[00:00:00] You're a host today and the director of the Center for Research on Vermont. It's a beautiful spring day here broadcasting from my home in Hinesburg. We have a very special guest, Dr. Cherrie Morse, a human geographer at the University of Vermont who like me, grew up in Vermont, studies Vermont, thinks about Vermont, thinks about rurality and issues of rurality and what it means to live in rural places like Vermont. And we're going to talk about her research on why people choose to stay here and how that compares with other rural places.

[00:00:34] So let me welcome Dr. Morse, Cherrie Morse, cultural geographer. As I said at the University of Vermont. Welcome, Cherrie.

[00:00:45] Hi, Richard. Thank you.

[00:00:47] And before we start, I should just say, because we are in the middle of an extraordinary time, I hope you and your family are doing okay.

[00:00:56] We are. Thank you for asking. And I hope yours are, too.

[00:01:00] And you, I believe, live in Underhill or Jericho or somewhere up in the mountain North Underhill.

[00:01:10] Right.

[00:01:12] Well, I'm really glad you're here because this is a hole thing that we're trying and bear with us people if the technology doesn't work.

[00:01:18] But we want to talk to people who really think about Vermont research and of the variety of people I get to work with at UVM. Cherie Morse probably thinks as much about Vermont and rural places as anybody I know. Just a moment on you yourself, the type of research you do, and then we are going to dive into this whole question of who chooses to live here in Vermont and why they stay and what they think about when they don't stay. But first, just tell us a little bit about you. Cherie.

[00:01:57] Sure. Well, I didn't start out researching Vermont demographics, that's for sure. My area of work is usually in human environment interaction. So I'm always really interested in the relationship between people and the place where they live and how those two sort of factors influence one another. And I often do research on Vermont's working landscapes. And as I'll describe in this short presentation, I'm going to give you I kind of fell in to studying Vermont's demographic change as an outcome of that work of looking at rural communities in our state.

[00:02:44] Yeah. And you grew up in the Woodstock area. I belive.

[00:02:48] I did. I am a Woodstock WASP that's the mascot for the Woodstock High School.

[00:02:57] Yeah, and I grew up in Putney. So although we would never go north, why would we?

[00:03:07] OK, so let's go ahead and dive in. So I'm going to turn this over to Cherie for a while and she's going to walk you through some of this research she's been doing.

[00:03:15] And if people do have questions or comments please just type them in and we'll take them as we move to that part of the discussion.

[00:03:22] So I'll let you just go ahead and start Cherrie and I think Brianna will bring up your PowerPoint presentation. Great.

[00:03:33] So the presentation I'm going to give today is just a brief summary of some of the research that I conducted with other Vermont based colleagues way back in 2014.

[00:03:48] I'm going to share a few of the big findings from that research. And that was about why do people stay, leave or return to Vermont? And that research was with people who, like Richard and me, grew up and attended high school in Vermont. So that's who we surveyed. And then I'm going to share a little bit about some comparative research I've done using the Vermont model in two other rural states in the West and Midwest of the United States.

[00:04:19] And then I'm going to just sort of open up a conversation about some kind of demographic change that we might experience in the short and medium term here in Vermont in our future. So the Vermont Roots Migration Project got its start in early 2014 after I joined a conference that was held at St. Mike's with several other researchers who all do Vermont based work.

[00:04:50] And what we realized at the end of our conference time together was that we had each also grown up in Vermont.

[00:04:58] And that's super unusual to be in a group of other scholars, all of whom who had spent our childhoods here in Vermont. And so we got to talking as Vermonters often do, about how did you manage to stay here? You know, how did you get your work and your culture, your life to kind of all line up in one place.

[00:05:23] And as we were talking, we started talking about our siblings and our cousins and our parents and the conversation of who is able to stay, who wanted to stay and who left was dominant. And so out of this conversation, we brainstormed the idea that we would just put together a little tiny survey and that because each of us came from a different community, basically small communities in mainly the central part of Vermont that we would just post to our own Facebook pages and ask our classmates, essentially our alumni networks to just fill out this little survey. And it would ask people what their residential story is. Why did they stay? Why did they leave?

