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"In "The View From Vermont," geographer Blake Harrison explores the impact of tourism on that upcountry region's image and economy. Harrison's interest is "the nature of work-leisure relations in rural communities like those in Vermont." Its abandoned farmland from the early 1900s on "became a palimpsest on which vacationers inscribed a new rural aesthetic based on leisure and consumption rather than on productive agricultural work."
In a provocative discussion, Harrison explores the relationship between controversial issues, such as sprawl and civil unions, and tourism. Those issues, he writes, owe "at least part of their meaning and resonance to tourism," because tourism exercises "tremendous power over what people think of when they think of a properly ordered rural space."
Just as opponents of sprawl and supporters of civil unions find their views as defining Vermont as "a special place," echoing the message of tourist promoters, those on the other side echo "longstanding arguments about the undue influence of tourists and about tourism's place in the state's economy."—Boston Globe
A study of tourism and the social, cultural, and political forces that have shaped Vermont’s landscape and popular image over the past century.
With its small native population, proximity to major metropolitan areas, and bucolic rural beauty, Vermont was fated to be a tourist mecca, forever associated in the popular imagination with maple syrup, fall colors, and ski bunnies. Tourism, for good and ill, has always been the decisive factor in the conception of rural Vermont. What is surprising, however, is the degree to which we have accepted this notion of rural Vermont as a somehow timeless entity. Blake Harrison’s rich and rewarding study instead presents the construction of Vermont’s landscape as a complex and ever-changing dynamic informed by progressive, modernist, and reformist thought, competing views of economic expansion, rural and urban prejudice and social exclusion, and (more recently) by land use planning and environmentalism. This broad-based study includes the early history of Vermont tourism, the concomitant abandonment of farms with the rise of the summer home, the creation of an “unspoiled” Vermont (from billboards, at least), the impact of Vermont’s ski industry on tradition-bound tourism, and later efforts to legislate growth and protect an increasingly static ideal of a rural Vermont.
While grounded within a specific Vermont view, Harrison has much to contribute to broader studies of rural places, tourism, and landscapes in American culture. His analysis of how physical landscapes affect and are affected by our imagined landscape, and the insight afforded by his juxtaposition of leisure and labor, will deeply inform our understanding of rural tourist landscapes for years to come. This is a truly interdisciplinary work that will satisfy and challenge historians and geographers alike.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
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BLAKE HARRISON holds a Ph.D. in geography from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and has taught courses on the human geography of New England and North America at Montana State University, Yale University, and Quinnipiac University. He currently lives in New Haven, Connecticut.
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