Protecting Nature in the Adirondacks and the Amazon: Common Threads

There is no doubt that nature is in trouble in the modern world, and our growing economic and social problems are certain to increase threats to nature while decreasing the amount of resources available to address those threats. A way around this dilemma is to use pragmatic, market-based approaches to conservation to serve the needs of both people and nature. Since the circumstances of people and nature vary greatly throughout the world, specific applications of this concept must vary as well. Two examples from opposite ends of the world development spectrum are Thirteenth Lake in New York's Adirondack Park, and the town of Sinop in Brazil's Amazon Rainforest.

The public and private lands surrounding Thirteenth Lake represent a pragmatic solution to the negative environmental effects of sprawl. Here, members of the Thirteenth Lake Property Owners Association voluntarily give up some of the rights commonly enjoyed by property owners in the U.S. to enhance the public goods of nature protection and aesthetic quality through deed covenants. These covenants require that homes be set well back from the lake and well apart from each other, and to conform to design standards governing screening vegetation, utilities, paint color and building materials, etc. Recreational use of the lake is controlled by limiting access to a common beach area where amenities such as parking, a sandy beach, a floating dock for deep water swimming and diving, chairs and picnic tables, chemical toilets, canoe and kayak storage racks, and an emergency phone are provided, and use of the beach area is governed by a set of rules designed to protect the natural ecosystem and the aesthetic quality of the development. The overall impact is reduced fragmentation of habitat, increased protection of wildlife, and noticeably enhanced aesthetic quality compared to similar lake-shore developments in the Adirondacks and elsewhere.

The rest of the land surrounding the lake is in public ownership as part of the New York State Forest Preserve where it is governed by Adirondack Park regulations for land designated as "Wilderness" under the park's Land Use Master Plan. As such, permanent structures and the use of motorized vehicles are prohibited on the lakes public shoreline. All camping on the public land bordering the lake must take place 150 feet from trails or lake shore except at a handful of designated spots where shoreline camping is allowed. At the northern end of the lake there is a public parking area close by chemical toilets, four handicapped access campsites, and a boat launch. Although the lake itself is not designated as "Wilderness," the design of the boat launch effectively limits the size of boats that can use the lake to small craft such as kayaks, canoes, and rowboats, and there is a 5 hp limit for motorized boats (and signs suggest that only electric motors may be allowed on the lake at some point in the future).

One of the key factors in the successful marriage of public and private land at Thirteenth Lake is the use of science and technology to monitor the health of its ecosystem. An example of this is the loon monitoring program that was conducted at the lake this summer. Loons are often used as indicator species for environmental quality in Adirondack lakes, and the information gleaned from this study can be used to guide future policies pertaining to the public and private lands at Thirteenth Lake.

The threats to nature in wealthy nations are often very different from the threats to nature in the developing world, so it is interesting to find some similarities between Thirteenth Lake and an environmental success story taking place in the Amazon rainforest. In their 2007 book The Last Forest Mark London and Brian Kelly describe the town of Sinop in the Brazilian Amazon as "a failed experiment that somehow managed to succeed (p. 109)." Sinop was founded in 1972 as a "private colonization project owned by a single individual...(who used) a manioc-to-ethanol factory...as the catalyst for real estate development (p.104)." The manioc-to-ethanol scheme was an abject failure, but the town prospered nonetheless. "Sinop now has 120,000 citizens living along paved streets in neat sub-divisions, waiting patiently for the completion of the new airport terminal and the forty-six store shopping mall (p. 105)." London and Kelley find one key to Sinop's success in the fact that it started with a "private governing authority, selling off clearly demarcated plots of land. (This gave) ...settlers who then had a vested interest in the enhanced value of the land (the)...incentive to stay and prosper rather than slash and burn the land and move on (p.104)."

They find a second key to Sinop's success in the story of Jaime Demarchi, a farmer and machine shop owner, about whom they write: "It took years for Jaime and his neighbors to understand the soil: what crops worked, what rotation they needed, what fertilizer worked best. 'We now have rotations that go through soy, corn, wheat, and rice,' he said. 'And each of those plantings may need a different seed, depending on where they are, what the soil is like, what the rotation is going to be. We can figure those things out because we have the most modern technology in the world. Right here in Amazonia.' In his machine shop, Demarchi has a computer with broadband access, which allows him to share information about see varieties with research organizations, to download weather information, to buy and sell equipment, and to keep up with commodities markets. He has a cell phone. The advantage that American and European farmers once had over Demarchi--access to information and technology--is gone. The competitive matrix now tilts in his favor because he also has a year-round warm climate, abundant rainfall, and plenty of land (pp. 110-111)."

The common threads that run through the Thirteenth Lake and Sinop examples provide practical guidelines for new development programs that make effective use of the increasingly scarce resources available for environmental protection. One such thread is that both examples rely on sub-divisions of clearly-titled private property to tap into landowners' self-interest as a means of creating and sustaining development that will simultaneously protect the environment and their investment. The implication of this finding for conservation organizations seeking to make maximum use of scare resources is this; where self-interest leads to successful developments, recovered investments and profits can be channeled into new developments. This creates self-expanding funding sources for nature protection at a time when new resources are likely to be increasingly difficult to come by, and adds an interesting new dimension to the idea of "sustainable" development.

Another common thread running through both examples is that they take a pragmatic approach to protecting nature through their emphasis on creativity and adaptability. This is important because, as Louis Menand writes in his 2001 history of pragmatism The Metaphysical Club, "ideas are tools...(that) are provisional responses to particular and unreproducible circumstances (whose) survival depends not on their immutability but on their adaptability (pp. xi and xii)." They also illustrate the importance of employing science and technology to guide and enhance creativity and adaptability when dealing with the natural world.

Thirteenth Lake provides a specific example of how public and private land can be combined to protect nature, an idea that mirrors the basic concept embodied in the Adirondack Park on a smaller scale. While London and Kelly do not specifically discuss what role, if any, publicly-owned nature reserves played in Sinop's success, they note with apparent approval the efforts of Brazil's Minster of the Environment, Marina Silva, to set aside forest reserves along newly-created road (BR-163) that joins Sinop to the world's markets (p.114). Employing the expanded definition of sustainable development described above within the framework of regional land use planning promises to yield an effective foundation for future efforts to protect nature in the modern world.

The First Modern Forest

As I discussed in my post titled "Pragmatism and Nature" treating nature as a pristine condition that is separate from human activities usually results in policies that are destined to fail. The pragmatic view of the modern world, on the other hand, suggests that nature is best seen as an idea that embodies many different values and concepts. In this context it is interesting to note that the Adirondacks seem to be the place the concepts that make up the modern idea of nature first came together.

One of the ideas that helped shape our modern concept of nature was the belief that nature was the physical manifestation of spiritual truth and beauty. This idea was embraced by transcendentalist authors like Thoreau and Emerson and brought to the forefront of the visual arts by the painters of the Hudson River School. Emerson linked transcendental thought to Adirondacks in his long poem "Adirondac" (see Steve's post of 10/2/08), and the prevalence of Adirondack landscapes in paintings produced by members of the Hudson River School makes the importance of the region to that movement unmistakable (need link to Hudson River site).

As the Transcendental movement and the Hudson River School were entering the American consciousness, authors like Joel Tyler Headley and Charles (Adirondack) Murray were busily promoting the recreational and health benefits of the Adirondack forest to the growing ranks of city dwellers in the 19th century U.S. quotes from both. Eventually this led people to attribute special healing properties to the Adirondack forests. This idea reached what was perhaps its zenith with the establishment of Dr. Edward Trudeau's Adirondack Cottage Sanatorium in 1884. There tuberculosis victims spent many hours each day (even in winter) on the porches of cure cottages breathing healthful "vapors" until the Sanatorium closed in 1954 after the discovery of drugs such as streptomycin that were effective in treating the disease.

While the abundant beauty and recreational opportunities of the Adirondack forests were helping change how people thought about nature, people with a utilitarian view of nature were transforming the Adirondack forest and the U.S. economy. Most of the forests close to the industrial centers of the Northeaster United States had been cleared for agriculture by the mid-1800's, but the Adirondack forest, with its rugged terrain, poor soils, and short growing season, had been spared. As the U.S. economy changed from being predominantly agricultural to being predominantly industrial in the latter half of the 19th century, timber products occupied a place equivalent to oil and the internet in our modern economy. Forests were the main source of fuel, construction material, and chemicals during the industrial revolution in the U.S., and they provided the paper that was the essential means for storing and transmitting information in this increasingly mass-market economy. The most accessible source of large amounts of timber products was the Adirondack forest, and it was soon filled with the sounds of axes and saws.

Clear cutting and the enormous forest fires that followed in its wake stripped much of the Adirondacks of trees and wildlife before the turn of the century. The resulting erosion carried away much of the already thin layer of Adirondack topsoil, which ended up in lakes, ponds and streams and choked out aquatic life. Eventually, even relentlessly utilitarian Progressive-era politicians began to fear that the destruction of the Adirondack forest posed a threat to many important New York watersheds that were essential to commerce.

