into the picture as a hobby: Brian had taught himself how to grow the fungi while in New Hampshire.

As they settled in Worcester, the couple wondered what role they could play in their new community, what skills or knowledge they could contribute, Karen said. “We at the time realized nobody was growing mushrooms year-round,” she said.

So they turned the hobby into a business. The Wisemans found it natural to transfer their skills to the clean, controlled, indoor environments that finicky fungi demand.

Karen completed a three-year certificate in clinical herbalism from the Vermont Center for Integrative Herbalism, which operates out of Goddard College’s campus in Plainfield. She was skeptical at first, she said, but soon came to appreciate how many ailments could be addressed by natural products, rather than those synthesized in a lab. 

Few small-farm families can support the lifestyle without at least one partner doing other work, and the Wisemans are no exception. Karen explained, “I don’t know of any farmers that farm where somebody in the family doesn’t have an off-farm job. Yeah, we can all hope that feeding ourselves and the kinds of work that farmers and agriculture does really becomes a true value to us again, where we value it like all the other garbage in society. But we’re not there yet.”

She works remotely with flexible hours in regulatory and compliance for a medical device manufacturing company. Brian works full time growing mushrooms. 

The couple now feels at home in Worcester. In fact, a neighbor helped build a sterile lab in the Wisemans’ home for his senior project with the Central Vermont Career Center.

The Wisemans handle all the steps of the mushroom-growing process at home. With the help of their barn and a second facility just down the street, the Wisemans grow, fruit, inoculate, process and package their mushrooms. Their kids are now old enough to help with the work, but this can be hard between track and theater schedules.

About 65% of Peaceful Harvest’s business is wholesale with local co-ops, said Karen. Hunger Mountain Coop in Montpelier is a proud carrier of Peaceful Harvest mushrooms. The co-op’s wellness manager Crystal Arellano said the market helps local producers get on the shelves even if it means the co-op gets lower profit margins. 

“The co-op is serving the community. That’s what we’re here for,” Arellano said. “And for our members, our producers, all of us, this is a center for us to share items. So we want to make sure that those companies have a place here and have a spot. And we also want them to keep their business at the same time. So, being able to highlight their items and give it at a price that’s reasonable for the customer too. It’s nice, because when people come into the store, they can look around and know that a lot of these things are coming from Vermont.”

The co-op features products from three other mushroom companies, Arellano said, but Peaceful Harvest is the only one to use both mycelium and mushrooms in its goods. Mycelium is to fungi what roots are to plants.

Additionally, Karen uses her training in clinical herbalism to teach in sessions hosted at places like Hunger Mountain. “I think most of us are pretty proud to recommend Peaceful Harvest: One because it’s local, and then two, we know how much thought has gone into each formulation,” Arellano said.

As the small business continues to grow its roots, the family has this to say, according to Karen: “There’s a reason our business is called Peaceful Harvest Mushrooms. We just want a simple, peaceful life that helps other people and that respects the natural world that we get to be a part of.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Leaving Big Pharma for mushroom farming, Wiseman family finds purpose in Worcester.

Gov. Phil Scott has allowed two of the session’s most consequential bills related to climate change to become law without his signature. One holds big oil companies accountable for the damage climate change has caused in Vermont, and another is designed to protect Vermonters from the impacts of more frequent flooding as a result of a warmer atmosphere. 

The first, S.259, named the “Climate Superfund Act” and modeled on federal Superfund law, requires the world’s biggest oil companies to pay for damages that their products have caused in the state by way of climate change. 

The law directs money owed to Vermont to be calculated based on those damages and the corresponding percentage of emissions that the company was responsible for between 1995 and 2024. Then, the money would be deposited into a Climate Superfund Cost Recovery Program Fund, designed to pay for projects that protect Vermonters from climate change and help the state adapt to it. 

While several other states have introduced similar legislation, Vermont is the first in the country to enact such a law. 

Scott has said he would prefer that Vermont only move forward in the company of other states, rather than setting precedent and inviting almost-certain legal action from oil companies with deep pockets. The litigation process is likely to be expensive.

