Meg Mott has been called a Constitutional Wrangler, whose stated mission is “teach ordinary citizens how to think through the various constitutional issues in a specific controversy”. Meg is a writer, teacher and the town moderator of Putney, Vermont. She uses dynamic and innovative strategies to help people find a common language.

After twenty years of teaching political theory and constitutional law to Marlboro College undergraduates, Meg has taken her love of argument to the general public. Her award-winning series Debating Our Rights on the first ten amendments, brings civil discussions on contentious issues to public libraries and colleges.

In 2008, after moving to Putney, Vermont, Meg received an invitation to run for town meeting moderator, and gaveled in her first gathering in 2015. She has been the town moderator ever since.

“I was once very suspicious of Robert’s Rules of Order,” said Meg, who recalled living in a yurt as her wife built their goat farm. “Was it just patriarchy or white supremacy or heteronormativity? I had all my big words. I came to realize that communities were lost if they stopped listening to each other,” she said in a recent interview. “In these times, we need to be more careful that we do not engage in viewpoint discrimination.” (VT Digger, 2/28/24)

Meg credits her interest in argument/discourse to Clarence Darrow, a first amendment and due process attorney. She recalls that Darrow helped her understand that “if you want people to do a better job at ruling themselves, they better have some pretty strong principles, and everybody’s going to want to give up on those principles”. She realized that our constitutional structure is critical to helping people govern themselves.

Meg is a collaborator with the Ecological Planning Laboratory at the University of Vermont. The Ecological Planning Laboratory helps communities tackle vital projects on their land, offering long-term support in partnership with UVM Extension and the Field Naturalist graduate program. The EPL work emphasizes social-ecological health at the watershed scale.

Bordertown is an ecomedia project coming to you from the upper Winooski watershed in central Vermont. Our goal is to serve as an instrument for relationship building and communication, and to encourage the conversation around resiliency, equity and justice. Our intention is to celebrate life and community - and to help create conditions for all life to thrive.

Music for this Podcast - "Adding My Voice" by Railroad Earth.

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