Watersheds were another example of the new ideas that were coming together in the Adirondack forest to create the modern concept of nature. In 1865 George Perkins Marsh published Man and Nature, an exhaustive inventory of the ways humans had altered the natural world. His work laid the foundation for the concept of ecosystems that is an essential component of modern environmental science. In 1872 the New York State Assembly appointed a Commission of State Parks to make recommendations for protecting the Adirondack forest, and Phil Terrie points out in his 1998 Adirondack history Contested Terrain that the Commissioners invoked "language and examples found in Marsh's Man and Nature although that important book was not specifically cited (when) the Commissioners argued that...the chief reason for establishing an Adirondack Park was to protect watershed (p. 93)".

Over the next 22 years these ideas were gradually drawn together to create the Adirondack Park. Anglers and hunters, journalists, wealth landholders, nascent conservationists, and utilitarian downstate business interests concerned about the effect changes to the Adirondack watershed would have on New York's canal system created one of the earliest successful environmental coalitions. In responding to this coalition the New York State Legislature never resolved the issue of what to do about the people who lived within the park's boundaries. In effect, this decision to "create first, resolve later" established a pragmatic approach to park policy, and it is no accident that major changes to the original structure of the park such as the establishment of the "Forever Wild" clause in 1894, and the creation of the Adirondack Park Land Use Plan in 1973 are some of the most useful applications for those seeking to protect nature in the modern world.

Pragmatism and Nature

People who care about nature have reason to be concerned about its fate in the modern world. Deforestation continues at a staggering rate in developing nations, and sprawling development takes a toll on nature in both rich and poor nations. Wild plant and animal populations throughout the world are depleted for folk medicine and fashion, and wild animals are increasingly hunted for "bushmeat," or hunted, trapped, or poisoned when they have an adverse effect on domestic animals or crops. Finally, marine ecosystems are ravaged by over-harvesting and pollution, and global warming threatens species everywhere (see Steve's post on Bicknell's Thrush, for example). Anyone who cares about the fate of nature must advocate for effective policies to address these problems.

In his 2001 book The Metaphysical Club Louis Menand quotes Oliver Wendell Holmes as stating "all the pleasure in life is in general ideas, but all the use of life is in specific solutions (p. 342)." We seek, through our study of the Adirondack Park, to produce both general ideas and specific solutions about how we might best protect what remains of nature. One general idea that has emerged from our study to date is that there is great benefit in taking a pragmatic view of nature when considering environmental policy. It is important to note that in this context "pragmatic" is not simply a synonym for "compromise." Instead, it expresses the belief that ideas, including the idea of nature, "should never become ideologies--either justifying the the status quo, or dictating some transcendent imperative for renouncing it (Menand, p. xii)." Sometimes useful ideas will emerge from compromise, and at other times from the application of just principles.

Unfortunately, environmental policy is often decided in a political arena where nature is defined in ideological terms by anti-environmentalist seeking to justify the status quo, or radical environmentalists seeking transcendent change. The result is often conflict, gridlock and policy failure. The Adirondack Park is one of the world's oldest and largest attempts to protect nature through public policy, and our research suggests that this experiment has usually worked best when it has taken a pragmatic and democratic view of nature, and often failed when it has not. Some specific solutions that have worked in the Adirondack Park and promise to be useful elsewhere are: land use planning, affording nature extra protection in the political process through delay and referendum as mandated by the "Forever Wild Clause", stewardship and citizen science, and paying local government taxes on state land. The failure of the Commission on the Adirondack Park in the Twenty-first Century, on the other hand, confirms that effective policies for protecting nature must be forged in the crucible of democratic politics, no matter how frustrating or imperfect that route may sometimes seem.

Elsewhere in The Metaphysical Club Menand explains that the usefulness of pragmatism in the modern world rests on "a kind of skepticism that (helps) people cope with life in a heterogeneous, industrialized, mass-market society (p, xii)." It is no accident that pragmatic skepticism emerged on the scene at the same time as modern scientific methods since science, democracy, and capitalism are the three pillars of the modern world. It is also important to recognize that those pillars are sometimes at odds with each other. Democracy and capitalism, as Robert Dahl demonstrates in his 1998 treatise On Democracy, " are locked in a persistent conflict in which each modifies and limits the other (p. 173)." Similarly, recent events in the field of biomedical research have demonstrated that capitalism is fully capable of distorting the scientific process in its quest for profit. It is, however, the conflicts that sometimes emerge between science and democracy that are most important for those who are concerned with the fate of nature in the modern world.

Where the environment is concerned, the mismatched language and time-frames of science and democratic politics present a serious barrier to effective policy making. The language of science is modest and probabilistic, characteristics that allow political partisans to create illusions of doubt when scientific findings are cited in public discourse. Further, the painstaking methodology and redundancy of results required by science creates a slow-moving process that is at odds with the election-driven time frame of democratic politics. Recognizing the mismatch between the language and time frames of science and democracy is essential to creating environmental policies that eschew ideology in favor of weighing and assessing the full-range of empirical evidence.

A general theme that emerges from the study of Adirondack Park history is that its policies work best when they embrace the pragmatism embodied in the park's founding (see my post titled "The First Modern Forest). Both of the recent comprehensive histories of the park reached similar conclusions. In his 1978 book The Adirondack Park: A Political History Frank Graham writes of the Adirondack Park Agency: "There were public relations blunders that ought to serve as warnings for regional planning groups in the future {my emphasis}.To its capable staff of planners, lawyers, and ecologists, the agency might have added a community relations expert--and even a psychologist--who could have bridged the gap by interpreting goals and techniques of the planning effort for local government officials, the press, the business community, and the public at large (p. 261)." Phil Terrie expands on this theme in his 1997 Contested Terrain: A New History of Nature and People in the Adirondacks when he concludes that "..the difficulties involved in protecting both human and natural values reflect the continuing value of narratives to define the land and influence people's understandings of the land's meaning. (The) failure of the legislature to resolve the dilemma posed by private land in the Park (represents)...a great opportunity to...find just the unifying narrative we need forge a hopeful story for the future (p. 183)".

Adirondack Park history strongly suggests that defining nature in ideological terms yields policies that are controversial and counter productive, whereas taking a pragmatic view of nature results in policies that are flexible and effective. For pragmatists, ideas are "tools that people devise to cope with the world in which they find themselves (Menand: p. xi)." Examining the Adirondack Park from a pragmatic perspective yields a "tool kit" that can be adapted to the task of nature conservation in a wide range of circumstances. This kit includes: land use planning, delay and referendum, deed covenants, landscape design, tax payments on public land, variable tax assessment, stewardship, and conservation easements.