“Instead of coordinating with other states like New York and California, with far more abundant resources, Vermont — one of the least populated states with the lowest GDP in the country — has decided to recover costs associated with climate change on its own,” he wrote in a letter to lawmakers on Thursday explaining his decision. 

“Taking on ‘Big Oil’ should not be taken lightly,” he wrote. “And with just $600,000 appropriated by the Legislature to complete an analysis that will need to withstand intense legal scrutiny from a well-funded defense, we are not positioning ourselves for success.”

Still, he said he understood “the desire to seek funding to mitigate the effects of climate change that has hurt our state in so many ways.” He noted that Attorney General Charity Clark and state Treasurer Mike Pieciak have “endorsed this policy and committed to the work it will require.”

He also found “comfort” in a measure that requires the Agency of Natural Resources to report back to the Legislature in January 2025 on the process, “so we can reassess our go-it-alone approach.”

Vermont’s effort to move forward on its own has brought the state national attention. Publications including The Guardian, The New Yorker and the The New York Times have covered the bill’s progress and potential implications, especially if other states follow suit.

An analysis from Columbia University outlines legal challenges that Vermont could face while defending the law. But supporters point to the growing field of science that is getting better at tracing changes in climate to human-caused sources. 

And, if Vermont wins the expected legal challenges, the state could receive a large amount of money, which would be funneled toward climate resilience projects, such as those that would help protect the state from future flooding. 

Ben Edgerly Walsh, a lobbyist for the Vermont Public Interest Research Group, said he expected the cost of damage in Vermont that could be attributed to oil companies to reach hundreds of millions of dollars and to “outstrip, by a couple orders of magnitude, any potential costs to defend the law.”

“What’s incredibly clear is these companies that are responsible for the climate crisis aren’t going to pay Vermont a dime unless we take an action like this,” he said. 

Scott also allowed S.213, named the “Flood Safety Act,” to go into law without his signature Thursday. The law establishes a new state permitting system for building in river corridors, sets new standards for wetland protection and increases dam safety measures. Its supporters stress the urgency of preventing many types of development that could be impacted by floodwaters or could worsen flooding downstream. 

Vermont has already seen more frequent and intense flooding in recent years, and climate change is expected to cause increased flooding in the state, which is particularly dangerous to Vermont towns located along the banks of rivers. 

Scott expressed strong opposition to the bill throughout the most recent legislative session and reiterated some of his concerns in a letter to lawmakers Thursday. 

“S.213 is another example of this Legislature’s practice of passing complex and significant policies without appropriate consideration of whether they can even be implemented,” he wrote. “Throughout the session, the Agency of Natural Resources’ subject matter experts repeatedly told legislators that the work required in the bill is not achievable in the timeline it sets.”

Secretary of Natural Resources Julie Moore had often said she wanted to make sure that Vermonters have enough time and input on the law. Her agency estimates that the permitting system, which would take effect in 2028, could apply to as many as 45,000 land parcels. 

“However, we also told legislators throughout the session, we support the goals and agree this work needs to be done,” Scott wrote in the letter. “Therefore, this bill will become law without my signature, but you can expect us to come back in January and propose a sensible timeline that is actually achievable and does this work correctly for the people of Vermont.”

In terms of the bill’s expense, Lauren Oates, a lobbyist for the Nature Conservancy who has advocated for the bill, said the status quo is expensive. 

“We’re spending tens of millions of dollars every year to help our either direct communities or our neighboring communities, as a collective tax base, recover from and respond to these events,” she said. “It’s costing us way more than we can afford.”

Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Baruth, D/P-Chittenden Central, said in a written statement that he believes, “in decades to come, S.213 will be seen as the moment Vermont got serious about preparing for the worst of climate change.”

“We came into this session with one mission above all else: meet the challenge of Vermont’s climate-related flooding issues head-on,” Baruth wrote. The bill, he said, “does just that, by addressing dam safety and high-hazard river corridors and by making wetlands and watersheds more resilient in the face of catastrophic rain events.” 

