The Adirondack Park

[Greg Nolan]

New York’s Adirondack Park is the largest park in the contiguous United States, at more than 9,300 square miles (six million acres). It is the world’s largest, intact, temperate, deciduous forest. It protects the sources of most of New York’s major rivers and safeguards nearly 90 percent of the never-logged forests and motor-free wilderness areas remaining in the Northeast.

Members of the WCHA who have attend our annual Assembly in the last several years are familiar with the park -- unusual in that it includes 130 permanent communities and some 130,000 year-round residents as well as extensive areas of wilderness. The Adirondacks provide many places to paddle in uniquely accessible areas, both in developed resorts (such as Lake George) and in large areas of undeveloped wilderness.

You may find of interest the following material on the Park, the use of a $300 million Environmental Protection Fund, and the expansion of the Park by acquiring some 65,000 acres land, including land in the High Peaks region and the headwaters of the Hudson River, and determining how the newly-acquired land is to be classified:

http://www.adirondackcouncil.org/uploads/newsletter_archive/1457979577_Newsletter_Winter 2016.pdf

Indeed, if you are so minded, you have an opportunity to be heard on how the newly-acquired land is to be classified and used:

http://bewildnewyork.org/

http://salsa4.salsalabs.com/o/51275/p/dia/action3/common/public/?action_KEY=20239

 

[Rob Stevens]

Actually, Paul Smith's College, location of many of our Annual Assemblies, is located in the St. Regis Canoe Area; http://www.dec.ny.gov/lands/70572.html

 

[Greg Nolan]

Actually, Paul Smith’s College, located in the St. Regis Canoe Area, is within the Adirondack Park.

The Adirondack Park (and the similar Catskill Park) is established by Article 14 of the New York State Constitution. http://www.dec.ny.gov/lands/55849.html

The Adirondack Park is unique in this nation, both because of its large size -- the largest state park in the country -- and because it is comprised of lands that are both privately- and publicly-owned lands. How this works is pretty complicated sometimes, but even lands of state agencies and local governments, as well as privately owned lands, are subject to the jurisdiction and regulations of the Adirondack Park Agency. This pamphlet describes how this all works -- usually well, but sometimes not without conflict. http://www.adirondackwild.org/pdf/pdf_article-XIV-booklet/Article XIV Booklet.pdf

The boundaries of the parks are defined by a “Blue Line.”



(The map in the link to the St Regis Canoe Area given above also shows the Blue Line of the Adirondack Park, and Paul Smith's College is well within the Park.)

The land newly acquired was previously in private ownership (paper company), and approval is pending for a land use plan that will be the basis for regulating activity within this land. Approximately half of the land within the Blue Line is state-owned land and almost all of that is required by the State constitution to be kept “forever wild.” There is a current controversy because the proposed regulatory plan will allow motorized vehicles on some of the newly acquired land -- a use not consistent with “forever wild.”

 

[Larry Meyer]

You might enjoy a book on FDR by Douglas Brinkley, Rightful Heritage: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Land of America, which takes the unusual slant of looking at FDR’s record as a conservationist. While I have read a lot of FDR biographies, this is the first (and only) I have ever encountered that so dramatically illustrated how many preserves and wildlife refuges he created. He vastly outdid Teddy on that front.