2025 Review and Reflections

PART 1: The Year in Review

Community, Communitas
Our wonderful Middlebury College interns—Mishka Banuri and Kylie King—hosted weekly Communi-tea Craft Circles last summer. Activities included potato-stamp printing, Henna tattoo art, pickling, and experimenting with flower dyes.  In the fall, we co-hosted the event “Radical Pamphlets Past and Present” with the College’s Special Collections department. You can watch the panel discussion on our YouTube channel: @newperennials1428.

We launched CRAF (Community Roots Apprentice Fellowship), which links students with community organizations and inspirational mentors. Designed and implemented by program specialist Lisa Winkler and intern Kylie King, CRAF uses the apprenticeship model and operates outside the usual pressures of deadlines and grades. This year’s mentor organizations include ACORN, A Revolutionary Press, Courageous Stage, Elderly Services Inc., Henry Sheldon Museum, Middlebury New Filmmakers Festival, Proxemia Sound, Rokeby Museum, and the Teen Center. (We gratefully acknowledge additional support for CRAF from Middlebury College’s Center for Community Engagement.)

Since 2019, New Perennials has awarded $136,750 in grants to more than 31 community partners. Funded projects this past year included ACORN’s Farmacy Program, Courageous Stage’s Inspired Citizens Project, and the Willowell Foundation’s Walden Year. We also continued to support campus partners, projects, and events in Environmental Studies and Environmental Affairs, including The Knoll and the Climate Action Program.

The crew of Perennial Films visited Vermont as part of their upcoming documentary, Prairie Prophecy, about the life and lifework of Wes Jackson. Featuring the mission and accomplishments of New Perennials in Vermont, the film offers interviews, commentary, and a bit of piano noodling from New Perennials Director Bill Vitek and highlights the work of Corie Pierce and her team at Bread & Butter Farm, a New Perennials partner. The film premieres this spring in Kansas.

The Un-Classroom
Marc Lapin and Bill co-taught the seventh iteration of their Perennial Turn course. Bill also taught Walking Body, Walking Mind, his J-term class, and began to develop a new course: Plants Are Us and Why It Matters. Collectively, these courses explore the meanings of perenniality and the many ways of “walking and being” in the world. One student explained perenniality like this: “It is a way of perceiving the world that allows humans to be interconnected with the non-human world through love and appreciation, allowing for sustainable coexistence.”

These courses keep grading to a minimum. Their syllabi are flexible and adapt to students’ interests and needs. The courses ask students to teach and teachers to learn, invite all manner of folks to join in, and take every opportunity to head into the greater classroom without doors. While this can feel uncomfortable for both teachers and students, we’re hearing positive comments about the experience. For example: “Though the class is unconventional in much of its content and format, I found this mode of learning to be incredibly fulfilling, and I feel confident and invigorated in pursuing further work related to the course and applying its contents to how I carry myself day by day.” And “I think the very structured ‘anti-structure’ format has proved vital to my learning in this course. We are asked to learn, think, and analyze in a critical and introspective manner that no other class at Middlebury has asked of me thus far.”

In the year ahead, we will continue our work in these areas and add a new set of short-form pamphlets, audio versions of all our pamphlets, a new book highlighting Vermont incarcerated artists and poets, and an autumn gathering that will be one-part New Perennials Reunion and one-part Movie Night, with a screening of Prairie Prophecy.

PART 2: What We’re Thinking About

Perenniality
A few months ago, one of Bill’s adult children lamented that, once again, he stumbled when trying to explain what his father does for a living. We know how he feels. What exactly is the New Perennials project? We say it nourishes deep roots in communities and classrooms by looking to plants—particularly perennials with their deep roots, dynamic relationships, and long-lived rhythms—for insights and lessons that can be applied in our daily lives.  