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont set to become first state in the nation to ‘make big oil pay’.

This story, by Report for America corps member Carly Berlin, was produced through a partnership between VTDigger and Vermont Public.

A few years ago, when Corinne Cooper was considering leasing a lot at a manufactured home park in Berlin, she had some sense that the park had experienced minor flooding in the past. But, she said, she didn’t receive much information from the property owner when she asked if he had done anything to mitigate the risk. 

“I was naive enough to think, ‘Well, you know, I’m only planning on being there two or three years,’” she said. Within that window, floodwaters destroyed her home, when the Stevens Branch of the Winooski River inundated the park last July.

In response to last year’s widespread flooding, Vermont lawmakers have passed new measures intended to give prospective homebuyers, renters and manufactured home purchasers more information about flood risk when looking for their next home.

Vermont now joins a growing list of states that mandate flood risk disclosure for real estate transactions, as climate change fuels more extreme weather.

The new requirements have not yet been signed into law by Gov. Phil Scott, and are part of a sweeping land use and housing reform bill that the Republican governor has suggested he may veto. Yet the flood disclosure measures proved relatively uncontroversial throughout this year’s legislative session.

Rep. Tom Stevens, D-Waterbury, one of the authors of the legislation, represents a town that is no stranger to floods. In the intervening years between Tropical Storm Irene’s destruction in 2011 and the historic floods of 2023, “there were a number of people who bought homes that had no idea that they were in a flood zone,” Stevens said.

“Those communities who were affected felt like this was something that was missing from statute,” he added.

The new measures require the seller of a property to tell a buyer whether the building is in a high or moderate-risk flood zone mapped by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The seller must also disclose whether the property flooded while they owned it – and if it faced damage from flood-related erosion or a landslide, issues that arose after last summer’s floods. Sellers will also need to reveal whether or not they maintain flood insurance on the property. And if a seller fails to tell the buyer any of this information, the legislation lays out a clear path for recourse.

Prospective buyers already have some avenues to learn about flood risk. When seeking to buy a home within FEMA’s so-called 100-year floodplain, purchasers pursuing a federally-backed mortgage will already learn from their lender that federal law requires them to take out a flood insurance policy. And the new flood disclosure requirements augment existing rules realtors follow to relay potential hazards to buyers. 

Peter Tucker, a lobbyist for the Vermont Association of Realtors, previously told VTDigger/Vermont Public that he supported the proposed disclosure measures but found them somewhat redundant, given existing realtors’ rules. Now, though, he recognizes that for buyers paying for property in cash – or the estimated 30-40% of the market not working with a realtor – the disclosure law will provide information they may not get elsewhere. 

“I think it becomes more important when you consider the entire marketplace,” he said.

That information may help homeowners better prepare for future flooding. A 2022 FEMA analysis found that states with stronger flood disclosure requirements often have higher rates of residents with flood insurance policies. Without flood insurance, Vermonters are left relying on federal disaster aid to recoup their losses – which rarely pays out as much money. 

The bill also requires that landlords disclose whether a rental sits in FEMA’s high-risk flood zone before a tenant signs a lease, and tasks the state Department of Housing and Community Development with creating a model form for property owners to use to convey this risk. The state would need to create a similar notice for lot leases in manufactured home parks. Flood damage to a manufactured home itself would need to be communicated to a buyer, too.

Cooper sees flood risk disclosure as a step in the right direction. And she hopes people will grasp the gravity of the information when they get it – even if their choices are constrained by Vermont’s acute housing shortage and skyrocketing prices.

“Just because something hasn’t flooded or flooded to a certain degree in the past doesn’t mean that it won’t in the future,” Cooper said. “I’m certainly not wanting anybody else to take those risks.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Lawmakers pass flood disclosure requirements for home sellers, landlords.

Kate Kampner is a reporter with Community News Service, part of the University of Vermont’s Reporting & Documentary Storytelling program.