[00:06:07] And to tell us a little bit, kind of in their own words about their own experience, because we realized, although we have demographic stats that come from places like the U.S. Census, we don't have the explanation for why people move. We think we do when we attribute it all to economic factors or other things.

[00:06:25] But really, we don't have any we didn't at that point really have any personal firsthand accounts of decision making processes.

[00:06:36] So we opened up the survey. It ran for three weeks on our Facebook pages and luckily we were each of a different sort of age bracket. So we were hoping to get responses from a wide range of Vermonters from different places and different age groups. And sure enough, we got a huge response and we didn't expect it at all. We thought we would get seventy five responses maybe, and we got like three thousand seven hundred responses in just three weeks. So that gave us this gigantic data pool to work with. And in the years following that, we spend a lot of time looking at those data and matching up the sort of quantitative statistics with the stories that people shared in the survey. So just a little bit of background I am going to share a few of those highlights with you, but just a little bit of background on Vermont's population. These data are a little old. So right now, as of July of 2019, the estimates for Vermont's population was down to three hundred and twenty three thousand.  Mainly our dominant racial group is white and about half of us were born in Vermont. There is a growing foreign-born population, but it's not a very large portion of our population yet. We are one of the most rural states in the United States, so only 40 percent of us live in what's considered to be an urban area.

[00:08:10] And we also are an aging state, so we go back and forth with Maine on which one of us is the oldest state in terms of the average age of our residents and outmigration and demographic problems are centuries long issues. And this is something that my colleague Jill Mudgit who is a historian, has really helped me understand. And I thank her for that.

[00:08:39] So when we talk about out-migration problem, we need to be really clear about what we're talking about. This graph shows us population change by age category over a 10 year period between 2010 and 2017. And what we can see is that we have during that time period a decreasing number of young children or children in general from the ages of zero to 19. We actually have a very small increasing number in that 20 to 30 age group. But when you look at the forty to fiftyfour year olds, that's who are really losing in terms of categories of ages. And then we're increasing on the other end with our elder Vermonters. So when we talk about a youth outmigration problem, it's not really youth that we're concerned about this point. We're really looking at working age people who are at the height of their careers. People who are really engaged in society, who act as volunteers, who serve on town government, who coached youth soccer team. Those folks. So just to recap with the point of this original survey was it was first of all to gather the personal narratives of people, and then the second was just that second bullet just explains those methods that I just described. We posted on social media. Just each on our Facebook page. And from there, it kind of went viral.

[00:10:17] So the next few slides, just look at the broad findings and this is just like super, you know, airplane view of the findings.

[00:10:29] We thought when we asked leavers why they left the state that economic factors would be an overwhelmingly cited response. And in fact, this idea that people can earn more money outside of the state or have work that's located outside of the state features as the top two reasons for why people said they left. However, those percentages are only 35 to 30 percent. So they're not huge, they're not overwhelming, they don't even constitute 50 percent of the respondents. So what we take away from these findings is that there are a plethora of reasons, a multitude of reasons why leavers said they left Vermont and some of them are highly individual. For example, does the desire to live in an urban area or the desire to live in an area with greater cultural diversity? The notion that it's just too cold here, and it's unbearable. Or, you know, there were about a quarter of the people who said the cost of living was too high. When we looked more deeply at the results and we compared results by gender and by educational attainment, we realized that some of these results really differentiate themselves by different social groups. And so I just want to highlight that this is a broad generalization of the overall findings. Among stayers, there is far more agreement, and I should note that the people who took the survey were allowed to select more than one answer for why they decided to stay, leave or returned to the state. So that's why these percentages don't add up to one hundred. So most of the people that we surveyed said they enjoy living here. And that seems kind of like common sense.

