Bill McKibben

writer, educator, and environmental activist/leader; author of 17 books, including nonfiction on environmental topics and a novel; his work has appeared in periodicals including the New Yorker and Rolling Stone; serves as Schumann Distinguished Scholar in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; won the Gandhi Peace Prize, honorary degrees from 19 colleges/universities, and the Right Livelihood Award in the Swedish Parliament; founder and senior adviser emeritus of 350.org, the first global grassroots climate campaign

The morning crowd at the Bennington Starbucks moved through the time-honored ritual with rote familiarity: ordering their caffeine and caramel in pidgin Italian, waiting like schoolkids for their names to be called, and then either exiting into the faintly cool January air or sinking childlike into an oversized, overplushed armchair for a hit of the Web. The stereo played, over and over, the same nine songs by aging—aged, actually—guitar hero Peter Frampton, now appropriately acoustic.

Then, right in the middle of some melancholy chord, a voice crackled over the sound system, a voice that some people in the coffee shop immediately recognized.

“Greetings, Green Mountain Starbuckers,” said Vern Barclay in his deep radio baritone with just a hint of his Franklin County upbringing. “This is a special message going out to those of you in the nineteen Vermont shops. The other 34,513 Starbucks scattered across the planet Earth and aboard our lazily orbiting space station will continue to listen to Mr. Frampton mark the launch of his new album on Starbucks’ label. I know that all of us join in thanking the coffee giant for taking the musical icons of our various youths and encouraging them to noodle acoustically in the background, and it is a great pleasure to know that no matter which shop you visit, the soundtrack will be the same—it’s almost as reassuring as the muffled bu-dump bu-dumpof the womb. But today, your friends here at Radio Free Vermont, ‘underground, underpowered, and underfoot,’ wanted to take this opportunity to patch in to the streaming Starbucks signal and remind you that we still have coffee shops in this state actually owned by Vermonters. Coffee shops where the money in the till doesn’t disappear back to Seattle, where the cream in the Mocha-Sexy CappaMolto comes from the cow down the road, and where the music on the stereo might actually come from your neighbors. You can find a list at RadioFreeVermont.org, if the authorities haven’t managed to shut it down today, and don’t bother telling them that Vern sent you—they’ll know. Remember: small is nice. And now—if perhaps your barista will be so kind as to turn up the volume a notch or two—we leave you with a little Grace Potter and the Nocturnals, straight out of Waitsfield.”

from Radio Free Vermont by Bill McKibben (Blue Rider Press)