THE ADIRONDACS
(this poem in its entirity was taken from The Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson at www.rwe.org)
A JOURNAL DEDICATED TO MY FELLOW TRAVELLERS IN AUGUST, 1858
Wise and polite,--and if I drew
Their several portraits, you would own
Chaucer had no such worthy crew,
Nor Boccace in Decameron.
We crossed Champlain to Keeseville with our friends,
Thence, in strong country carts, rode up the forks
Of the Ausable stream, intent to reach
The Adirondac lakes. At Martin's Beach
We chose our boats; each man a boat and guide,
--Ten men, ten guides, our company all told.
Next morn, we swept with oars the Saranac,
With skies of benediction, to Round Lake,
Where all the sacred mountains drew around us,
Tahawus, Seaward, MacIntyre, Baldhead,
And other Titans without muse or name.
Pleased with these grand companions, we glide on,
Instead of flowers, crowned with a wreath of hills.
We made our distance wider, boat from boat,
As each would hear the oracle alone.
By the bright morn the gay flotilla slid
Through files of flags that gleamed like bayonets,
Through gold-moth-haunted beds of pickerel-flower,
Through scented banks of lilies white and gold,
Where the deer feeds at night, the teal by day,
On through the Upper Saranac, and upPere Raquette stream, to a small tortuous pass
Winding through grassy shallows in and out,
Two creeping miles of rushes, pads and sponge,
To Follansbee Water and the Lake of Loons.
Northward the length of Follansbee we rowed,
Under low mountains, whose unbroken ridge
Ponderous with beechen forest sloped the shore.
A pause and council: then, where near the head
Due east a bay makes inward to the land
Between two rocky arms, we climb the bank,
And in the twilight of the forest noon
Wield the first axe these echoes ever heard.
We cut young trees to make our poles and thwarts,
Barked the white spruce to weatherfend the roof,
Then struck a light and kindled the camp-fire.
The wood was sovran with centennial trees,
--Oak, cedar, maple, poplar, beech and fir,
Linden and spruce. In strict society
Three conifers, white, pitch and Norway pine,
Five-leaved, three-leaved and two-leaved, grew thereby,
Our patron pine was fifteen feet in girth,
The maple eight, beneath its shapely tower.
'Welcome!' the wood-god murmured through the leaves,
--'Welcome, though late, unknowing, yet known to me.
'Evening drew on; stars peeped through maple-boughs,
Which o'erhung, like a cloud, our camping fire.
Decayed millennial trunks, like moonlight flecks,
Lit with phosphoric crumbs the forest floor.
Ten scholars, wonted to lie warm and soft
In well-hung chambers daintily bestowed,
Lie here on hemlock-boughs, like Sacs and Sioux,
And greet unanimous the joyful change.
So fast will Nature acclimate her sons,
Though late returning to her pristine ways.
Off soundings, seamen do not suffer cold;
And, in the forest, delicate clerks, unbrowned,
Sleep on the fragrant brush, as on down-beds.
Up with the dawn, they fancied the light air
That circled freshly in their forest dress
Made them to boys again. Happier that they
Slipped off their pack of duties, leagues behind,
At the first mounting of the giant stairs.
No placard on these rocks warned to the polls,
No door-bell heralded a visitor,
No courier waits, no letter came or went,
Nothing was ploughed, or reaped, or bought, or sold;
The frost might glitter, it would blight no crop,
The falling rain will spoil no holiday.
We were made freemen of the forest laws,
All dressed, like Nature, fit for her own ends,
Essaying nothing she cannot perform.
In Adirondac lakes
At morn or noon, the guide rows bareheaded:
Shoes, flannel shirt, and kersey trousers make
His brief toilette: at night, or in the rain,
He dons a surcoat which he doffs at morn:
A paddle in the right hand, or an oar,
And in the left, a gun, his needful arms.
By turns we praised the stature of our guides,
Their rival strength and suppleness, their skill
To row, to swim, to shoot, to build a camp,
To climb a lofty stem, clean without boughs
Full fifty feet, and bring the eaglet down:
Temper to face wolf, bear, or catamount,
And wit to trap or take him in his lair.
Sound, ruddy men, frolic and innocent,
In winter, lumberers; in summer, guides;
Their sinewy arms pull at the oar untired
Three times ten thousand strokes, from morn to eve.
Look to yourselves, ye polished gentlemen!
No city airs or arts pass current here.
Your rank is all reversed; let men or cloth
Bow to the stalwart churls in overalls:
_They_ are the doctors of the wilderness,
And we the low-prized laymen.
In sooth, red flannel is a saucy test
Which few can put on with impunity.
What make you, master, fumbling at the oar?
Will you catch crabs? Truth tries pretension here.
The sallow knows the basket-maker's thumb;
The oar, the guide's. Dare you accept the tasks
He shall impose, to find a spring, trap foxes,
Tell the sun's time, determine the true north,
Or stumbling on through vast self-similar woods
To thread by night the nearest way to camp?
Ask you, how went the hours?
All day we swept the lake, searched every cove,
North from Camp Maple, south to Osprey Bay,
Watching when the loud dogs should drive in deer,
Or whipping its rough surface for a trout;
Or, bathers, diving from the rock at noon;
Challenging Echo by our guns and cries;
Or listening to the laughter of the loon;
Or, in the evening twilight's latest red,
Beholding the procession of the pines;
Or, later yet, beneath a lighted jack,
In the boat's bows, a silent night-hunter
Stealing with paddle to the feeding-grounds
Of the red deer, to aim at a square mist.
Hark to that muffled roar! a tree in the woods
Is fallen: but hush! it has not scared the buck
Who stands astonished at the meteor light,
Then turns to bound away,--is it too late?
Our heroes tried their rifles at a mark,
Six rods, sixteen, twenty, or forty-five;
Sometimes their wits at sally and retort,
With laughter sudden as the crack of rifle;
Or parties scaled the near acclivities
Competing seekers of a rumored lake,
Whose unauthenticated waves we named
Lake Probability,--our carbuncle,Long sought, not found.
Two Doctors in the camp
Dissected the slain deer, weighed the trout's brain,
Captured the lizard, salamander, shrew,
Crab, mice, snail, dragon-fly, minnow and moth;
Insatiate skill in water or in air
Waved the scoop-net, and nothing came amiss;
The while, one leaden got of alcohol
Gave an impartial tomb to all the kinds.
Not less the ambitious botanist sought plants,
Orchis and gentian, fern and long whip-scirpus,
Rosy polygonum, lake-margin's pride,
Hypnum and hydnum, mushroom, sponge and moss,
Or harebell nodding in the gorge of falls.
Above, the eagle flew, the osprey screamed,
The raven croaked, owls hooted, the woodpecker
Loud hammered, and the heron rose in the swamp.
As water poured through hollows of the hills
To feed this wealth of lakes and rivulets,
So Nature shed all beauty lavishly
From her redundant horn.
Lords of this realm,
Bounded by dawn and sunset, and the day
Rounded by hours where each outdid the last
In miracles of pomp, we must be proud,
As if associates of the sylvan gods.
We seemed the dwellers of the zodiac,
So pure the Alpine element we breathed,
So light, so lofty pictures came and went.
We trode on air, contemned the distant town,
Its timorous ways, big trifles, and we planned
That we should build, hard-by, a spacious lodge
And how we should come hither with our sons,
Hereafter,--willing they, and more adroit.
Hard fare, hard bed and comic misery,
--The midge, the blue-fly and the mosquito
Painted our necks, hands, ankles, with red bands:
But, on the second day, we heed them not,
Nay, we saluted them Auxiliaries,
Whom earlier we had chid with spiteful names.
For who defends our leafy tabernacle
From bold intrusion of the travelling crowd,
--Who but the midge, mosquito and the fly,
Which past endurance sting the tender cit,
But which we learn to scatter with a smudge,
Or baffle by a veil, or slight by scorn?
Our foaming ale we drank from hunters' pans,
Ale, and a sup of wine.
Our steward gaveVenison and trout, potatoes, beans, wheat-bread;
All ate like abbots, and, if any missed
Their wonted convenance, cheerly hid the loss
With hunters' appetite and peals of mirth.
And Stillman, our guides' guide, and
Commodore,Crusoe, Crusader, Pius Aeneas, said aloud,
"Chronic dyspepsia never came from eating
Food indigestible":--then murmured some,
Others applauded him who spoke the truth.
Nor doubt but visitings of graver thought
Checked in these souls the turbulent heyday
'Mid all the hints and glories of the home.
For who can tell what sudden privacies
Were sought and found, amid the hue and cry
Of scholars furloughed from their tasks and let
Into this Oreads' fended Paradise,
As chapels in the city's thoroughfares,
Whither gaunt Labor slips to wipe his brow
And meditate a moment on Heaven's rest.
Judge with what sweet surprises Nature spoke
To each apart, lifting her lovely shows
To spiritual lessons pointed home,
And as through dreams in watches of the night,
So through all creatures in their form and ways
Some mystic hint accosts the vigilant,
Not clearly voiced, but waking a new sense
Inviting to new knowledge, one with old.
Hark to that petulant chirp! what ails the warbler?
Mark his capricious ways to draw the eye.
Now soar again. What wilt thou, restless bird,
Seeking in that chaste blue a bluer light,
Thirsting in that pure for a purer sky?
And presently the sky is changed;
O world!What pictures and what harmonies are thine!
The clouds are rich and dark, the air serene,
So like the soul of me, what if 't were me?
A melancholy better than all mirth.
Comes the sweet sadness at the retrospect,
Or at the foresight of obscurer years?
Like yon slow-sailing cloudy promontory
Whereon the purple iris dwells in beauty
Superior to all its gaudy skirts.
And, that no day of life may lack romance,
The spiritual stars rise nightly, shedding down
A private beam into each several heart.
Daily the bending skies solicit man,
The seasons chariot him from this exile,
The rainbow hours bedeck his glowing chair,
The storm-winds urge the heavy weeks along,
Suns haste to set, that so remoter lights
Beckon the wanderer to his vaster home.
With a vermilion pencil mark the day
When of our little fleet three cruising skiffs
Entering Big Tupper, bound for the foaming
FallsOf loud Bog River, suddenly confront
Two of our mates returning with swift oars.
One held a printed journal waving high
Caught from a late-arriving traveller,
Big with great news, and shouted the report
For which the world had waited, now firm fact,
Of the wire-cable laid beneath the sea,
And landed on our coast, and pulsating
With ductile fire. Loud, exulting cries
From boat to boat, and to the echoes round,
Greet the glad miracle. Thought's new-found path
Shall supplement henceforth all trodden ways,
Match God's equator with a zone of art,
And lift man's public action to a height
Worthy the enormous cloud of witnesses,
When linked hemispheres attest his deed.
We have few moments in the longest life
Of such delight and wonder as there grew,
--Nor yet unsuited to that solitude:
A burst of joy, as if we told the fact
To ears intelligent; as if gray rock
And cedar grove and cliff and lake should know
This feat of wit, this triumph of mankind;
As if we men were talking in a vein
Of sympathy so large, that ours was theirs,
And a prime end of the most subtle element
Were fairly reached at last. Wake, echoing caves!
Bend nearer, faint day-moon! Yon thundertops,
Let them hear well! 'tis theirs as much as ours.
A spasm throbbing through the pedestals
Of Alp and Andes, isle and continent,
Urging astonished Chaos with a thrill
To be a brain, or serve the brain of man.
The lightning has run masterless too long;
He must to school and learn his verb and noun
And teach his nimbleness to earn his wage,
Spelling with guided tongue man's messages
Shot through the weltering pit of the salt sea.
And yet I marked, even in the manly joy
Of our great-hearted Doctor in his boat
(Perchance I erred), a shade of discontent;
Or was it for mankind a generous shame,
As of a luck not quite legitimate,
Since fortune snatched from wit the lion's part?
Was it a college pique of town and gown,
As one within whose memory it burned
That not academicians, but some lout,
Found ten years since the Californian gold?
And now, again, a hungry company
Of traders, led by corporate sons of trade,
Perversely borrowing from the shop the tools
Of science, not from the philosophers,
Had won the brightest laurel of all time.
'Twas always thus, and will be; hand and head
Are ever rivals: but, though this be swift,
The other slow,--this the Prometheus,
And that the Jove,--yet, howsoever hid,
It was from Jove the other stole his fire,
And, without Jove, the good had never been.
It is not Iroquois or cannibals,
But ever the free race with front sublime,
And these instructed by their wisest too,
Who do the feat, and lift humanity.
Let not him mourn who best entitled was,
Nay, mourn not one: let him exult,
Yea, plant the tree that bears best apples, plant,
And water it with wine, nor watch askance
Whether thy sons or strangers eat the fruit:
Enough that mankind eat and are refreshed.
We flee away from cities, but we bring
The best of cities with us, these learned classifiers,
Men knowing what they seek, armed eyes of experts.
We praise the guide, we praise the forest life:
But will we sacrifice our dear-bought lore
Of books and arts and trained experiment,
Or count the Sioux a match for Agassiz?O no, not we!
Witness the shout that shook
Wild Tupper Lake; witness the mute all-hail
The joyful traveller gives, when on the verge
Of craggy Indian wilderness he hears
From a log cabin stream Beethoven's notes
On the piano, played with master's hand.
'Well done!' he cries; 'the bear is kept at bay,
The lynx, the rattlesnake, the flood, the fire;
All the fierce enemies, ague, hunger, cold,
This thin spruce roof, this clayed log-wall,
This wild plantation will suffice to chase.
Now speed the gay celerities of art,
What in the desert was impossible
Within four walls is possible again,
--Culture and libraries, mysteries of skill,
Traditioned fame of masters, eager strife
Of keen competing youths, joined or alone
To outdo each other and extort applause.
Mind wakes a new-born giant from her sleep.
Twirl the old wheels! Time takes fresh start again,
On for a thousand years of genius more.'
The holidays were fruitful, but must end;
One August evening had a cooler breath;
Into each mind intruding duties crept;
Under the cinders burned the fires of home;
Nay, letters found us in our paradise:
So in the gladness of the new event
We struck our camp and left the happy hills.
The fortunate star that rose on us sank not;
The prodigal sunshine rested on the land,
The rivers gambolled onward to the sea,
And Nature, the inscrutable and mute,
Permitted on her infinite repose
Almost a smile to steal to cheer her sons,
As if one riddle of the Sphinx were guessed.