[00:12:29] But if you look at the academic literature on rural migration, there is a kind of urban bias that runs through the field that just assumes that people who stay in rural areas are stuck there. And our findings completely argue against that point of view and say, actually, people choose to stay and they enjoy staying. So landscape and the desire to live near family and an appreciation for Vermont culture and community were the main reasons people said they stayed. And what's interesting is, if you'll recall, the earlier slide, about 35 to 30 percent of people said there was some work related reason why they live outside of the state. And we have about the same percentage of Vermonters who stayed saying that work was one of the reasons why they stayed in the state. So work kind of starts to wash out in terms of an explanatory factor.

[00:13:30] And then this is the group of returnees. So we had about 20 percent of the people that responded to the survey were people who had left and lived outside of the state for at least a year, if not more, not counting university or a military service, and then decided to return to the state. And here we see these same factors that are important to the stayers, that are also important to the returnees.

[00:13:56] So family.

[00:13:58] Landscape, culture and community. Very few said they actually move back because they had a job opportunity waiting for them here in Vermont. But one of the things we really noticed in our research is that landscape was a major factor here for stayers. And this is something new in the literature because it's not a question that migration researchers had really asked people about in the past.

[00:14:24] They ask a lot about family ties and economic factors, but very little, if ever, about are you just tied to the physical environment and you feel comfortable there.

[00:14:37] And it attracts you to living in a particular place.

[00:14:45] So to kind of move forward a little bit on this idea of identity and place and the kind of feelings of attachment we asked stayers if they ever felt homesick for Vermont.

[00:15:04] And so the stayers included people who've been away from the state for seven decades or just a year, and an overwhelming majority of them said, yes, they do sometimes miss Vermont. And we asked them, you know, what is it that they Miss and Landscape and people, specifically family members, were really the most cited category. So you can see in this next slide, we made a little word cloud of all the responses that people typed into the survey.

[00:15:37] And for sure, family was a much cited word in the responses.

[00:15:46] But if you look closely at all these other words, like beautiful, lifestyle, nature, scenery, mountains, fall, all of those point toward an attachment to landscape that again, we haven't seen in the migration literature elsewhere. And there are so many amazing stories that are embedded in our data. And I pulled most of those amazing stories out for this presentation so I can be brief, but this is a statement made by a 27 year old who moved out to the West Coast and said they did want to move back someday. This person does.

[00:16:30] And when asked what they feel homesick for, they said

[00:16:38] It's not something I can put into words. And it actually, for us, captured the kind of deep emotion that people feel in their attachment to the place they grew up in, and specifically to Vermont. And as my colleague Jill Mudgett has pointed out, there's a really long history of what she calls environmental nostalgia in Vermont. In her research, her dissertation research looked at the diaries of people in the 19th century who had moved out of state in the out-migration period of that time and how they characterized their longing for Vermont, their attachment to Vermont in their diaries or their letters home. And so we know that we've had out-migration processes happening since early in the 19th century. We always tend to have people leaving Vermont. And it seems as though this theme of missing Vermont as a place has a long history as well. So. Since 2014, Jill and I have given lots and lots and lots of lectures around the state because as it turns out, not just government leaders, but business leaders, education leaders, you know, parents who miss their kids and maybe want them to move back to Vermont. Everybody in Vermont has an interest in this story about why do we stay, leave or come home and what are the economic, environmental, social dimensions of this problem that we call outmigration. And so we've given these talks all over the state to different groups of people. And there are two questions that we always get. And one is, is Vermont exceptional? Rights so like is this attachment to landscape and place, is that just all of us, you know, really sentimental Vermonters who grew up with this very strong place based narrative and rural ideal? And we're just quirky and we're just this little state?

[00:18:44] Or is there something else going on with this set of findings that we have?

