Ruthann Rudel

Ruthann Rudel is one of many here in southeastern Vermont to have recently moved here. While she continues to maintain her job and a home in Cambridge, Massachusetts (in which her and daughter and son live), in 2024 she bought a house off a dirt road in Westminster. It's largely her computer and Zoom that enables her to continue her work in Cambridge yet live in a home with a view of woods and farmland a 2 ½ hour drive from. For the last thirty years, she has worked with a non-profit organization called Silent Spring centered in Cambridge. When she started working with them, the medical world saw breast cancer as an epidemic The National Cancer Institute was funding treatment and screening but very little funding was available for organizations to research the causes of this epidemic. The recently formed Silent Spring organization wanted to address that very problem.

In 1986, I earned a degree from Oberlin College in Chemistry and neuroscience and then worked for a few years at Tufts Medical School in Boston doing neuroscience research. In 1990 I got a job as an environmental consultant in regulated industries: mining, chemical companies. I learned the toxicology of poison. I studied risk assessments that guide decisions regarding public water supplies, lead in paints and how much lead should be allowed around our homes and playgrounds or how arsenic gains a foothold in the human body. I began to learn that industry creates the science IT needs. The Public Health community didn't have the resources to advocate for and make informed decisions about policies. In those early 90's, 70% of research was coming out of industry, 25% out of government organizations such as the National Research Defense Council and 5% from academics who were themselves divided. In 1994 I went to a lecture sponsored by a non-profit 501-C3 called Silent Spring centered in Cambridge. I was so impressed by their practical work I applied for a job with them. 1 was hired and have been there ever since. I'm now a director." (You can go to the website "Silent Spring Institute" for specific information about Rud el and this organization that looks into THE CAUSES, particularly environmental causes, of breast cancer.

So why did Rudel set up a life in Vermont? In part, the computer and Zoom enables her to make this move to the country yet remain working in the city. Presently she works via computer three weeks a month from her office/home in Westminster. She attends meetings via Zoom five days a week but returns to her home in Cambridge on the fourth week for "in person" work at Silent Spring. But why Vermont? "I learned early on from my parents how to remake one's life. My father was born in 1930 in Vienna, Austria, yet both his parents died in 1938. With help, and as an orphan, my father escaped to New York City. He went on to study economics in Ann Arbor, Michigan and then worked for the State Department in DC. They sent him, among other countries, to

Iran and to Turkey where he worked for AID in international develop ment. At one point he was stationed in New Delhi when he met my Mom. "She was an explorer. She had worked as a secretary, then worked as a temporary secretary for Manpower, a temporary workers' agency, across the country. She ended up working for the US State Department across Europe, particularly Ankara, Turkey. In all of that, she met my father. After a couple years, they moved back to DC whereI grew up. What I learned through all of that was how to manage new lives in new places.

“But the telling memories of my childhood in DC gathered around my mother taking me in the summers to her parents' dairy farm in Wisconsin. That was where I learned about the peace of life in the country. I saw how my grandparents grew their own food, drank milk from their cows.... My Mom's parents were from Czechoslovakia but emigrated to the US it the 1950's to a town named Denmark, Wisconsin. They had forty cows, grew their own food and cooked exactly as their parents had cooked in The Home Country. Blood sausages for example. Those memories remain vivid in my mind. I bought a house in Cambridge where I lived for twenty years but wanted to get back to the country. For two years I rented my house and moved to a farmers' cooperative in Colrain, Massachusetts, and continued working for Silent Spring, but it just wasn't right. I started to explore Vermont in general and southeastern Vermont in particular.

"I volunteered as a helper on David and Yesinia Major at their Vermont Shepherd Cheese Farm in Westminster West. That's when I realized I wanted to live a grounded life in my own home while my son and daughter (in their twenties) lived at our home in Cambridge. I wanted to be more physically active, to know how to produce my own food as much as I could. I love to cook. I wanted to grow as much of my own as I could. I wanted to be thrifty, to live with a lighter footprint, but how? I needed models. "I visited a farmer in Halifax who, with her children, raised pigs. I went to CSA's to see how they worked. I helped David and Yesinia with shearing. I had always loved sheep’s milk cheese and cooked with it all the time. I appreciated the life the Majors were living. And then through them I learned of a house for sale in Westminster. I bought it. I couldn’t be happier. I look out at open fields, I’m surrounded by woodland and I can start to grow my own food.

“And to learn to do that, I volunteer at Milkweed Farm in Westminster West. I harvest their snap peas, beans and carrots, learning about soil amendments, planting and harvesting and putting food by. I’m starting to learn how to work on my house, too. A friend helps me with carpentry projects: replacing interior doors, altering cabinets, installing flooring….It’s all coming together.

“I’m also a serious swimmer and always have been. I swim at the Edgar May Recreation pool in Springfield, at Echo Lake north of Ludlow, Lowell Lake in Londonderry and Woodward Reservoir in Plymouth. I dive off the rowing dock at The Retreat Meadows in Brattleboro. And now I’m looking into UVM on-line to develop my research skills in agriculture. I’ve found my place.”