When Peter Stickney walks along his cow paddocks in the morning, he notes the scattered patches of greener grass across the pasture. He knows what this means: It’s where his cows have peed. 

So when the Rich Earth Institute, a Brattleboro organization focused on turning human urine into fertilizer, approached him to be a farm partner, Stickney said it was a no-brainer. 

Stickney manages the Elm Lea Farm at The Putney School, a boarding high school in the Windham County town of the same name. For the past few years, alongside six other farms in Vermont and the Northeast, Stickney has been receiving treated urine from Rich Earth Institute to spray across the farmland at Elm Lea.

The institute, its partners and others in the sustainability industry see the practice — dubbed “peecycling” in national headlines — as a cheap, easy and less-destructive method for fertilizing plants than synthetic fertilizer and as a way for people to rethink their views on whether human waste should really go to waste. 

“We’re doing something that is somewhat disruptive and asking for people to look at things differently, change behaviors a little bit, sometimes around where they pee and why,” said Jed Blume, the institute’s development director. 

For Stickney, it looks like this: Rich Earth workers haul a tank of treated urine to the farm on a big truck before filling a smaller tank that Stickney can tow across the farm with a tractor.

“I could very quickly see how much darker green the grass was,” he said. “Dark green grass is happy grass — it means it has lots of nutrients. It’s very simple from my end, and it’s very soon that the results are visible, tangible.”

Federal funders are on board. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education program has given the group close to $325,000 since 2013 to explore urine’s role in fertilizer practices. “This is innovative research, and it could lead to something that could really help farmers in a sustainable way,” said Candice Huber, who oversees the program’s grants for projects in the Northeast pairing researchers and farmers.

The Rich Earth Institute is going on its 12th year now, and the process of collecting urine and getting it to farms has evolved over time, Blume said.

The institute says it collects urine from 230 donors, who use one of two methods provided by Rich Earth. Some donors pee into a funnel screwed to a jug, cap the container and bring it to a drop-off spot. Others own a specialized toilet with a trap installed in the bowl that connects to a separate plumbing line. Urine in the trap gets diverted to a tank that institute workers pump out once or twice a year.

Next, the raw urine is transported from the collection site to a treatment center either on or off a farm. Through storage or pasteurization, at certain temperatures, the urine is treated to use as fertilizer. “The Rich Earth Institute has developed a computer-controlled pasteurizer with a high-efficiency heat exchanger to sanitize urine quickly and energy-efficiently,” the site says. 

Finally, the urine is put on a tractor and put on crop fields.  

“There’s been an interest both economically and environmentally in finding more sustainable, equitable, environmentally friendly ways of producing fertilizer, and since our bodies are all little fertilizer factories, folks are starting to connect the dots,” Blume said. “There’s multiple incentives for practicing nutrient recycling both economically and environmentally … The plants like it.” 

Synthetic fertilizer is typically made of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium and often produced through two processes, the Haber Bosch method and traditional mining. Treated urine, which contains all three of those nutrients, is a low-cost and sustainable fertilizer source, according to Rich Earth.

One of the biggest concerns people have about urine fertilizer is pharmaceuticals, said Blume, but after doing a six-year research study with the University of Michigan and the University at Buffalo, the institute found “the pharmaceuticals don’t really accumulate in crop tissue at significant levels … Having that research energized us,” said Blume. 

Blume said the practice is becoming more socially acceptable, too. “The global fertilizer industry has seen a lot of volatility with regards to pricing and sourcing,” he said. “Once you explain what the nutrients are, they seem to be really interested in a sustainable form (and) being able to access those nutrients affordably.” 

Along with its farm partner program, the institute wants to offer people help through programs like “Urine My Garden,” which teaches gardeners to safely turn their pee into nutrients for their plants at home. And the institute is putting together a manual for farmers to do the same at scale. “We’ve developed a culture of practice around urine recycling,” said education director Julia Cavacchi. 

Part of their pitch, to organizations such as the Lake Champlain Basin Program, involves almost philosophical benefits.