[00:18:52] And so that leads to this question of how do we compare to other rural places in our country? And so one of the things that I just wanted to point out in that earlier slide with those different photographs is that there are all different kinds of rural in our country. So these photos here come from rural Florida, from Utah, from Nebraska, from other parts of the northeast and even from, you know, coastal areas that are rural. So we have all kinds of rural diversity in our country and we tend to group everybody into one category of rural or rural as one kind of place. And of course, that's just crazy. So this next research project that I started last year involves a partnership with two universities, the University of Nebraska in Lincoln and Utah State University in Logan, Utah. And it's called the American Roots Migration Project. Brianna, is it possible to move that side forward? Great. Thank you so much. So I partnered with Andrew, who said at University of Nebraska and Matt Barnett in Utah. And I asked them if they would essentially take the framework of the Vermont study and run it in their respective states so that we could do some kind of a comparative analysis of responses to see. OK, well, is Vermont different from other places in the way that we respond to those questions? What other dynamics are happening in rural places? And so those surveys ran last spring of 2019. And we are just now looking at the data and analyzing them from those studies. And we already have a couple of really interesting things to share.

[00:20:51] So.

[00:20:53] This is a little table that shows us some of the factors for staying. So these are just the stayers in Vermont, Nebraska and Utah.

[00:21:03] And what we can see is that.

[00:21:05] People in these other states, Nebraska and Utah, also enjoy their home states living there. But some of the other factors are expressed in sort of a different order. So if we look at Nebraska, for example, family is a really, really important component of staying or reason for staying in Nebraska. The second most important component is culture and community. And the third is a desire to raise their children in Nebraska. When we compare that to Vermont, we see that landscape kind of drops out for people in Nebraska. It's a factor that receives 44 percent of the stayers responses, but it's not a dominant factor. But if you slide your eyes over on that row from landscape environment, from Vermont to Nebraska to Utah, you see Utahns also have a really strong attachment to their physical environment. And that's really interesting because Utah as a state, if you think about it, contains a broad diversity of different kinds of physical landscapes. They have desert. They have wide open space. They have urban spaces that are much more developed than ours. And they have the Rockies. They have the Wasatch Mountains and a really alpine environment. So that's really interesting in and of itself. And then this table, which looks so boring and I don't know how to bring it to life in a better way just yet, but it's really important for a rural geographer like me to look at what I did was I took the Nebraska stayers and I looked at the reasons for staying.

[00:22:51] And then I divided them into a couple of different groups.

[00:22:55] One was people who grew up in a rural home town, and that is defined by the U.S. Census as communities that have fewer than two thousand five hundred people. So really small towns. And so I looked at people who grew up in really small towns and how they responded to their reasons for staying in Nebraska. And I compared them to people who did not grow up in a small town.

[00:23:20] And this column to the far right, this is the statistical significance value.

[00:23:28] It's called the p value for a chi square test. So that essentially tells us, is there something different going on between these two groups of people? And in a statistically significant way and it's a way of telling us like to pay attention to it, really. And so what we see is essentially a trend that if you grew up in a really small town, not just in a rural state, but in a really small town in a rural state, you are more pleased and you enjoy living where you live now, more you are more attached to the community, to your family, to raising your children in the state, to a whole set of other factors. So what it means, I think, is it raises a question, if you're a rural person in a rural state, do you have a kind of different way of looking at the world, perceiving the world? Do you seek out different experiences than your non rural counterparts and peers? This slide doesn't show it, but we also did this analysis for people who not only grew up in a small town, but now live in a small town of fewer than twenty five hundred. And we found that it was even more pronounced amongst those people. So, yes, the question that that Lidle's study in Nebraska raises is do people with experience living in small and rural communities? Do they have different values? Do they seek out different experiences or do they see the world differently than non-rural people? And so kind of bringing it back to Vermont and to this moment. Our state has been really focused, different members of our state in government, in business, in education, have been really focused on this question of how do we attract new residents into our state? How do we address our migration sort of deficit issue, population deficit issue by bringing in new people or encouraging those who grew up here to stay?

[00:25:35] And so what if we really imagine that that happens for a couple of reasons.