Bandit with a Chain Saw

The 10/6/08 issue of The New Yorker contains an interesting article by Raffi Khatchadourian that describes how illegal foresting is responsible for much of the deforestation that is happening in the world today. He closes the article with a tense account of a Russian "special officer" chasing an illegal forester through the woods. The officer fires several shots at the fleeing poacher before finally capturing him, but I was struck by the fact that the "middle-aged, visibly out of shape" bandit did not drop his chainsaw during the chase. Given the context of the article it seems unlikely that Khatchadourian's readers will see the poacher as a sympathetic figure, but he was to me. The sympathy I felt for this "bandit with a chainsaw" has its roots in a presentation I attended at the World Wilderness Congress in Tromso, Norway several years ago.

I was part of a large U.S. delegation to the Congress, and for the first few days my pride in being part of the this group grew day by day as I attended session after session where members of our delegation described marvelous GIS and GPS applications for wilderness protection, successful noise abatement policies in the Grand Canyon, etc. It grew even more after my colleagues and I made a very well-received presentation about lessons for protecting natural areas that might be learned by studying New York's Adironcack Park. But my reverie came to a screeching halt when I chanced upon a session presented by a forest ranger from a national park in India. I can't remember the name of the park or the ranger, but I've never forgotten his message.

His presentation started with wide-angle photgraphs of forest framed by the Himalayan Mountains in the background. This, he told us, was his park. He then began to show closer shots of the park, and it became apparent that his park was experiencing severe deforestation and errosion. He explained that the damage was initially caused by local people who entered the park to harvest branches for cooking and heating, and leaves for browse for their animals. He and his fellow rangers had responded by enforcing a strict ban on such activity. Soon, representatives from the local villages visited park headquarters and explained that their children were suffering from the cold and their animals were dying of starvation. Might it be possible, they wondered, for the local people to enter the park and take only leaves and branches that had fallen to the ground? The rangers felt sympathy for their plight and agreed to their request. That, he explained, was when the real damage started, since people literally came to park with brooms and swept the forest floor clean of fallen leaves and branches. Stripped of ground cover and seeds, the forest was dying, and the topsoil was washing away. He closed by asking us what, short of shooting the people who would inevitably continue to come to the park is search of leaves and wood, should he do? We had no answers.

Upon returning home I decided that I had to refocus my Adirondack research in a way that addressed the underlying factors exposed by the Indian forest ranger's presentation. It has not been an easy process, but I believe that answer lies in adopting a pragmatic philosophy when it comes to devising and implementing policies to protect nature. In this context pragmatic does not simply mean "practical," and it is not just an excuse to compromise, althoug compromise is often the result. It means instead that ideas, as Louis Menand explains in his 2001 book The Metaphysical Club, are not "'out there' waiting to be discovered, but are tools--like forks and knives and microchips--that people devise to cope with the world in which they find themselves (p. xi)." Since, in this formulation, ideas are "provisional responses to particular and unreproducible circumstances, their survival depends not on their immutablity but on their adaptability (and they)...should never become idelogies--either justifying the status quo or dictating some transcendent imperative for renouncing it (p. xii)."

I seems to me that failure to adopt a pragmatic view of nature has too often led to policy debates being dominated by those determined to justify the environmental status quo at any cost (anti-environmentalists) and those wedded to a transcendent imperative for renouncing it (radical environmentalists). In the Adirondack Park the failure to adopt a pragmatic view of nature was responsible for the failure of the Governor's Commission on the Adirondack Park in the Twenty-first Century, while the success of subsequent efforts to protect important natural areas through land acquisition and conservation easements is the result of politicians and policymakers taking a pragmatic approach. This recent history illustrates a larger theme: the Adirondack Park has succeeded in protecting nature in one of the most heavily developed parts of the world (60 million people live within a days drive of the Adirondack Park) because it has generally taken a pragmatic view of nature. Looking back at the successes and failures of the world's oldest and largest attempt to marry public and private land to protect nature may yield the answers the park ranger from India, and the rest of us who care about nature, need.

Land Use Planning in the Adirondack Park

In 1967 a stretch of Interstate Rte. 87 linking Albany and Montreal was completed. This stretch of highway, known as the Northway, runs along and through the Eastern side of the Adirondack Park. When the Northway was completed the Adirondack Park was within a day's drive of sixty million people. Conservationsists feared that this easy access would spark new development on private land in the park that would destroy its environmental itegrity. In response to this concern then-Governor Nelson Rockefeller's brother Laurance spearheaded a drive to create a national park in the Adirondacks. His proposal met with almost universal resistance from New Yorkers, but it eventually led to the creation of the Temporary Study Commission on the Future of the Adirondacks. This, in turn, led to the creation of the Adirondack Park Agency (APA) in 1971. The APA was charged with creating a State Land Master Plan to guide the Department of Environmental Conservation in managing state lands in the Adirondack Park, and a Private Land Use and Development Plan.


Using a process that was, in effect, the analog predecessor of modern GIS techniques, early Adirondack Park Land Use Maps were created by stacking translucent overlays each of which represented a particular environmental condition such as proximity to roads and shorelines, soil type, elevation and slope, scenic overlooks, associated with corresponding areas on a map of the park. Light shining through the layers produced varying shades of gray on the map such that darker shades indicated land that needed greater need for protection from development and other human activities. APA planners then converted the shades of gray into colors that designated different public and private land use categories. Governor Rockefeller accepted the first State Land Master Plan in 1972 and, after a great deal of debate and compromise, the state legislature approved the first Private Land Use and Development Plan in 1973.