“We can actually start to think about, how can we as humans come to heal the Earth with what our bodies produce in a way that is generous to the land,” Cavacchi said. “It’s a hopeful space to be working with in terms of using our bodies to heal.” 

Kimmerly Nace had a similar mindset when she and Abraham Noe-Hays created Rich Earth in 2012. Nace remembers how her neighbors would show up to her home in those early days, containers of urine in hand.

“It’s a very hopeful project,” said Nace, who no longer works at the institute. “People begin to feel that something that comes out of their body that’s normally been used as a waste can actually have value in agriculture.” 

“Farmers have been really receptive partially because farmers don’t have any ick factor around urine — it’s not different than any other animal manure for farmers,” said Nace. 

Nace is now the executive director of Brightwater Tools, a spinoff company that makes the technology Rich Earth uses to separate the urine from wastewater. Currently, she is working at a national level to shift the wastewater industry more toward nutrient recovery.

“We really did intend from the very beginning to be disruptive. To really shake it up and say wait, what are we doing here?” Nace said, comparing urine reuse to windmills and electric cars. 

Most of the grants Rich Earth has received from the USDA program are called partnership grants. The awards are capped at $30,000 and go to projects where researchers team up with a farmer to test hypotheses. Researchers set up their projects “so that they understand the needs of the farmer and how their work can really work on a farm.” 

Rich Earth has had seven partnership grants since 2013, several at close to the max funding amount.

“They had a lot of projects from us, and they’ve all been involving human fertilizer and testing it on crops and assessing the feasibility and bio-acidification,” Huber said. “Every year there’s discussion about the safety factors, the ability of using urine, as far as people who would be interested in eating products that are grown with that.” 

Huber said the federal program has full confidence in the institute’s work: “They are very good with their research in the way that they put it all together, and it’s really very thorough. All the regulations are being followed through the state. Safety-wise we trust that process.” 

Thor Retzlaff is the co-founder and chief marketing officer of Wasted*, a Burlington company that rents and sells water-saving porta-potties and toilets with eco-friendly features like bamboo toilet paper. 

Retzlaff believes in the mission behind the Rich Earth, which his firm works with.

More than a third of the company’s toilets divert urine from other waste. The company collects and sends it to Rich Earth for fertilizer. “We’ve been working with the Rich Earth Institute and Brightwater tools since the conception of our company,” Retzlaff said. “They very much inspired us to go and start this thing.”

Retzlaff, Brophy Tyree, and Taylor Zehren began the company after attending a virtual summit hosted by Rich Earth Urine in August 2020. Over the course of three days, Retzlaff said, “they essentially brought together the world’s minds to talk about how valuable piss is.” 

He and the other co-founders wanted to take what they learned about urine diversion and combine it with a catchy business model. “From there what we did was identify Vermont as the state that allowed us to turn pee into fertilizer, so it was an obvious choice to move our business to Vermont,” he said.

Wasted* toilets are easy to identify by their bright orange color.

Retzlaff said urine-based fertilizer will catch on as evidence of its benefits grows. “There’s been a lot of data aggregating in the past 15 years that essentially says, ‘Hey, this is not only more sustainable than synthetic fertilizer but it’s more productive, it’s producing greater results. It’s a localized way of retaining the nutrients in any given ecosystem.’” 

Or as Stickney, the farmer in Putney, put it: “It’s just the simplest thing in the world to do.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: The future of fertilizer? Pee, says this Brattleboro institute.

To many in Vermont, Feb. 26 was just another Monday, the first day of another week at school or at work. To Musa Muslim Yar and his wife, Zakia, it was a day they’d been dreaming of for two and a half years, when they’d again be able to put their arms around the two sons who could not evacuate Afghanistan with them in 2021.

That morning, at New York City’s John F. Kennedy International Airport, the couple and the youngest of their three sons, Shahidullah, clutched bouquets of roses as they waited for the two teenage boys to arrive on a flight from the Middle East. After 90 minutes, they saw the boys walk through a pair of sliding glass doors.

