A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (And Some Bears)

by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling

Despite the best efforts of civic-minded people like Burrington, in the decades since Louis Banks preached from the Pinnacle, Grafton had gradually slipped down an entropic slope. In the early days, the hands on the clock of enlightenment busily swept away Grafton’s wolves and bears and trees in favor of houses and farms and sheep. But when its capitalistic motor was stilled, that clock began rusting away, a slow fade of civilization punctuated by fire and flood. Between 1935 and 2002, the county lost 92 percent of its farmland, and fields reverted to impenetrable thickets of bramble, then tangles of young trees. Roads once supported by tax dollars became blackberry patches favored by foraging bears. The most heavily farmed region in the state became the most heavily forested. And even as camps have arisen in the woods in the first decades of this century, census data show that a third of Grafton’s permanent housing units stand vacant. The wilderness’s encroachment is presaged by advance troops of mice building nests in homes and under the hoods of cars. Left unchallenged, the vermin unpave the way for further intrusions by larger animals, water, wind, and vegetation. The state now considers Grafton a single, near-continuous block of bear habitat.