Today both land use plans are periodically revised using digital mapping technology and information provided by APA scientists and planners. Final decisions about those revisions rests with the eleven Adirondack Park Agency Board Members. Eight of the members are appointed at the descretion of the Governor (by convention five of these seats are held by park residents and three are held by out-of park residents). The three remaining members are the Secretary of State, the head of the Department of Environmental Conservation, and the head of the Department of Economic Development. The Board makes park policy decisions and acts on permit applications during its monthly open meetings. While the Governor obviously has enormous influence over the Board, the diversity of interests represented by its members and its open meetings generally encourages it to make pragmatic decisions.


Evidence of pragmatic decision making can be found in the two main land use categories and managment strategies that comprise the constitutionally-protected Adirondack Forest Preserve. About 50% of the Forest Preserve is categorized as Wild Forest, a wilderness designation that allows some permanent man-made structures (e.g bridges) and use of motorized vehicles on designated trails and roads. The other 50% is categorized as Wilderness, a designation that prohibits use of motorized vehicles and permits only primitive structures for trail maintenance. Maintaining a consistent balance between these land use categories over time has helped to create a broad-based, if sometimes uneasy, coalition among recreational users, park businesses, and preservationists where park politics are concerned.

The Private Land Use and Development Plan embodies pragmatic view of nature by inserting environmental concerns into the private market for Adirondack Park real estate. Under the plan private land is divided into six categories: Hamlets, Industrial Use Areas, Moderate Intensity Use Areas, Low Intensity Use Areas, Rural Use Areas, and Resource Management Areas. For each category "overall intensity guidelines" prescribe the approximate number of principle buildings that are allowed in a square mile area. Each category is defined by a "character description" and a statement of "purposes, policies, and objectives." In addition, "development considerations" are listed to point out possible adverse impacts of development, and "compatible uses" are listed as a positive guide to acceptable development for each category. Finally, the plan defines projects within each category that require APA approval due to their regional impact. In the case of subdivisions, for example, "regional projects" range from 100-lot projects in Hamlet Areas to two-lot projects in Resource Management Areas.


Together, the State Land Master Plan and the Private Land Use and Development Plan continue the pragmatic tradition that has marked the Adirondack Park since its founding. Take, for example, the issue of shoreline protection. Since the majority of Adirondack Park homes and businesses are located on or near the park's 11,000 lakes and ponds and 30,000 miles of rivers and streams, regulation of shoreline development is one of the most controversial aspects of the Private Land Use and Development Plan. The 1973 Land Use Plan was approved by the legislature only after regulations for development along shorelines were rendered less restrictive than regulations for other areas of the park. Since that time, environmentalists have continually lobbied for stricter regulations on shoreline development in the park, but it took 35 years for the APA to require shoreline property owners to obtain permits for rebuilding or expanding exisiting buildings. For most radical environmentalists the APA's action is meaningless gesture that fails to address the root cause of the problem (capitalism). For most anti-environmentalists it is needless restriction of private property rights. For most pragmatic environmentalists, it is a step in the right direction that improves environmental quality without dramatically altering economic and social conditions in the park.

How to Define Big---Adirondack Park is Massive

Although New York history represents a major portion of the New York State third grade curriculum, many New York college bound students fail to recognize the Adirondacks as a major state park. Adirondack Park is larger than all other state and national parks in the 48 contiguous United States. In fact, only three national parks/preserves in Alaska out rank the Adirondacks in absolute size. Gates of the Arctic, Noatak National Preserve, and Wrangell St. Elias National Park and National Preserve are bigger at 7.5, 6.6, and 13.2 million acres, respectively. The Adirondack Park weighs in at a tad more than 6 million acres (2.5 million hectares or 24,281 square kilometers). Adirondack Park is bigger than Yellowstone N.P, Death Valley N.P, Rocky Mountain N.P., and the Grand Canyon. Adirondack Park is as large as the neighboring state of Vermont.

Adirondack Park sticks out like a large green blot on the Google Earth Map of New England. From space, its jagged border separates the green forests within to the non-park lands on the outside. There are 86 countries with less land area than the Adirondacks. This includes several developed countries with a large human presence. These include Luxemburg, Jamaica, Belize, El Salvador, Kuwait and Puerto Rico. The island country of Sicily is nearly the same size at 25,708 square kilometers. Costa Rica with its rich biodiversity is only twice the size at 51,000 square kilometers.
A few years ago, my field biology students measured and counted trees on 200 square meter plots on Long Point at Raquette Lake. We learned that on average, a typical hectare of this Adirondack forest has 638 trees of various sizes. Hemlock was the most abundant and accounted for 50% of the trees. Yellow birch and American beech were dead even at 13% each in the forest. If these values are typical, and we have no reason to suspect otherwise, then we predict that there are about 793 million eastern hemlock trees in Adirondack Park. Of the 1.6 billion trees, 207 million are yellow birch and another 207 million are American beech. We also determined that a hectare of Adirondack forest contained 280000 kg of dry biomass in living trees for a total of 1.8 x 1012 kg in the park. This mass is the same as 165 million yellow school buses.

Hidden within this great forest are large numbers of uncountable animal species. Anyone who has driven Adirondack roads on rainy summer nights is aware of the great numbers of American toads plopping across wet roadways. Much of the animal diversity and volume is unaccounted because we rarely see it. Take for example the eastern red-backed salamander. This species is very common across New York State. It leads a totally terrestrial lifestyle and one is very likely to encounter dozens of these in a short period of time, just by gently lifting rocks, logs, and humus in the forest. Ducey and Breisch in “The Amphibians and Reptiles of New York State” (Gibbs et al., 2007) estimate that the average forest has 1,660 eastern red-backed salamanders per acre. This translates into an astounding 10 billion eastern red-backed salamanders in the Adirondacks and places them near the top as the nation’s most abundant vertebrate.

These comparisons illustrate the Adirondack Park is easily the greenest place in the 48 contiguous states. More than 85% of the wilderness east of the Rocky Mountains is located in the Adirondack Park. The trees are protected by the New York State Constitution. Their presence and protection makes them a valuable environmental sponge by removing large quantities of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year. Do you suspect that my numbers and calculations are a little overzealous? After all, the Adirondacks have a significant surface are of water. On the other hand, the 6 million acres are flat terrestrial quantities, but the Adirondacks are anything but flat. If anything, my numbers are a complete underestimate of forest biomass as the vertical rises in the ADK add significantly to the total tree count.

Blow Down Natural History Part 2

Any visitor to a New England or Adirondack forest will note the pock-marked surface of the forest floor. The boils and depressions of the forest floor are grave markers where the past giants of the eastern forests once stood. Trees die of old age in the forest. They reach a point in their life where wood rots from within, insects and parasites rob the tree of energy, and even the stress of maintaining tissues on a giant tree decreases their vigor. Many trees fall on their own, but more often than not, they receive a nudge from occasional winds.

The winds of July 15, 1995 were anything but occasional. The blow delivered to the forest toppled healthy trees along with the diseased trees. The canopy of leaves acted like a sailboat spinnaker capturing the wind and bending to inflate. Yes, some trunks buckled, stretched and snapped. Roots cracked from the strain and where the wood held tough, the roots were pried from the sandy Adirondack soils. The legacy of the great blow was recorded in tree trunks laying in an easterly direction, shallow root profiles erected 90º from the horizon, and divots left where the roots once lay. Smaller sub canopy trees still stand and smaller saplings still dotted the forest floor.

Although the woods must have looked like a war zone, they remained healthy over the coming weeks, months and years after the mighty blow down. Leaves slowly died and fell to the forest floor. The greenness of the leaves represents the tree tissue of the highest nutrient content. Leaves are loaded with nitrogen rich photosynthetic pigments and proteins. Foliage also contains essential elemental nutrition of calcium, phosphorus, and magnesium. The leaves softly buffer the forest floor and protect it from excessive dryness and intense sunlight. The salamanders, wood beetles, bacteria, and fungi all profit from the added protection as the woodlands suddenly were more exposed to life outside of the forest. As the leaves decompose, the nutrients are quickly capture by bacteria and fungi and transferred to forms utilized by the saplings. The forest babes grow quickly with the added sunlight and flush of life supporting nutrients.

Wood takes longer to decay. Wood beetles assist by tunneling under the bark and through the wood. This activity introduces bacteria and fungal spores to the tree’s interior and channels oxygen rich air in to support the decomposition. Armed with the right stuff in terms of enzymes and metabolic machinery, the fungi dismantle the hardened lignin and cellulose of the tree. Wood Decomposition takes time. Over several years, the bark loosens, the wood softens and splits and fungal threads infiltrate deeper into the wood. The tree cadaver becomes a sponge and water is slowly wicked from the soil upward and held in place by the pits, cells, and capillary fractures in the wood. Wood is not the most nutrient rich tissue, but it does add vital elements of calcium and potassium to the soil as it decomposes. By now, the tender saplings have grown into vigorous adolescents and shade the trunk. New organisms colonize the exposed surface of the bark. Moss and fern spores, land and germinate on this optimal bed of wet organic matter. The fragile filaments of moss branch, take root, and begin their assault on the new territory. Without surprise, red-backed salamanders have found the understory beneath the tree trunk as an ideal place to find invertebrate food and to mate, lay eggs, and bring forth young. New tree life springs forth from the mossy surface. Hemlock and yellow birch have a crazy itch to grow only atop mossy logs, tree stumps, and rocks with thin moist soil. This unique behavior ultimately produces hemlocks and birches with stilted roots in the woodland.

