Nature Conservancy Magazine: Back to the Adirondacks: New York's Renowned State Park Gets Its Largest Land Acquisition in More than 100 Years (In celebration of New York's Adirondack State Park--while sobered by the fact that such a huge watershed in needed to supply New York City with adequate water, as our anti-environment open-borders overlords of both parties continue to see how fast they can infinitely redouble America's population numbers.)

Back to the Adirondacks

By Ginger Strand

Blake Gordon Photography

Hoovering gleefully over a map of of New York's Adirondack Mountains, Mike Carr is like a kid who requested a pony for Christmas and found a whole dude ranch under the tree. “For 35 years the conservation community dreamed  of protecting the Finch lands,” he says. “They were at the geographic center of the park, surrounded by protected lands, connecting about 800,000 acres.

A big man with a booming voice, Carr directs the Nature Conservancy's work in the Adirondacks. Pilot, skier, hiker, paddler, volunteer fireman—he has been avidly exploring the Adirondacks since he was a kid and his Illinois family would ship him here every summer to visit relatives. But the map he’s pointing to justifies his enthusiasm. The Finch timberlands—161,000 acres formerly owned by paper company Finch Pruyn & Company and purchased in 2007 by the Conservancy—look like puzzle pieces completing a jigsaw of the Adirondack Park. The map alone explains why the Conservancy would race to pull together $110 million in just a few short weeks upon hearing the lands might be for sale.

All over the world, forests are being cleared and fragmented, but here, the Conservancy wanted to piece one back together. And what a forest: The Finch lands include 300 lakes and ponds, 90 mountains, nearly 16,000 acres of wetlands and 29 untouched miles along the upper Hudson River. They contain land formations that have been off-limits to the public for more than a century. And they reconnect the Adirondack Park’s 6-million-acre landscape, providing the large tracts of land and elevation gradients that are increasingly critical: Species from moose, bobcats and bears all the way down to mosses and liverworts need this room 
to move and adapt to changing climate conditions. 

But there was another species in the Adirondack Park that needed help adapting: human beings. The Finch deal was not as simple as buying some land and handing it off to the state for its forest reserve. Communities with long-standing logging and mining economies don’t tend to look kindly on conservation that restricts development. And New York law said that any of the 27 communities affected by the Conservancy’s purchase and resale of land to the state could contest the deal. For the deal to go through, the Finch lands would have to benefit nature and people.

If you gathered up Yellowstone, Yosemite, Grand Canyon and Glacier national parks and stuck them in the Adirondack Park, you’d have nearly 800,000 acres left over. Designated a park in 1892 by the New York State legislature, the Adirondacks is one-fifth of the total land area of the Empire State. The park encompasses massive stretches of forests unaltered from the 1850s, when transcendentalists like poet-philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson came here to establish what became known as the Philosophers’ Camp. . . .

http://magazine.nature.org/features/back-to-the-adirondacks-1.xml