[00:25:44] What if these efforts are really successful on their own regardless of what's happening with global pandemic pressures? What if, as we are seeing, at least anecdotally, folks are moving into their second homes as a way to cope with the crisis? So they're moving into their second homes here in Vermont and maybe they decide to stay. Maybe the folks who are experiencing the worst of the pandemic in the Tri-State area on the East Coast decide they're done with urban living. And Vermont looks pretty darn good in comparison. What if in our future the mega-drought that's taking place in the American West, what if the living conditions in the south get hotter and more difficult and sea level rise continues? What, if any one of those factors creates an influx of people moving into our state? What does it look like? Are we prepared for them? Have we thought through in a really systematic way how we might accommodate people of different economic backgrounds, who have different experiences and different expectations about what city life or town life or civic life might offer them? What does it mean for our rural landscapes? What does it mean for our dairy farms that are now under a whole bunch of economic pressure? What does it mean for development planning? So I just want to raise this question about what might forward looking rural planning look like in Vermont. We don't have a central planning office. We have one, but it's not occupied or staffed. Our planning takes place at the town municipal level, which is great and works really, really well in most circumstances, but may not be able to have the capacity right now to really do the kind of planning forward that's required for any community to withstand pressure to plan ahead on that kind of thing. And one other factor to consider. Our state has a really high what we call vacant, rate. What that means is about twenty two point five percent of our homes in Vermont are either second homes or their summer camps. Sometimes that means hunting camps. But usually that means a about 22 percent of our housing stock is second homes. What if those homes fill up right away? What if our population goes up that dramatically in a short period of time? These are things I'm saying, you know so that we can think about them and think creatively about them.

[00:28:41] And I'm going to stop there.

[00:28:44] Thank you, Cherie. So this is research live Wednesday Center for Research on Vermont with Dr. Morse, who is a geographer who's just sort of laid out some of the big issues that Vermont is thinking about. You can't open a paper or a news prior, COVID, of course, where there wasn't some discussion about what's going to happen with Vermont's demographics.

[00:29:08] And early on, you showed us that we are the second oldest state on average. And it's something that policymakers are super concerned about. But this I had never thought about it this way before. We have a large percent of unoccupied houses.

[00:29:30] And we also have to me anyway, we have two hundred and fifty village centers.

[00:29:36] So unlike other places in the country where those places have been wiped out by sprawl and land use patterns, we still, and yes, we have issues around those, but we still have these intact village centers, which tend to be the places where there is housing. I'm guessing. And there's under used retail and space. Is there anything in the way you're thinking about that those small towns and village centers become places they get repopulated in some future.

[00:30:08] Yeah, I'd like to answer that question from two different directions. When we think about where's this vacant housing right now?

[00:30:19] We have to realize it's kind of not evenly spread over the Vermont landscape. And it's not all in places like Stowe where we think of there being a lot of second homes or Woodstock, for example. Towns like Plymouth, Vermont, have a huge percentage of second homes in them. Really, really small towns. There are other places around the state that are like little hotbeds or, you know, of places of a second home ownership. And so those towns, you know, I think it would be helpful for them to think through what does it mean at the community level if they're seeing a lot more people moving into their very small towns? The question about where might we plan for this development, if it indeed happens I think it's clear that Chittenden County already has really difficult issues with providing enough housing for people that want to live there. And we know we have most counties in Vermont outside of Chittenden County were losing population over the last decade or so.

[00:31:31] So there are town centers which could serve as places where we do infill or some renovation or some really smart, forward looking development that would allow for walkable villages, other like businesses to be centered within town centers. But we need to actually make those places. We need to retrofit them. We need to make them attractive. And we need to let people know from out of state, the people who have means that they don't need to own two hundred acres on their own to feel like they're part of the Vermont landscape, that they could live in a nice village center and take advantage of all the conserved public lands that we have around us for things like recreation.

[00:32:22] Marc Mihaly wrote that he agrees with you that we may see increased growth, climate, refugees and for other reasons, people moving to Vermont but concerned we don't have the legal infrastructure to maintain the development patterns, just what you're talking about that are traditional Vermont like how do we without that central planning office or without those structures?