Every bit of the dead tree provides life and new opportunities in the Adirondack woodland. The empty divot where the roots once laid creates an interesting microhabitat of shade and moisture. Herbaceous wildflowers and ferns may utilize the more protected facets of the wind throw. The newly excavated underground caverns provide dens for weasels, fox, and skunk. Black bears may use larger excavations for winter dens. Owls seek winter refuge in the hollows of tree snags from the giants that snapped leaving a partial trunk in place.

So, what if the state/NYS DEC elected to harvest wood from the 1995 blow down? What impact would the harvest have on the land? Clear cut practices have a definite detrimental impact on the future recovery of the forest. Clearing wood from the blow down is far from clear-cutting, but some of the land would be negatively affected. First, machinery used to drag, load, and process the wood will rake and aerate some soil. Tire ruts and truck paths will compact the soil in other areas. Both disturbances will negatively impact the soil flora and fauna. Higher aeration leads to more rapid decomposition and drying of the soil. Mycorrhizal fungi that worked diligently with the forest die, retreat, or hide as spores. Rapid decomposition floods the environment with nutrients faster than the remaining seeds and saplings can use. Some of the more soluble elements such as nitrogen and phosphorus may leach from the soil throughout the watershed. Without the mycorrhizal fungi and the elemental nutrition, a new forest will recover more slowly and less vigorously. Without a quick recovery of juvenile trees, the slash and remaining wood dry and fail to support the microcosm of invertebrates, moss, salamanders, and young birch/hemlock seedlings. Without a rapid recovery, the ecological impact is felt in local streams that choke with increased erosion and mineral enriched waters.

Over the period of hundreds and thousands of years, the impact of a single wood harvest would be negligible. The most destructive force in the Adirondacks during the past 25,000 years hasn’t been wood harvests. Glaciers after all scoured all terrestrial life from the Adirondacks. The greatest threat from blow down harvest is a recession of ecological recovery. If timber harvests were allowed very time a blow down occurs, then the great AMerican forest may loose species diversity, and its rugged aesthetic appeal. Harvesting wood without ecological thinking will diminish the natural process of recovery that our state constitution guarantees for the Adirondack wilderness.

Our camping excursion to Spruce Island in Lake Lila on September 17, 2008 placed Tom and I near the heart of the 1995 blow down. The island is about 400 meters in length and no more than 100 meters at its widest point. For the most part, the island contains vegetation representative of the surrounding forest. Red spruce and balsam fir dominated the narrow north end of the island with paper birch, white pine, and hemlock on the wider southern end. It is within the later area that the impact of the 1995 blow down was observed. Former trees with heights of 75 meters lay in an easterly direction with root mass upturned and facing westward. The trunks were in various stages of decay. The bark was intact on most of trees from the blow down, although it was loosened and could easily be broken or lifted from the trunk. Shards of paper birch from the blow down provide the ignition matrix for our evening fires.

It was easily to distinguish trees from the 1995 blow down from older falls. The island was full of decaying logs where moss had colonized the trunk surface and rain and wind had deteriorated exposed root masses. The older trunks laid at angles much different from those that fell in 1995. The island has numerous craters, divots, and pock-marks of various stages of weathering. Much of the forest floor looked as if artillery explosives had once battered the island. The abundance of fallen trunks and overhanging limbs made island exploration a gymnastic adventure. Magnificent white pine trunks were still solid enough to permit the combined mass of Pasquarello and Broyles. Our greatest fear from trekking across blow down timber was the potential to impale our body part from half broken limbs.

We were impressed with the destructive power of blow down winds. Not only had massive trees with thousands of pounds of biomass tumbled, but incredible root systems with hundreds of pounds of soil had been uplifted like the light end of a school yard teeter-totter. Any rock with roots wrapped around it had also been uplifted and reoriented. Some of the craters were nearly a meter deep although most were significantly less than 0.5 meters. Adirondack soils, after all, are sandy and thin.

The blow down trees created light gaps in the forest and several species of tree took advantage of the sudden increase in sunlight. Several root masses provided a suitable site for new paper birch seedlings to colonize and grow. Straight vigorous paper birch saplings burst forth from the vertically oriented root masses. Red maple had colonized another light gap, and fire cherry was quick to invade two other sites. The presence of fire cherry is interesting on Spruce Island. No other large fire cherries occurred here and there was no indication that it existed on the island before the blow down. These plants were most likely new recruits from the surrounding forest. Their seeds probably traveled by blue jay, hermit thrush, or grosbeak from the surrounding Lake Lila forest. After passage through the avian intestinal pathway, the seeds of this pioneer species landed in these new light gaps with intent to grow.

Fallen trees from the 1995 blow down were evident elsewhere in the Lake Lila Wilderness. In all but a few locations, the damage was well-hidden within the forest. Three-hundred year old yellow birch still stood tall in upland areas, and wind-shaped white pine lined the lake. On the north end of Lake Lila, two campsites (#4 & 5), free exploration of the surrounding woods was limited by large fallen trees and tangles of dead branches. ALthough I didn't observe these campsites before the 95 event, I can imagine that the effective area of these camp sites had significantly decreased. A small pennisula just south of camp sites 4 & 5 bore the most glaring woodland scar. Here a large notch had been carved out of the pine forest. The site was impenetrable with downed logs. Nevertheless, recovery was evident here as well as seedlings and saplings had begun their assault on the freshly contested terrain. Nature wields the pain or destruction and the cures of ecological recovery in the Adirondacks.

Doctors of Philosophy Camp at Lake Lila

One of the interesting episodes in the history of the Adirondacks took place at Follensby Pond in 1858. There Philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, Biologist Louis Agassiz and eight other artists and scholars participated in what has come to be known as the Philosopher's Camp. On it's 150th anniversary there is little on record about this event except for a few pages in some comprehensive histories of the region (see, for example, Frank Graham's 1978 book The Adirondack Park pp.20-22) and a lengthy poem by Emerson that can be found at: http://wildernessandwaterslides.blogspot.com/2008/10/adirondacs-this-poem-in-its-entirity.html

It might seem a tad self-inflated to call the recent camping trip Steve and I took to Lake Lila a modern-day version of the Philosophers Camp, but both of us have Ph. D's and that at least allows us to claim a similar title for our experience. We did not dissect any animals as they did at the original Philosopher's Camp (although Steve did sacrifice some mushrooms to make "sporecasts"), and we did not hunt, fish, or shoot at targets with rifles as they did. We drank our "foaming ale" from not from "hunter's pans" but from plastic cups, and at times our laughter "echoed through the woods" as theirs did 150 years earlier. We ate processed food we brought with us in a smooth plastic anti-bear canister rather than feasting on "wild game and fresh baked bread." When we weren't pumping our drinking water through a micro-filter, gathering "dead and down" firewood to get us through chilly nights and mornings when temperatures dipped into the 30's, washing our dishes and ourselves with biodegradable "camp soap" made from hemp oil, or taking care of other camp chores, we explored Lake Lila in the same manner that the Philosophers explored Follensby Pond, by canoe and on foot. After two days we returned to soft beds and "the fires of home" and were greeted by news of collapsing financial markets that history may someday judge as significant as the laying of the Trans-Atlantic cable.

At about the midpoint of our stay we began to focus our explorations and discussions on two questions: What makes camping at Lake Lila special, and what circumstances and policies make or help keep it that way? One of the first things we noticed about Lake Lila was how quiet it was. So quiet, in fact, that during our stay we noticed at times that our ears "ringing" in response to the lack of background noise. Much of that quiet is due to the fact that motorized boats and vehicles, generators, and chainsaws are prohibited. The nights were clear, and that made us aware of the fact that there is almost no light pollution, which made the night sky a much more crowded and interesting place then the night sky in Cortland (it actually made some of the familiar objects we looked for to help us find our way around the night sky unfamiliar). Isolation from other campers contributed to the quiet and our sense of solitude. A quick check of the register at the parking area revealed that there were probably fewer than 30 other campers occupying the 1400 acre lake and shoreline during our stay, and the only other voices we heard aside from our own were from two or three boats that passed by during the 48 hours we spent at our island campsite.

