Some fun facts about Vermont in the year 2000: Burlington, the state’s largest city, didn’t have a downtown grocery store — and wouldn’t until City Market opened two years later. A gallon of gasoline cost $1.50. Same-sex couples won civil unions but still couldn’t marry. Veteran race car driver Phil Scott was about to become a rookie state senator. Grace Potter was in high school. Noah Kahan was barely out of diapers.
Point is: A lot can happen in 25 years.
That’s the motivating idea behind a new book of essays, 2050: Vermonters Take a Swipe at the Future, released this week. Collected by the late Burlington author Bill Mares before his death last year, the slim tome poses a hefty question: What will Vermont look like a quarter century from now?
To answer it, Mares solicited musings from several dozen local friends, colleagues and acquaintances. The author or coauthor of 20 books, Mares was a wily intellectual, an endlessly curious Renaissance man who at various points in his life worked as a journalist, a teacher and a state legislator. He was also a beekeeper, photographer and brewer, among other pursuits. The 37 contributors to 2050 — 38, including illustrator Don Hooper — reflect Mares’ own wide-ranging interests through their diverse backgrounds, professions and perspectives.
Among them are poets, writers and journalists; a doctor and a meteorologist; artists and educators; farmers and businesspeople. Some you may know — Melinda Moulton, Stephen P. Kiernan, Mark Breen — while others keep lower public profiles but have been no less influential in shaping Vermont for the past 25 years. All have provocative, thoughtful or entertaining takes on the next 25. Many will appear at readings around the state over the next week or so, beginning this Saturday, November 15, at the St. Johnsbury Athenaeum.
The compelling mix of essays — and a couple of poems — by and large express optimism for the future.
When Mares was diagnosed with lymphoma last year, he put 2050 on the back burner — or more accurately, in a shoebox — in order to finish his memoir, Better to Be Lucky Than Smart! He just barely did. That book was published on July 24, 2024. Five days later, Mares, 83, died with the help of Act 39, Vermont’s medical aid-in-dying law.
But he hadn’t finished 2050, so Mares’ wife, Chris Hadsel, took up the task, along with former Burlington Free Press, Rutland Herald and Baltimore Sun reporter Jane Smith as editor. It was a tall order.
Mares had asked 40 people to contribute essays. His main criteria was that they were able to write, had something to say and could say it in 500 to 1,000 words.
“You try keeping Bill Schubart to 1,000 words,” Hadsel joked in a recent interview with Seven Days, referring to the Hinesburg author and political commentator.
Hadsel, who is the director of the local nonprofit Curtains Without Borders, rejected some submissions for being off topic, navel-gazing or stuck in the present. She also found a handful of new contributors to fill holes. In the end, she landed on a compelling mix of essays — and a couple of poems — that by and large express optimism, albeit cautious at times, for the future.
In the book’s opening essay, “We Can See It Coming,” Kiernan identifies familiar problems — education, deforestation, the loneliness epidemic. He doesn’t offer solutions but suggests those will emerge at some point in the coming decades thanks to the community-mindedness of Vermonters. “This attitude, this energy, this sense of common purpose,” he writes, “this is how a brave little state can remain a lovable home.”
Others take more cynical or humorous views. Adam Hall, who wrote the local satire website the Winooski, imagines the grand opening of an 80-story Burlington skyscraper. On hand for the ribbon cutting is 79-year-old Gov. Miro Weinberger.
Educator James Lengel mocked up the April 1, 2050, edition of a news outlet called VTScooper, with stories on ski conglomerates leaving Vermont, technological breakthroughs at “Vermont University” and how everything grown in the state is automatically organic due to comprehensive agricultural regulations.
Former Champlain Valley Union High School principal Val Gardner writes from the perspective of a 13-year-old.
What you won’t find in 2050 are references to President Donald Trump or the hot-button issues of 2025.
In conversations before he died, Mares insisted that current events were “kind of irrelevant” to the project, Hadsel explained: “He said, ‘What I’m talking about is the Vermont that will endure and what people think, regardless of the current ups and downs, 25 years from now.’”
Indeed, most contributors imagine a Vermont that, while not untouched by current political and environmental crises, has not been defined by them.
In other words: In 25 years, Vermont will still be Vermont.
2050: Vermonters Take a Swipe at the Future book launch, Saturday, November 15, 5 p.m., at St. Johnsbury Athenaeum. Free. rootstockpublishing.com
The original print version of this article was headlined “Forward Thinking | In Bill Mares’ final literary project, 2050, Vermonters imagine what the state will look like in 25 years”
This article appears in The Winter Preview Issue 2025.
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