Right now, so much of the non-human world is sending what feels like last-chance messages about what we have too long ignored, beginning with agriculture. For most of its long history, agriculture has relied heavily on annual plants, soil disturbance, weeding, irrigation, fertilizers, and biocides in pursuit of maximum productivity in short-term cycles, even as it exhausts and sickens farmers, consumers, soils, and whole ecosystems. Further, because these practices long ago infiltrated our everyday lives, they made it seem natural to live by clocks, calendars, and deadlines, demanding maximum productivity at ever-faster speeds. This starts at a young age when children begin school. Classrooms mimic farm fields and annual growing seasons, with students grouped in same-age, monocultural arrangements, sitting in rows. They are graded and rigorously selected by tests and teachers for the best and brightest varieties, complete with annual harvesting—rebranded as graduating—to pursue a career, a word that means to run in a circle as fast as one can. 

What if we focused more on slower, deeply rooted, and longer-lasting perennial practices? Might perennial thinking applied to our social structures and systems help address the overwhelming stresses we’re putting on ourselves, on others, and the living earth? These are the questions that motivate us.

Stated another way, before we put our hands in the dirt, maybe we should put our heads in the soil. Not literally, of course, but as a pathway into exploring the root-brain hypothesis suggested in The Power of Movement in Plants, written and edited by the father-and-son team of Charles and Francis Darwin. It suggests that roots function as the plant’s brain and are responsible for controlling much of its activity, whereas the plant’s topside parts are primarily for nutrition and reproduction.

This reorientation gives us a different interpretation of growth, success, and progress. Instead of growing up, for example, we might try to stay put and grow downward. Perhaps it’s time to question the wisdom of being told to “Grow up!” Grown-ups are taught that it’s OK and even preferred to speed up time, use up resources, and mean up others in a zero-sum competition to get their share. Were we instead to reverse direction and grow downward like long-lived perennials, we might tend to slow down time, power down our use of resources, and “get down” with others in the reciprocal sharing of resources in our communities. 

New Perennials creates these growing-down/slowing-down experiences in our courses and community programming. We try to get our senses, thinking, and actions into “perennial mode,” even into a perennial mood, and to invite perenniality to work on us. If we can begin to feel these downward practices as normal and feel the release of tension in our bodies and our thinking and actions, who knows what will come next? There’s good evidence that when perennial and diverse crops are planted in depleted soils, the soils begin to heal on their own. We’re seeing glimpses of this kind of healing in ourselves and our students and collaborators.

Ignoramus!
We are all familiar with the term “ignoramus,” and we know it mostly in its derogatory usage. But the word has a much older and legalistic use. It means “we do not know” and was used by grand juries to indicate there was insufficient evidence provided by the prosecutor. We engage an ignorance-based perspective that assumes humans are much more ignorant than they are knowledgeable. We were already inclined toward this view when the Covid-19 pandemic put us firmly in the ignoramus mindset and in the groove of simultaneously imagining, testing, and implementing ideas and projects. We have developed a simple strategy: if something works, keep at it; if it doesn’t, move on to the next idea. “Ignoramus” is a team effort. It invites community and community finds a way.

Mission Work
In the early days of The Land Institute, Wes Jackson would remind his students and colleagues that they were doing mission-oriented (as opposed to movement-oriented) work. New Perennials takes this advice to heart. We are a small shop, and we care a heck of a lot. We welcome, encourage, and emulate generalists and regionalists. Although we are as locally focused as it gets, we believe our mission can be impactful wherever it takes root. 

Coda
Together we have made connections, insights, discoveries, laughter, and friendships. We have imagined other ways to be in the world. That’s really something. Let’s enjoy for a moment what we’ve accomplished in these seven years, even as we prepare for next year—and maybe a few more years to come. It’s good to know that beyond the amazing grant support that got us here—and the wonderful work of current and alumni team members, students, colleagues, and community partners—this project, like the perennial plants it emulates, will find its own ways of rooting, relating, grooving, growing, and thriving. It already has.