Now that our annual Lake Champlain Toxic Algae Festival is off to a rip-roaring start, I thought it was time to explore a question that’s been percolating in the back of my mind for a while now. The question that’s the title of this diary.

It’s almost an article of faith around these parts: Vermont has a strong devotion to the environment. We feel closely connected with nature, and are dedicated to preserving it whenever and however we can. On environmental issues, we set an example that others should follow.

Well, in the words of Lee Corso, “Not so fast, my friend.”

Sure, there’s some truth in that comforting self-image — but there’s also a whole lot of horse hockey. And that comfy self-satisfaction prevents us from truly examining our environmental performance and evaluating the choices we face.

It’s a given that Vermont is a relatively green, natural place with above-average environmental quality. But that’s mostly due to two factors that have nothing to do with our inherent virtue as a people, or our diligent stewardship of the land:

— A small population, and

— A relative lack of extractable resources.

It’s easy to be environmentally friendly when your numbers are small. Heck, there’ve been people on Earth for two and a half million (or six thousand, as you prefer) years now, and we didn’t begin to f*ck up the atmosphere until the last two hundred or so. Here in Vermont, we can let our unfiltered woodstoves belch fumes all winter long, flout clean-water standards, drive trucks and SUVs and four-wheel drive vehicles* all over the place, and allow unregulated junkyards to flourish, and it hardly makes a dent on the Green Mountain State. (Well, except for the water part; but more on that later.)

*I’ve lived here for seven winters, and I can count on my fingers the number of days I wished I had four-wheel drive. Overall, I’d rather have two-wheel drive and get two or three more miles to the gallon. Sure, there are those who really do need FWD, but for most of us, a Subaru is a badge of Vermontiness rather than a necessity of life.

And it’s easy to be green when you don’t have significant deposits of coal, oil, natural gas, iron ore, or precious minerals to exploit. (Our much-touted fracking ban is essentially an empty gesture, since we don’t have any known reserves of gas and nobody’s even looking.) If our Appalachians were as loaded with coal as West Virginia’s, do you think we could have spurned the financial rewards of strip mining? I’d like to think so, but the truth is, we’ve never had to make that choice.

Of course, we do have much to be proud of.  

One great example: coming from a state with no “current use” protection for landowners, I can say that Act 250 is a terrific thing, and has done a lot to rein in development. Of course, our lack of population has done even more; outside of Chittenden County, there’s just not much of a market for suburban sprawl.

Indeed, our low population has allowed us to be disturbingly lax on many environmental issues. To name a few:

— As the annual algae blooms can attest, we have a lousy track record on water quality. We’re still awaiting word from the EPA on what Vermont has to do to catch up with the Clean Water Act; that’s likely to be an expensive process, and nobody seems to have the political will to take it on.

Our sewage and stormwater systems are outdated and frequently overflow, sending untreated waste into our rivers and streams. And, as Seven Days’ Ken Picard recently reported, Vermont has a laughably weak system for reporting overflows. What’s worse, there is no real system for tracking the health impacts of overflows:

State toxicologist Sarah Vose says that testing for E. coli, considered a “fecal indicator bacteria,” only occurs at managed beaches and swimming areas, such as Burlington’s North Beach and Oakledge Park. When the public swims, boats or fishes at other locations, she says, they do so at their own risk.

Yep, the ol’ swimmin’ hole may actually be an ol’ shithole.

— Some people are very concerned about emissions from biomass plants (which are held to very strict air-quality standards), but they seem completely unbothered by Vermont’s unregulated woodstoves. According to the ANR, between 1/3 and 1/2 of all Vermont households use wood for some or all of their heating. That’s a lot of smoke.

In most areas of the country, woodburning from fireplaces and woodstoves is the largest source of particulate matter air pollution (PM) generated by residential sources. In some localities, fireplaces and woodstoves have been identified as the source of 80% or more of all ambient particles smaller than 2.5 microns in diameter (PM2.5) during the winter months.

Well, I guess particulate matter is acceptable, as long as it’s generated The Vermont Way.

Now, I’m not saying we should abandon wood heat. I’m just saying that it’s one of our many environmental blind spots.

— We have an appalling record on junkyards. Indeed, until the year 2010 — three years ago! — auto junkyards were essentially unregulated. Before then, the responsible agency was the Department of Motor Vehicles, which had no staff with environmental training and regulated entirely on the basis of appearance. Which meant, as long as you had a high fence along the roadside, you were A-OK with the state of Vermont.

And since the DMV had no resources to enforce its piddling rules, it unilaterally decided, quite a while ago, to only regulate junkyards along state highways. There’s a junkyard right in Montpelier, about a half mile from its picture-book downtown, that has never been effectively regulated. The soil and groundwater has never been tested. It’s located a few hundred feet from the Winooski River. And nobody cares.

— And then there’s our response to climate change. We’ve established some very progressive goals on renewable energy — which is the easy part. Attaining them is the real challenge. This year, our political leaders basically punted on energy efficiency, which is one of the keys to limiting greenouse gas emissions.

In terms of implementing the transition to renewables, even at this early stage we’re getting significant blowback — not only from pro-business groups, but from portions of the environmental community who fear change above everything, and who seem to hold the magical belief that if we don’t change, the climate will respect our borders and leave us untouched.

The unspoken guiding principle seems to be this: If it’s old, traditional, familiar, or small, it’s good (or at least acceptable). If it’s new, shiny, different, or (gasp!) corporate, it’s bad and we need to resist it.

And there’s where our self-satisfaction becomes counterproductive. Not everything old, traditional, familiar or small is good; not everything new, shiny, different, or even corporate is bad.

Vermont needs to take off those Green-tinted glasses and take a clear-eyed look at itself. In many ways, it needs to stay the same. In some important ways, though, it needs to change, if it’s going to be the environmental bellwether of our collective imagination.