250 million years ago, the supercontinent Pangaea had formed: a giant picture puzzle of continents with Vermont at its center, still near the equator. Broadleaf forests now covered the land and reptiles were abundant, including a plethora of giant dinosaurs. In the New England region, fossil remains show that three-toed dinosaurs strolled along what is now the Connecticut River; two-foot-long crocodiles that walked on four long legs and galloped with all four feet off the ground at once, left their 212-million-year-old fossilized remains in both Connecticut and Scotland.4 Pangaea itself was encircled by a giant ocean, Panthalassa, filled with burgeoning life forms, including sharks and sea turtles—successful species that continue today.
When the supercontinent began to break up around 200 million years ago, the Continental plates slowly drifted on convection currents to their locations around the globe, entailing significant changes in climate and in flora and fauna. The North American plate came to rest in the Northern Hemisphere, and Vermont developed a near-Arctic climate and a barren tundralike landscape. Dinosaurs were widespread on every continent and in many vārieties. Mammals began to appear around 180 million years ago, identified by fossil remains with small, shrew-sized jaws found in the western United States, Europe, and South Africa. Angiosperms dominated plant life, with flowers and seeds providing plentiful food. Mammals radiated, helping to pollinate and transport seeds in symbiotic proliferation.
The Ice Age began in North America around 2 million years ago, perhaps as a result of a collision with a meteorite, and ended as recently as 10,000 years ago. Four different glaciers descended from the north, repeatedly scouring the land, sculpting valleys, removing topsoil, and shoving the earth ahead of them as they traveled. The last, the Wisconsin Glaciation, encompassed all of New England in a one-mile-thick ice sheet, covering even the high peaks of the Adirondacks.
As the climate warmed, the ice sheet began to melt and retreat northward. Glacial residue includes piles of rocks and sand (terminal moraines); north-south scratches in granite bedrock from the moving ice (striae); and giant boulders (glacial erratics) that now sit amid farmers’ fields and in local forests. Glacial potholes and lakes reveal indentations in rock and soil from the massive weight.
“My family is in business,” a student said. “I came to school to be an economics major; my goal is to make money. Someday if the environment is really bad, I’ll be able to live where there’s clean air, clean water.” And he continued, “That’s why I came to school in Vermont, where the environment is still pure.” When we studied air, he recognized that the prevailing winds in our region of Vermont often blow in from the Midwest, bringing pollution from the factories in Cleveland and beyond; tree rings show nuclear fallout from tests in New Mexico; Vermont has serious problems with acid rain; and the state has one of the highest breast cancer rates in the country. He began to realize that there is no place on earth where money can protect you against pollution. The world is interconnected in such subtle ways that we must each attend to the whole.
When I teach yoga, we stand in Tadasana, Mountain Pose. The room grows silent. We feel bodies erect, weight dropping down, mineral bone meeting mineral earth. Eyes focus past the windows at the Green Mountains nearby, 350 million years old. Inner gaze connects to the skeletal core of our bodies. The breath is full, so all surfaces of the skin move as one. Time slows down.
The melting ice sheet traveled as far north as Burlington, Vermont, damming the northern drainage and spreading a giant Lake Vermont over its compressed roadbed. The lake was more extensive than today, and telltale markings of water levels can be found along the sides of cliffs and near the edges of the Adirondacks. The tops of nearby mountains (including Snake Mountain and Mount Philo), were tiny islands amid a vast waterway.
As the ice continued to move northward, the St. Lawrence River linked Lake Vermont to the Atlantic Ocean. Salt water flowed in, forming a shallow inland sea. Whale and seal bones, fossilized and found in Charlotte, Vermont, are dated from 10,000 years ago. As silt at the delta and the gradual rebound of the earth closed the northern outlet, the connection to the sea was lost, and the waterway once again became a lake. Freshwater Lake Champlain was much larger than its current size, with a rich, fertile valley to the east. The Champlain lowlands today feature a nutrient-rich soil of clay and silt from this time.
