Exploring the Green New Deal: A Brattleboro Town Hall Meeting

As part of the Sunrise Movement’s Road to the Green New Deal, 118 Elliot is hosting a town hall event for local organizations and residents to discuss climate policy and the Green New Deal. How do we break our dependence on fossil fuels? What is driving unprecedented wealth and income inequality? Can we turn the tide on climate change? These questions are related, urgent, and framing a national conversation on a Green New Deal. The answers will define the viability of our economy, character of our democracy, and obligations to our children.

Join a conversation at the crossroads of economy, society, and environment as ecological economist and author Jon Erickson, the Blittersdorf Professor of Sustainability Science and Policy at the University of Vermont, offers specifics and perspectives on the Green New Deal and its effort to address climate change at a Brattleboro Town Hall meeting on Tuesday, May 7 at 6:00 pm at 118 Elliot, 118 Elliot Street in Brattleboro, Vermont. Dr. Erickson will speak from 6:00 to 6:30 PM and lead a discussion until 7:30 PM. Doors open at 5:30 PM.  Light refreshments will be served.

While the meeting is intended as an informational gathering for ordinary citizens to learn more, a variety of local climate, social justice, and community organizations will attend to bring their perspectives to the discussion as we explore what a Green New Deal could look like in Vermont and beyond as part of the youth climate activism Sunrise Movement’s national effort to spark public participation and debate around the Green New Deal’s viability and goals. The companion bills, HR 109 and S 59, ‘Recognizing the duty of the Federal Government to create a Green New Deal’, have today respectively garnered 92 and 12 cosponsors.

Jon Erickson received his PhD in Natural Resource and Environmental Economics from Cornell University, and a BS in Applied Economics and Business Management from same. He has published widely on energy & climate change policy, land conservation, watershed planning, environmental public health, and the theory and practice of ecological economics. His books include The Great Experiment in Conservation: Voices from the Adirondack Park (2009), Frontiers in Ecological Economic Theory and Application (2007), and Ecological Economics: a Workbook for Problem-Based Learning (2005). He is also an Emmy award-winning producer of films such as the four-part PBS series Bloom on sources and solutions to nutrient pollution in Lake Champlain.  He was the Interim Dean of UVM’s Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources from 2012-2014, Managing Director of UVM’s Gund Institute for Ecological Economics from 2009-2012, and is past President of the U.S. Society for Ecological Economics.

Sunrise Movement is a national, youth-led organization working to stop climate change and create millions of good jobs in the process. According to its website: “We do not look right or left, we look forward.’ The Brattleboro Town Hall is part of its ‘Road to the Green New Deal’ gatherings to promote Americans coming together around the future of our communities and our planet.