Another special things about Lake Lila were water that is probably clean enough to drink without filtering if it weren't for the omnipresent backwoods threat of Giardia contamination. We saw no litter on land or water except for a few small scraps right near our campsite and a helium-filled mylar balloon that had blown in from somewhere (Ohio? Michigan? California? China?). With the exception of a two foot tall box privy DEC had placed near our campsite and the railroad tracks we crossed over on our hike to the summit of Mt. Frederica, no man-made structure was visible anywhere on the lake, and Steve noted the welcome absence of invasive species such as purple loosestrife and zebra mussels.

We decided that the spacing of the campsites was one of the things that made our experience at Lake Lila special. With three exceptions, the twenty-four designated shoreline and island campsites are strategically placed to minimize contact with each other. The most desirable campsites (and we concluded this was probably somewhat a matter of personal preference) regularly become available to newly arriving campers due to a regulation that limits stays at a specific campsite to three days unless prior permission for a longer stay is granted by a forest ranger assigned to the area. A provision that allows camping anywhere in the area outside of 150 feet of lakes, ponds, streams, trails, or roads insures that no one will spend a lot of effort only to be completely denied the experience of camping at Lake Lila, and the fact that there is no fee means people are less likely to feel cheated if they must camp at one of the less-desirable sites. Lake Lila's location near the center of the park, far from the popular tourist and commercial centers such as Old Forge, Lake George, Lake Placid/Saranac Lake, and Tupper Lake that dot it's edges keeps visitors down, which contributes to the sense of isolation and solitude. It also means that people who wish to camp must plan there visit carefully since there are no stores, restaurants or motels nearby, and we concluded that such people are likely to be better neighbors when it comes to camping in a natural setting.

Despite the its isolation, Lake Lila provides a relatively safe and comfortable camping experience from July through October. The lake can be choppy, but it is relatively narrow and the water is warm if the waves cause paddlers to tip. The Adirondacks are generally free of dangerous flora and fauna (especially compared to, say, tropical rain forest). There are no poisonous plants or snakes. There are no grizzly bears, only relatively unaggressive and (thanks to Lake Lila's widely spaced campsites and generally well-equipped and well-educated campers that frequent them) wary of humans black bears. The largest predator in the Adirondacks is the coyote, and we know of no instance of coyotes attacking humans.

On the other hand, the often early onset of harsh winter weather and Lake Lila's cool and buggy (e.g. black flies) springs keeps most campers away for seven months, and this reduces human impact on the ecosystem. So does the fact that it takes 1/2 an hour to cover the last 8 miles of bumpy dirt road to the parking lot, after which campers face a 1/3 mile portage for boats or a 3 mile hike. This makes most campers reasonable well-equipped, educated (e.g. about bears, camp soap, burning only dead and down wood, etc.), and respectful of others' camping experience, although the physical demands of camping at Lake Lila are not such that only a tiny percentage of people may reasonably participate.

In some ways, Lake Lila has changed considerably since I last camped there in the mid 1990's. Where before it was a thin strip of state-owned land surrounded by large tracts of private forest products land, it is now part of a large new wilderness area in the Adirondack Forest Preserve that was created in March 2000 by the purchase of 15,000 acres of land from the Whitney family using money from the Environmental Protection Fund and the Clean Water/Clean Air Bond Act (need links). The William C. Whitney Wilderness that resulted form this purchase embodies a pragmatic view of nature in several important respects.

The William C. Whitney Map and Guide published by DEC states that the "former road system of the Whitney purchase is quickly being overtaken by vegetation (and gradually taking on) the character of a wilderness." At the same time, a well-maintained combination of a paved and dirt road provides relatively easy travel to designated parking areas, which greatly increases access to the interior of the wilderness. A road around the north edge of Lake Lila is closed to motor vehicles and bicycles, but owners of private land bordering the wilderness retain a legal right to use the road. Other roads at the headquarters area of the wilderness are closed to public motor vehicle use but open to "people with mobility impairments who utilize mechanized aids (i.e., non-motorized or motorized wheelchairs or other similar devices), and there is a privately-owned inholding of several hundred acres adjacent to the headquarters. Finally, the Remsen-Lake Placid Travel Corridor, which allows public use of snowmobiles and ATV's borders the wilderness on the west, but riders and their machines are not legally allowed into the wilderness itself.

In the end, it may be that Lake Lila provides an outstanding camping experience to those who for whom outstanding camping requires a healthy dose of nature because its design and regulation allow it to function as a "public good" whose use in this context by one does not significantly diminish its use by others. At the same time, it is accessible to a relatively wide range of individuals who are seeking a natural camping experience. This arrangement is appropriate given that it is collectively-owned by the citizens of the State of New York.

Since we got home we've begun to explore the idea that Lake Lila "works" because it is rooted in a pragmatic concept of nature. As Louis Menand explains in his 2001 book The Metaphysical Club for a pragmatist ideas are "tools people devise to cope with the world", and ideas work best when they are adaptable. this means, Menand tells us, that ideas "should never become ideologies -either justifying the status quo or dictating some transcendent imperative for renouncing it." In a sense the entire Adirondack Park embodies a pragmatic concept of nature that is adaptable enough to balance the diverse and sometimes competing values (spiritual, recreational, ecological, utilitarian) that humans impose on the landscape. Lake Lila illustrates on how this concept can work to protect nature on a smaller scale. This is, in turn, provides a model for our research and writing about the Adirondack Park where we seek to examine various aspects of the park with an eye toward devising tools that can help us protect nature in our industrialized, mass-society, world.

Back to School in the Adirondacks

As children across New York State return to school this week, Steve and I return to writing our Wilderness and Waterslides blog after a brief hiatus. A few thousand of those children live in the Adirondack Park, and the schools they are returning to are funded in part by taxes New York State pays to local governments on the Adirondack Forest Preserve. A closer look at one of those communities shows why this practice is essential to maintaining the Park's marriage of public and private land.

Many towns and counties in the Adirondack Park contain a large percentage of state-owned land. Approximately 80% of the land in Hamilton County, for example, is owned by New York State. Until recently, the Hamilton County town of Raquette Lake operated a two-room public school for children in grades K-6. But declining enrollments made that arrangement impractical, and now the three elementary students who live in Raquette Lake must make a 45 minute journey each way to attend school in Indian Lake. The taxes New York pays on Forest Preserve lands allows Raquette Lake to pay for transportation and tuition for those students. It also allows the town and county to maintain the roads the children travel on, and the Raquette Lake School to stay open as a community meeting place. Throughout the Adirondack Park roads, schools, bridges, and public safety are supported by local taxes paid on state lands that require very few services in return. This makes it possible for permanent residents of the park to maintain viable communities under circumstances where this might otherwise be impossible.

Recently the arrangement has been threatened by the November of 2007 decision of acting state Supreme Court Justice Timothy Walker, who found the mix of payments and examptions made by New York on various types of state-owned land to be arbitrary and unfair, and ordered payments to municipalities stopped. Walker then stayed his own decision pending review by higher courts, but his action prompted Assembleywoman Theresa Sayward and State Senator Betty Little, both of whom represent Adirondack districts, to propose a moratorium on purchases of state land until the case is resolved. Senator Little argued that "enough is enough" suggesting that future state land acquisition would interfere with necessary development in the park. Environmental groups such as the Association for the Protection of the Adirondacks argued against the proposed moratorium as "counter to the best interests of Adirondack and Catskill residents" since "if the State cannot compete to acquire important lands coming on the market in near future, those very lands could be enrolled under the forest tax law by private landowners, who then receive an 80% tax exemption, thus forcing other landowners to be taxed more to be able to maintain local services."


As the events above illustrate, decisions about environmental policy are often made in the political arena where competing values interact in complicated ways. This sometimes leads environmentalists to yearn for a decision-making process that circumvents the messier aspects of democracy. In 1990 environmentalists thought they had such an opportunity when Mario Cuomo put together his Commission on the Adirondack Park in the Twenty-First Century. But the result was policy gridlock and political rancor on a scale unprecendented in the often-turbulent history of the Adirondack Park. If we wish to use the Adirondack Park as one of the world's oldest and largest experiments in marrying public and private land and derive policy lessons for those who would use such arrangements to protect nature in the modern world, we must examine its failures along with its successes. In future posts we will examine the failure of the Commission on the Adirondack Park in the Twenty-first Century with that in mind. Meanwhile we await a decision on Walker's ruling by the Appellate Division of the New York State Supreme Court later this fall.

Blow Downs are Natural Disturbances--Part I

Disturbance is a natural force, and blow downs are part of nature. This is my view and I stand by it.

Disturbances have value and importance in the Adirondack forest. They may be as innocuous as a bear footprint on a decaying log or a winter frost heave on exposed soil. Disturbances may also be as grand as a hundred year flood on a river plain, a fire that burns of days, or the blow down of July 15, 1995. Nature is full of disturbance. In the short term, the disturbance may radically change the ecosystem. For the frost heave, the soil becomes freshly aerated changing the composition of soil bacteria, thin hyphal filaments of fungi shredded, winter hibernacula of insects and amphibians destroyed. The Adirondack blow down opens the forest soil to more sunlight, air flow, and dryer air that affect the birds, amphibians, ferns, insects and microbes. In the long term, nature recovers and the disturbance no matter how grand or how small disappears to the forest.