Many waterways in Vermont follow the northward path of the retreating glaciers. Lake Champlain itself, 125 miles in length, is sometimes referred to as the sixth Great Lake; it flows north to the Richelieu River in Canada, then to the St. Lawrence River and to the sea. Most rivers that flow into Lake Champlain, such as the Otter Creek, Lamoille, and Missisquoi, flow north, as does the Mad River further east.5 The Connecticut River, forming the eastern border of Vermont, is an exception. This 407-mile-long river has its headwaters in small lakes of northern New Hampshire and travels south to meet the ocean at its mouth in Connecticut. In the 1800s and early 1900s this river, like others, was a dumping ground for industry and sewage, and people avoided the unsightly view; dams were built to generate power, diminishing the animal and fish populations. In fact, the Connecticut River was once described as “the most beautiful sewer in America.” Now it is being restored, at considerable expense, as a healthful source of beauty for those who live near or visit.
Around 30,000–12,000 years ago human ancestors crossed the Bering Strait onto the North American continent (although stone tools found in the Southwest suggest much earlier human inhabitation).6 Small bands of Paleo-Indians arrived in the Champlain bioregion around 11,000 years ago, hunting in a still glacial environment. In a mere fifty years, the giant woolly mammoths became extinct, most likely due to overhunting and climatic change. Eventually, giant buffalo and woodland caribou were hunted in hardwood forests; plus walruses, seals, and whales in the new Champlain Sea. Through the years native peoples went from small nomadic bands to hunters and gatherers with specific territories and seasonal migrations, followed by a gradual shift to farming with the domestication of plants and animals. Artifacts can be found throughout the bioregion, detailing different periods. During the Woodland era (3000–400 ya) there were five language families; the Abenaki tribe in the Champlain bioregion spoke Algonquian, contributing place-names such as Lake Memphremagog and the Missisquoi Rivers, which generally describe some feature of the waterways for other travelers.7
By the time the French explorer Samuel de Champlain and his men arrived by water in 1609, native peoples were well established in the area, and had coexisted with the land successfully for thousands of years. In epidemics of 1616 and 1633, 80–90 percent of the Abenaki were eradicated due to white man’s diseases (to which natives had no immunity) and from fighting (including battles with their neighboring Iroquois enemy). From the 1600s to 1776, ongoing battles, including the French and Indian War, kept European settlers away. With the French defeated in 1763, the English arrived in earnest, lured by “cheap” land and “untouched” resources. It took as little as fifty years for white settlers to overrun indigenous peoples and cut the virgin forests. European farming techniques reconfigured the landscape into fenced fields and pastures. Immigrants flocked to the region, and the remaining Abenaki “disappeared” into the culture. As recently as the 1900s, texts reported that there were “no native peoples” in Vermont, the Abenaki having merged so thoroughly into the communities; yet there are over two thousand self-proclaimed Abenaki today in Vermont and one thousand in neighboring Quebec.
The arrival of Europeans decimated animal life as well. The beaver, key to healthy drainage and water purification across the nation, was a prime target for attack; their pelts “bankrolled” early colonists, as they could be sold to Europeans for use in felt hats. Author Alice Outwater, in her fascinating book Water, describes how English entrepreneur William Pynchon was granted a monopoly on fur trade in this region. By the mid-1670s, nearly a quarter of a million beaver pelts had been shipped to London from the Connecticut River Valley alone! Felt hats made from beaver fur were worn by both sexes throughout Europe and eventually in the Americas. By 1700 even the industrious beaver was extinct along the eastern coast, at a great loss to the water drainage of the region.
By 1812, Vermont was the fastest-growing state in the union; woodlands were burned for potash and charcoal for iron mills and logged by farmers clearing land for sheep farming. By the 1840s, Vermont was 20 percent forest and 80 percent cleared, and the state was an ecological disaster—erosion had depleted the soil, and all large mammals