Revitalising Vermont  

Tom Philpott at Grist has an interesting post on efforts to revitalise local economies in Vermont by localising the food sector - A new vision of 'credit crunch'.

The effort to revive global credit markets has devolved into farce. Every day, U.S. authorities announce some earth-shaking new measure -- a $700 billion bailout, the Fed's extraordinary move into the commercial-paper business, a coordinated global set of rate cuts -- and every day, investors continue acting as tweaky as meth heads when the dope has run out.

Why should this matter to anyone who doesn't have a pile invested in the stock market? Because we're in what's known as a credit crunch. When banks stop lending for a long period, economic activity slows to a crawl, and the economy craters. The jobs that evaporate could include your own.

But are there not other forms of credit, other visions for how economies could function? Hasn't the Wall Street model of finance -- wherein multimillionaire b-school wizards "innovate" such wondrous "risk-spreading" instruments as mortgage-backed securities and credit-default swaps -- gone, well, bankrupt?

The front and business sections of Wednesday's New York Times brought plenty of alarming financial news. For an unexpected bit of financial cheer, dig back to -- of all places -- the Dining In/Dining Out section. There, you'll find a great piece by Marian Burros on the small, once-depressed Vermont town of Hardwick, where people are working together to build a thriving economy around food.

Like many towns in rural America, Hardwick -- once a granite-mining center -- had fallen on hard times.

Usually in such cases, food cultures wither. Restaurants and diners shutter, farms consolidate in search of larger, far-away markets, and food expenditures become a sieve draining any remaining wealth out of the community and into the pockets of distant shareholders in fast-food chains and retailers like Wal-Mart.

Something different is now happening in Hardwick. ...