[00:32:44] How do we enable those towns and villages to be the focus of our growth?

[00:32:50] Yeah, he's absolutely right. And he knows what he's talking about.

[00:32:56] And I think it's something we really need to take seriously. I think many of us are really resistant to the idea of centralized planning because it seems like an issue that would take away local control.

[00:33:10] And I don't really see it that way. I see that we could have central planning office at the state level that isn't in the business of actually setting zoning, but instead is actually doing planning work and data collection and data housing work. We have no central repository of data that crosses over sectors that we really need to do this kind of work. We need agricultural data. We need land based data. We need demographic data. We need business data. And we need it to all be in one place, you know, like stable, sturdy office, which will keep these records over time so that we can do the kind of proper planning that we need to do.

[00:33:50] And that office, I think, could work as a coordinating sort of facility for all of the different towns and cities that are going to need to do this work. And perhaps regional planning commissions could take up a lot of this work as well at that scale.

[00:34:12] And Jill Whitney asked a similar question, how, and this is, of course, what policymakers are always talking about. I heard

[00:34:18] Governor Scott, just the other day, too much happens in Chittenden County? How can we make these things happen in other places in Vermont?

[00:34:26] Yeah, I think that this is a funky thing going on and this came out of a meeting I was in earlier today where people are talking about this same set of issues. This strange thing about Covid or the good thing about Covid is it's showing the holes in our social, environmental and economic systems and where the disparities are. And one of the odd things about this virus is that those large employment centers are probably gonna be the last ones that can go back up to capacity because we can't be with each other in large groups.

[00:35:04] So I'm just wondering if the virus is going to point out that the small businesses that are located across the state will be the ones that can come back to a capacity quicker and do more and gain more of the attention and economic development aid that they require to get strong. So I think that's just the interesting little side note.

[00:35:24] But I think we have to do more to really support towns and draw attention to towns and allow towns to build their own kind of economic development models, like let ideas come from the grassroots up and then provide them with support to do that at the town planning level.

[00:35:48] You know, in a separate project, I'm doing a quick survey on telecommuting behavior. You know, as we all think about what emerges in whatever becomes normal, again, almost a third of our respondents already are saying they expect  to telecommute more.

[00:36:05] Most trips these days aren't just the journey to work trip. They're all the other things there too. But I'm just wondering. And yes, we have broadband issues in other places in the state. But if people are telecommuting more, they may do more locally, which would also provide funding for local retail restaurants and stuff, which may be happening less when people go to work. They tend to do that in the workplace.

[00:36:31] Yeah, when I think about this kind of spatially and yet geographically, either when we're talking about our food systems, our kind of work networks, those sorts of things are social networks. The shorter we can make our chains, the better. And I think Vermont is really well positioned in that regard that

[00:36:57] a lot of us really can still access the town store and neighbors nearby, and I think the remote work environment is making the local even more important to us because we're not getting in our cars. I'll speak for myself. I'm not getting in my car driving from Underhill to Burlington to go to work. And so when I have a break from work and I go outside for a walk, I'm interacting with my neighbors along Poker Hill in a way that I never have before because I wasn't physically here. So if we take my little tiny example, you bring it out and say, if I were going to my local store more often, which I am, if I'm just going to the hardware store and engaging with my neighbors in different ways, I'm becoming more locally embedded in those networks.

[00:37:43] Yeah, absolutely. Paul Searls, lots of our good friends in the Vermontresearch network writes in that he's been giving these talks around the state about one of his recent book in the climate refugees.

[00:37:55] It's something that the RPC is thinking about, but there's concern that those people may have more resources than Vermonters and will, as you said, maybe buy more valuable real estate or push out people who have been living here a long time is that something you think about at all.

[00:38:14] Well, I think this is where the planning comes in. And I think we need to think about climate refugees, not as one homogenous group.