Naweedullah, 17, hugged his father and then clasped his mother. Mustafa, 16, followed suit, with both teens also kissing their parents’ hands, a sign of respect in the Afghan culture. A cellphone video of the reunion captured several of them wiping away tears.

“There are no words to describe that moment,” Musa said in a recent interview, speaking in Dari through an interpreter. “We were very happy.”

In August 2021, as the Taliban advanced into the Afghan capital of Kabul, the family — Musa, Zakia and their three sons — prepared to board a plane to the United States. Musa had been serving as a security guard at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul for nearly a decade, and feared the Taliban would throw him in prison because of his American ties. The federal government had given their family permission to relocate to the U.S.

With thousands of people trying to flee Afghanistan that August, the airport was overrun with crowds. Naweedullah and Mustafa got separated from their parents and brother, and did not make it onto the flight out of the country. But they were able to safely return to relatives.

“I’m always thinking of Afghanistan, even when I’m working, because my two children remain there,” Musa told VTDigger during a 2022 interview in Bennington, where his family has resettled.

At that time, Zakia said that the separation from her sons created a hole in her heart. The couple worked not only to support their new lives in Vermont but also to send money back to their sons, including paying for their English language lessons.

Meanwhile, multiple individuals and organizations worked to bring Naweedullah and Mustafa to Bennington through the international migration system, according to people involved in the process.

These entities included the United Nations’ International Organizaton for Migration, Vermont’s congressional delegation and the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration.

Also part of the efforts were two organizations in Vermont: the Ethiopian Community Development Council, a federally contracted resettlement agency that brought the Muslim Yars to southern Vermont, and Bennington County Open Arms, a volunteer organization that supports international resettlers in the county.

Over the past couple of years, Musa and Zakia submitted documents, agencies coordinated up and down the chain, and volunteers helped the family make calls and write letters to officials.

“It really was a lot of different people,” said Bryan Dalton, a member of Bennington County Open Arms, who was closely involved in the process of reuniting the family. “They arrived properly vetted.”

As a retired U.S. foreign service officer, Dalton acknowledged that his professional experience enabled him to help the Muslim Yars navigate the system. “I did what I did,” he said, “but I did not singlehandedly bring the Muslim Yar boys to reunite with their parents.”

The Ethiopian Community Development Council coordinated with the International Organization for Migration to get Musa and Zakia permission to meet their sons at the airport in New York, said Jack Rossiter-Munley, a staffer with the development council. Under the usual process, he said, the parents would have met their sons in Bennington or at an approved location closer to Bennington.

“Musa and Zakia, for very understandable reasons, wanted to meet the boys as soon as possible in person,” said Rossiter-Munley, who was part of the group that went to the airport.

The Muslim Yars are among at least 115,000 Afghans who’ve come to the U.S. since the summer of 2021 through the federal government’s Operation Allies Welcome, based on data from the Department of Homeland Security.

Around 500 Afghans have been resettled in Vermont during this time, according to resettlement agency figures. The Ethiopian Community Development Council operates in Bennington and Windham counties while the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants encompasses the Montpelier area, as well as Chittenden and Rutland counties.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees said Afghans now constitute one of the largest refugee populations in the world, with 5.4 million registered in Pakistan, and Iran alone.

Since moving to Bennington, Naweedullah has turned 18. He and Mustafa are now enrolled at the local high school, while 14-year-old Shahidullah continues to attend middle school.

The older boys are still adjusting to life in Vermont but said they’re happy to finally be reunited with their parents. “We were very lonely in Afghanistan without them,” Naweedullah said through an interpreter, in an interview at their house.

He and Mustafa said they now feel more hopeful about their future. They stopped formal education after the Taliban took over Afghanistan, an effort to keep a low profile and prevent themselves from being targeted because their parents and brother had fled to the U.S.

“We feel at peace here, mentally and physically,” Mustafa said in Dari. “There is no war. There is no fighting.”

Naweedullah spoke about his dreams of becoming a doctor. Mustafa wants to be a professional soccer player and Shahidullah, a police officer.

