Jim Westphalen

The yaks don’t know it, but they are part of a much larger plan. Williams is a leader in the Vermont secessionist movement, which is itself part of a broader, national movement promoting “re-localization” — the idea of building societies based on local goods and energy, and developing local government and culture.

Secession has a long and mixed history in this country, the very founding of which, if you think about it, was an act of secession. Secessionists today have a wide range of grievances, often involving federal spending and taxation. Williams, like a lot of people who think along these lines, believes we must confront a litany of planetary crises, but that the United States is just too big and unwieldy to do that effectively. “Never before has the world had to confront the issue of global peak oil or of climate change,” he says. “I think the key to managing those challenges is re-localizing and decentralizing.”

Williams edits a newspaper called Vermont Commons, which explores political, economic, and cultural issues related to secessionism. (The paper comes out six times a year and has a circulation of about 12,000.) He believes that the United States “is no longer a functioning republic for so many different reasons: It’s way too centralized; it’s way too corrupt in terms of the way the political process does or doesn’t work.” What really got his attention, he says, was the “systematic suppression” of votes in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections. But he is quick to point out that talk of secession is not merely a sign of his dissatisfaction with the Bush policies of the last eight years, though legislation like the Patriot Act does not please him. “The U.S. empire is essentially ungovernable,” he says. “The problems we’re confronting are well beyond the scope of one person or one party or one platform to fix.” Though he speaks admiringly of President Barack Obama’s talents, last November, for the first time, Williams did not vote for president as a matter of principle, explaining that he was loath to validate the national government. (He does vote in state and local elections.)

It comes as a shock the first time you hear someone utter the words “U.S. empire,” especially when he does so in as calm a voice as the one Williams uses. Far from ranting, he maintains his end of what he calls “this conversation” with equanimity and plenty of examples from history. “I think Rob likes listening as much as he likes talking,” says Bill McKibben, the environmental writer and activist who also lives in central Vermont and sympathizes with many of Williams’ ideas, though he says he does not believe in secession. In McKibben’s eyes, Williams — younger and more media-savvy than most activists who have led the discussion in the past — has given the Vermont movement a much-needed jolt of legitimacy.

“The Vermont secessionist movement, to the extent there is one, has been regarded as mostly kooky and fringe, full of people who like to dress up as Ethan Allen and issue manifestos,” says McKibben. “Rob has actually performed the very useful service of providing a bridge between that [crackpot fringe] and the more conventional world. ... I think he’s way more interested in actual physical questions about food and energy and money than about overheated rhetoric.” Since Vermonters seem willing to give Obama a chance to address their concerns — he got 67 percent of the vote, higher than in any state except Hawaii — Williams now sees his role as one of keeping the conversation alive.

Williams has always been an independent thinker, says his wife. The couple began dating as Princeton seniors and got married in 1992. They spent most of the 1990s in New Mexico, where both taught at a private school in Albuquerque and Rob earned a Ph.D. in history. By the time they moved to Vermont, in 2001, they had a new baby, Anneka, who’s now 9, and a son, Theron, on the way. Kate had a job with the Trust for Public Land, and they were feeling their way as new parents in a new state.

Vermont, they discovered, was far more complicated than its popular image might suggest. “People have Vermont pegged as a granola-eating, Volvo-driving, Howard Dean-shouting blue state, but it’s not,” Rob Williams says. “Vermont is one of the most interesting states in the country, politically.” He notes that Vermont has civil unions — in April, the state Legislature authorized gay marriage — and “you don’t need a permit to carry a weapon.” And if it’s hard to pigeonhole Vermont, it’s nearly impossible to do that with Williams. In addition to teaching college courses on media criticism and media history, he works with a Vermont-based nonprofit that brings together people from trouble spots around the world for discussion and socializing, writes about the arts for a local paper, and sings and plays guitar in a folk-rock band that works the après-ski scene in central Vermont. The band’s name is Phineas Gage, after a freakishly lucky Vermonter of the mid-19th century who not only survived having a large iron rod dynamited up through his brain but actually lived 10 more years, long enough to profit from it on the freak-show circuit.

Kate is a member of Waitsfield’s select board — the first woman to hold that position in her town. “She and four old guys run the town,” chuckles Rob, who was just elected to another three-year term on the school board. By day, she now works as executive director of the Northern Forest Canoe Trail, a nonprofit that oversees a waterway running 740 miles through four states and Quebec.

Kate agrees almost completely with the localization part of her husband’s argument, and would be happy if the couple grew more of their own food. She says she does not agree with secessionism, though she wonders whether people could “consider bio-regional organizing and have a conversation where you invite people in to create something completely new.”

This is an idea her husband is willing to consider. “A lot of us like the idea of what we call ‘New Acadia,’” he says. “Take the upper part of New England and the Canadian Maritimes.”

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