[00:38:20] So I think that we will see or we could very well see or maybe already are seeing people who have second homes that have means and come from urban areas looking at Vermont. But the climate refugees that we're going to get, I think, in the decades to come aren't necessarily going to be people of means at all. And so we need to plan for that. And that's, I think, one of the areas where smart growth really is vitally important. We made our second, third waves of people coming to the state may not be coming here because of a rural ideal. And they want to own their 200 acres that they're coming here because they have few other places to go and we have water. And one of the things that just really need to say from the food systems and agricultural perspective is everything that we do to accommodate new Vermonters has to at the same time conserve our prime farmland and our farms because we need to be able to continue to feed ourselves and feed our region. And that's something Vermont's been doing and focused on. And if we allow development to happen roughshod over the landscape. Those are the places we're going to lose. First, the prime ag lands and the places with the beautiful views. So that's why I think the planning piece is so important. And I have worked in town government in the past and I do understand the hesitancy around planning and the loss of local control. But I think we're in like a different time now and we really need to have our eyes wide open as we consider these issues.

[00:39:58] Yeah, Nick asked and it's similar really to the extent we know the types of people who may be moving to the state and how can we make sure that we're attracting kind of a, you know again, I guess, it gers back to planning, but how do we put ourselves in a place that we attract a diverse range of ages and types of people and, you know, going forward?

[00:40:21] Yeah, well, I kind of I go back to those findings of the Vermonters and why they stay, right? They stay because of the landscape, the lifestyle the landscape offers to them, the kind of culture that we have here. And I do believe that if we have appropriate housing that is not too expensive young people already would want to live here. And we see that with our graduates from the University of Vermont, many of whom would love to stay here, have fallen in love with this region, but feel like they have to leave. Partly it's the job stuff, for sure. But really, housing it's housing in at least in the Chittenden County area. It's just it is way too expensive for most young people. So I think this is about economics, but it's also about housing. So I'm not concerned that we're not going to draw in young people. I'm not really so worried about that.

[00:41:26] Nice well,

[00:41:27] there's a lot of interest in this issue as you can imagine from so many directions. We're going to sort of wrap up now, but know that.

[00:41:41] Dr. Morse is going to be continuing this type of research for a long time and lots of other ways to kind of check in on it.

[00:41:50] Where are you headed next with this?

[00:41:56] I realize were are at the end of the semester here. So lots of people are here locally about ending and helping our students move off to their next thing.

[00:42:04] But what's next for you in line of research?

[00:42:13] You know, I think looking at some particular case studies, or at least initiating some in collaboration with Vermont based organizations to see what this kind of planning might look like, how it might become amenable to most Vermonters and how it would be effective, I'm really interested in that at the moment. Yeah,  I would say that's that's where I am right now, and I welcome people to reach out and share ideas with me.

[00:42:47] Yeah, and like you, I also am spending much more time in my hometown.

[00:42:54] We have a store, you know, we are probably going to slowly reopen those things, so really interesting to think about what this crisis means for how we emerge in our communities.

[00:43:11] So I'm going to just turn for a minute to tell people that next week a totally different topic, and speaking of hard working UVM students, Brianna, who's behind the scenes here has just put up a poster for next week's talk, which is going to be about the history of Vermont humor, which maybe we all need right now, featuring Bill Mayors, who, of course, has written and been involved with many books on Vermont, humor, secession, real Vermonters, many with Frank Brian.

[00:43:50] And in this case, working with Don Hooper, who's a fabulous cartoonist.

[00:43:56] He is going to be illustrating the book. So they're going to give us a history of tha.Let me come back and thank Cherie Morse, Dr. Morse for her work here and the geography department at the University of Vermont for being with us today.

[00:44:13] And I hope to see you actually in person some day. Yeah.

[00:44:21] That would be great. And thank you for the opportunity to chat with you. And folks who are listening in.

[00:44:27] OK.

[00:44:28] All right. We will talk soon. Thanks again. And join us next week, Wednesday at at noon. Bye bye, everybody.