The youngest boy is pleased to have his brothers around again, saying they hang out together and he doesn’t feel so alone anymore.

Musa, 46, is now working for a local nonprofit organization, and Zakia, 38, just got licensed to start a home-based catering business. The couple has been looking forward to earning additional income through Zakia’s cooking since they’re no longer relying on government aid, as they did when they first arrived in Vermont in January 2022.

With the onset of warmer weather, the Muslim Yars are now planning family trips for the summer. They’re talking about seeing Niagara Falls and visiting Boston. 

“Life is going well,” Zakia said.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Torn apart by chaos in Afghanistan, a refugee family is reunited in Bennington.

MILTON — The Milton school board on Thursday avoided talking about the Black Lives Matter flag that has flown outside the high school for five years. But the board voted to change the flagpole policy to effectively exclude such flags.

After a three-hour long, packed meeting at the high school library, the school board voted 3-2 to allow only the United States and Vermont flags to be flown on district flagpoles. 

Whether the Black Lives Matter flag, which still flew Thursday night, will come down right away is, however, unclear.

“The policy is now officially enacted, but not a word was spoken about next steps with the BLM flag on the flagpole and the plan for removing it,” Superintendent Amy Rex said in an email Friday.

The dissenting votes came from Kumulia Long, the chair of the five-member board, and Jeremy Metcalf. Both expressed concerns about dismissing a student-led democratic process that resulted in the raising of the Black Lives Matter flag in 2019.

A group of students advocated for and followed the required process to create a detailed one-page procedure to have the Black Lives Matter flag flown at Milton High School “recognizing that struggle and the work that needs to be done,” Metcalf said.

“Flags are symbolic. So how do we symbolize that we understand these struggles are happening and there’s work to be done and we support that work?” he said.

While the flagpole policy has been discussed by the board for a year, the discussion has largely been around the policy itself, rather than specific flags, according to Rex. The Black Lives Matter flag is the only other flag that has flown along with the U.S. and Vermont flags at the high school. 

During an October school board meeting, Long, the only Black member on the board, proposed removing student interest flags from the main flagpole and flying just the United States and Vermont flags, in an effort to minimize conflict. He suggested student interest flags could be moved inside the school instead.

However, previous discussions this year have included objections to flying the Black Lives Matter flag on the district flagpole outside the high school, which is not visible from the road. That has in turn led to residents recently protesting on the street outside the high school and sending letters to the board in support of keeping the flag up.

That narrative was carefully avoided at last night’s marathon meeting during which members claimed they were focusing on the flag policy and not the flag itself.

“So when I look at this as a policy change, I’m not looking at it as it’s taking down the Black Lives Matter flag. I’m looking at it as a policy that’s not working because we have a division within the community,” said board member Scott O’Brien.

He claimed that the flag was being flown in perpetuity “even though that’s what nobody wanted” and that the flag policy is flawed because no other group has come up to the school board to fly any flags since.

Rex pointed out that per the previous policy, the board could have requested the flag be taken down at any time, and that nothing in the policy states that another flag had to replace it.

Those who voted in favor of the new policy, incumbent Karen Stout, Allison Duquette and O’Brien (both newly elected to the school board) argued that a majority of high students do not support the flag, citing a recent anonymous student-led survey. But two high school representatives on the school board spoke up to correct the record. 

Jack Shannon, one of the student representatives, later explained that the survey had nothing to do with the Black Lives Matter flag. Instead, he said, it asked two questions: Are you in favor of a Milton student interest flagpole? If yes, would you utilize the student interest flagpole?

Shannon said 140 students, out of about 460 in the school, responded. Of them, 61 said no, 39 said yes and 40 were neutral to the first question; 90 said no, 16 said yes and 34 were neutral to the second question.

While the board had already voted in January not to have two flagpoles — one for the United States and Vermont flags, and one for flags representing student interests — that discussion came up again Thursday night.