There are three elements of disturbance that are important. First, the type of disturbance sets in place a series of immediate imprints and changes. For example, a fire removes ground vegetation, recycles nutrients, and reduces competition for survivors. A flood on the other hand, inundates the soil and kills seeds, animals, and microbes than can’t survive anoxic conditions. The flood may also deliver a different slate of organisms adapted to periodic soil saturation.

The frequency and magnitude of the disturbance are important features that drive the evolution of adaptive traits in organisms. Seasonal floods are frequent and predictable disturbances along some rivers. Thus, if you were to visit a river basin in the lower Mississippi valley or southeastern Atlantic coast in December, you might find a flat dry bed of crusty soil in a bald cypress water tupelo forest. Return to the exact same spot the following April and you might be ten feet underwater. Seasonal flooding selects for tree species whose seed bank remains alive, germinate, growth and reproduction under the influence of disturbance. In this case it is bald cypress and water tupelo that survive and selection works against sugar maple and American beech.

The magnitude or size of the disturbance is a final feature of the disturbance that determines the community response. Fires can be so intense, hot and devastating that nothing survives. Fires may also appear as minor, albeit important, occurrences that burn small areas of ground cover. It is important to note that magnitude is not determined by the physical size of the affected area, but more the scale of the impact within an area. In a similar way, meteorologists use the Fujita Scale to measure the magnitude of a tornado in a give area and not the distance traveled by the storm.

Why are these features important? The biological response and recovery time to pre-disturbance conditions is determined the type, frequency, and magnitude of the disturbance. Biological organisms and communities adapt to disturbances of predictable nature, rate of occurrence, and size of impact. Many pine forests in the southeastern and western United States are adapted to periodic (on the level of decades), low magnitude fires. The ponderosa pine retains its seeds in closed cones for many years until heat from a fire break the seal on the hard cones and allows the seeds to fall on fresh mineral rich soil days after the area cools. Long leaf pine saplings grow slowly at first. The young growing tissues are insulated from low magnitude fires by a dense covering of green needles. Pitch pine and California Redwoods grow a thick protective bark and self-prune lower branches to protect the canopy from fires that frequently race through their communities. Just like bottomland forests of the lower Mississippi valley have adapted to seasonal floods, many pine lands are adapted for periodic, low intensity, fires. The community does not radically change follow these forms of disturbance.

To humans the blow down of July must seem like a massive, unpredictable, once-in-a-lifetime disturbance. Certainly we don’t find organisms adapted to the intense winds experience from 4 to 6 A.M. that day. Trees fell and roots were turned upright. Animal nest and dens were destroyed. The interior of the forest was opened to strongest sunlight, wind and dryness that the soil has experienced in several hundred years. Our concern, sadness, and pain over such a “disaster” elicit emotional and perhaps irrational responses. Do we promptly harvest the wood and plant seedlings to start the process of recovery? Do we harvest the wood to reduce the threat of fire on human settlements? We want to help, but should we? And, would our actions help or hinder the natural process of recovery?

My next installments will discuss the pathway to recovery of the Adirondack forests following the 1995 blow down. I will also discuss if this disturbance was truly one of disastrous magnitude and as unpredictable as a short-lived human might believe.

Forever Wild and the Great Blowdown of '95: Part 1

Today marks the 13th anniversary of the "Great Adirondack Blowdown of 1995." My personal experience with the "Great Blowdown" started while I was sleeping soundly in the Staff House at SUNY Cortland's Huntington Outdoor Education Center, which is located on a peninsula on the roadless eastern shore of Raquette Lake that is accessible only by boat in the summer, and ice road during the winter. The Huntington Center was originally named Camp Pine Knot, and is justly famous for being the first of the Great Camps of the Adirondacks and the birthplace of William West Durant's "Adirondack Rustic" style of architecture. It was the last day of the "Adirondack Park Policies and Issues" course that I had co-taught for the past week with my colleague and friend, Bob Buerger, who was also sound asleep a few bunks away. The Staff House (also known as the Huntington Cabin) is a log cabin that was built by the camp's second owner Collis P. Huntington after he acquired the property from William West Durant in the late 1800's. The cabin is made of thick pine logs, and it still has its original glass windows without screens to preserve the architectural and historical integrity of the facility. The entrance to the cabin does have a screen door, however, so we left the inner door open when we went to bed to allow fresh air to circulate throughout the cabin since it was extremely hot and humid.

Somewhere around dawn the next morning the inner door of the Staff House slammed shut with surprising force. Bob and I sat up and looked groggily over at each other. We heard the sound of a storm raging outside. I concluded that wind from the storm had blown the door shut, and I assumed that Bob had reached the same conclusion since he quickly laid back down. I followed suit and, even though thunder was crashing and the wind was howling outside, I felt secure behind the the thick walls of our cabin and quickly fell back asleep.

A little later the Director of the Huntington Center at the time, Joe Pearson, opened the door to our cabin and called in "Are you okay?" Bob and I sat up again and looked at each other less groggily, but more quizzically, than we had earlier since the director rarely visited our cabin and never visited this early in the morning. The sun was shining brightly around our drawn curtains, and the wind was no longer howling outside, so his query made no sense to us. By then he had reached our room and, when he saw that we were obviously just waking up, he said something like, "Don't tell me you slept through all this?" Bob and I looked at each other sheepishly since, whatever "all this" was it was obvious we had indeed slept through it. Joe quickly filled us in. The storm had knocked down trees all over camp. Our students, who were sleeping in a wooden-frame building with open screen windows that faced directly into the path of the storm, had tried to signal us with their flashlights when trees began to fall all around them and they were unable to close their storm windows as rainwater blew through as though someone were throwing it in with a buckets. He concluded by telling us with obvious relief that some buildings around camp had been struck by falling trees, but none of the students or staff had been hurt and only one of the historic buildings had suffered minor damage.

After a quick breakfast, Bob, the students, and I went to work helping the Huntington staff with cleanup. They cut fallen trees apart with chainsaws, and we hauled the debris away. At every turn the students took delight in reminding Bob and I that we had slept through what seemed like the end of the world to them. As we worked, news filtered in by walkie-talkie from SUNY Cortland's Antlers facility on the other side of the lake. Roads were blocked and power was out all over the park, and at least one person had died at the nearby Eighth Lake State Campground when a tree fell on their tent. We briefly considered staying at Huntington for another day to help with cleanup and avoid traveling under what seemed likely to be dangerous conditions but we decided to head home since there was no way for our students to let their friends and families know they were okay because all the land phone lines were down and there was no cell coverage on the peninsula at that time. We drove slowly past emergency crews who were clearing trees and fallen power lines. It is normally a three hour drive from Huntington to our main campus in Cortland, but on that day it took us closer to six hours. The relieved looks on the faces of the people who were there to meet our students told us we had made the right decision since news of the death and destruction caused by the storm had spread quickly to the rest of the state.

Over the next several days news reports continued to document the events surrounding what was now being called the "Great Blowdown." Five people died as a result of the storm, and many hikers and campers were briefly stranded. Approximately 150,000 acres of forest suffered severe (60% or more of trees affected) or moderate (30-60% of trees affected) damage. A few months later a proposal emerged to salvage timber from trees on the Adirondack Forest Preserve that had fallen during the blowdown. The precedent for this proposal was the timber salvage operation that took place on Forest Preserve land following a large cyclonic storm that damaged trees in large areas of the Adirondacks in 1950. As in 1950, the legality of the 1995 salvage proposal hinged on the interpretation of the Forever Wild Clause of the New York State Constitution. Since the Forever Wild Clause is arguably one the strongest laws ever established in the area of environmental protection, its origins are worth examining.

The creation of the Adirondack Park in 1892 did not halt logging on state-owned lands within its boundaries, nor the sale and exchange of prime sections of Forest Preserve to timber companies, so conservationists went to work during New York's constitutional convention of 1894 to change this. Eventually they were able to secure passage of the Forever Wild Clause, which stated that: "The Lands of the State, now owned or hereafter acquired, constituting the Forest Preserve as now fixed by law, shall be forever kept as wild forest lands. They shall not be leased, sold or exchanged, or be taken by any corporation, public or private, nor shall the timber thereon be sold, removed, or destroyed."


The significance of the Forever Wild Clause is manifest in three ways: Its inspiring language ("forever kept as wild forest lands"), the extra protection (delay and referendum)afforded by its status as part of the New York State Constitution, and the historical impact of the last minute addition of the words "or destroyed" to the original language of the amendment. Later this summer we will travel to Lake Lila to see how the Adirondack forest has fared in the thirteen years following the blowdown, and in subsequent posts we will examine the policy lessons the Forever Wild Clause provides for those interested in preserving natural ecosystems in the modern world.