Fairlee, Vermont — At the top of a steep hill here stands a green hexagonal cottage. Milton Friedman, who built it in the 1960s, used to look out, as I am looking now, over the slopes that stretch in every direction, thick with pine and birch and maple. Perhaps the great free market economist mused, even in those earliest days of eco-activism, on how prosperity boosts the natural ecology.
This was once farmland, its soil poor, thin, and rocky. When the Midwest was opened to settlement, New England’s farmers trekked westward, and nature poured back into places like this. Some 90% of Vermont has been reforested, and these hills look much as they did to the first settlers. You see turkeys and white-tailed deer from the window. There are bears and coyotes in the hills nearby.