Some residents suggested flying the Black Lives Matter flag in the school vestibule or on a separate flagpole. One resident said students could apply to fly the flag on the town’s flagpole at River Street Park, a more prominent location.

Resident Sean Tatro, who has previously volunteered to pay for a separate flagpole, reupped his offer to do so at Thursday’s meeting.

Two teachers — Pete Wyndorf and Ellen Taggart — reminded the board members that the decision to fly the Black Lives Matter flag was the product of a two-year effort led by the Milton Students for Social Justice group. To take the flag down without student input would be disrespectful, they said.

Lynda Battistoni is a resident new to the flag dispute. She said some students, like her daughter, don’t know that there was a time when the flag did not fly there.

“I think a lot of this stems from misunderstanding or miscommunication or whatever, about what was really being discussed,” she said. “I feel like this is the perfect opportunity for a tremendous compromise that should make everyone happy. If it is not about a Black Lives Matter flag, then why do you care if another pole has it?”

More than 30 people attended the meeting in person and more than 22 online, with multiple residents speaking for or against flying a Black Lives Matter flag. 

Resident Mary Callahan said the Black Lives Matter flag was “anti first responders and anti law enforcement” and also claimed that it’s insulting to Black people who are “doing better in this country than white people.”

Racial disparities in wealth, housing, education persist and remain starkly in favor of white people in America, according to the Brookings Institute.

Another resident, Susan Mcnamara, said, “I love Black people. I have nothing against them but I don’t think the public would like a white lives matter flag flying, Hispanic, Chinese. Please let’s stop dividing this country, this nation, this little town and let’s respect everyone, include everyone, by not focusing on one particular race.”

Jeremy Metcalf’s first name was incorrect in an earlier version of this story.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Amid Black Lives Matter flag debate, Milton school board votes to only fly U.S. and Vermont flags.

A train crashed into two vehicles that police say were parked too close to the railroad tracks in Barton during Monday’s total solar eclipse, sending one woman to the hospital with minor injuries. 

Authorities responded to the crash at 3:33 p.m., according to a press release issued late Tuesday by Vermont State Police. Totality in the Northeast Kingdom town of Barton took place between 3:27 p.m. and 3:30 p.m. Monday.

A state police investigation found that a Vermont Rail System train traveling north through Barton struck a Toyota Prius at the intersection of Eastern Avenue and High Street, damaging the vehicle’s passenger side mirror. The train then hit a second parked vehicle — a Ford Explorer driven by the woman — and the force of that collision pushed the Explorer 5 to 10 feet into a third vehicle, a Jeep Wagoneer, according to police. 

All three vehicles had minor damage. Police said the cause of all the crashes was the vehicles parking too close to the railroad tracks. 

Read the story on VTDigger here: Train strikes vehicles parked too close to the tracks in Barton during eclipse.

BURLINGTON — In the aftermath of the totality of the eclipse on Monday afternoon, most viewers on the Burlington waterfront departed quickly. But some lingered, awestruck, in the returning sunlight.

“It was absolutely incredible,” said Waterbury resident Mike Timbers, 66. “It was one of the most beautiful sights I’ve seen in my lifetime.”

Bettina Haskell, 60, also of Waterbury, said that it looked like “a sunset or a sunrise on each side.”

“And to see stars?” she said. “And the birds?”

Ben Frechette, 34, and Ana Weiss, 33, of Boston, said they had made a last-minute decision to come to Burlington to see the totality.

“Everybody was like you gotta do it, you gotta do it,” Frechette said. “I wasn’t sure until we saw totality. And then I was like, holy crap. This is like nothing I’ve ever seen.”

“It was crazy,” Weiss said. “It was so, like, eerie.”

“Looking up at where the sun usually is and seeing, like, a hole in the sky, is …” Frechette said.

“So weird,” Weiss put in.

“It kind of makes you understand why like, you know, like ancient civilizations saw that and they were like, ‘Oh, the world’s ending,’” Frechette said.

Read the story on VTDigger here: ‘One of the most beautiful sights I’ve seen in my lifetime’.