The people and the park - Great Northern Forest Ecoregion - includes related information

Sierra, March-April, 1994 by Bill McKibben

JOHN RUGGE CAME TO THE ADIRONDACKS to paddle a canoe, but he stayed on to pull the region out of a crisis. In 1974, Rugge, a newly minted doctor from the Yale School of Medicine, was passing his days on the riffly stretches of the Hudson below Riparius, writing his now-classic The Complete Wilderness Paddler. Then word came that nearby Chestertown had lost all three of its physicians. As in many other rural towns, suddenly the sick had nowhere to go. Rugge was asked to fill in, but he realized that solo country medicine would be rough. "You've got the grim choice of either never leaving or, when you do, having no one to care for your patients." Instead, Rugge helped the town set up a municipal health center, supported by a city hospital 40 miles away. From the day he opened the door it was crowded--12,000 visits that first year.

When other towns in the region began to lose their doctors, residents again turned to Rugge. This time he linked doctors together in a nonprofit group practice that covered thousands of square miles and joined isolated mountain villages to the most modern medicine. The operation was a success--so much So that it attracted the attention of the U.S. Senate Finance Committee, charged with redrafting the Clinton health-care proposal. Rugge's clinics were the only rural health-care providers committee staffers visited.

A windowless doctor's office in a former supermarket may seem an odd place to begin an account of the Adirondack Mountains. Better, perhaps, to describe the view from one of the high summits, a foreground of rock and an empire of green stretching out on every side. Bigger than Yellowstone, than Yosemite, than the Grand Canyon, than Glacier--combined. The biggest park in the Lower 48, six million acres, half of them "forever wild" under New York's state constitution.

Or you could start by looking at the Adirondacks on a map of the nation, where they stick out like a green thumb, the only really large splash of wild land east of the Mississippi and north of the troubled Everglades. Just two hours from Montreal, four from Boston and Manhattan, the Adirondacks are a wild gem set in a ring of asphalt, a truly timeless place in the most speeded-up corner of the planet.

Maybe the view from a trail would be the best as appropriate a place to start as any of these. The real story of the Adirondacks, like the story of Rugge's clinics, is one of crises surmounted--resolutions tailored to local needs that can then serve as models for other communities.

The first and most dramatic crisis in the Adirondacks was the wholesale ecological destruction of these hills once lumbermen discovered them in the mid-19th century. The cutting that continued over the next decades at times matched the ferocity of any in the Amazon basin or the Oregon coast. But the state addressed the problem forthrightly in the late 1800s, and as it bought and protected land in the decades since, this crisis has begun to ease.

The second and more insidious problem has affected the land the state did not buy (While the "Blue Line" establishing the park's boundaries was drawn around all the lands legislators felt should be acquired, today only half is publicly owned.) Long used mainly for timbering, the park's private lands began to face the threat of development and sprawl that would have inexorably turned this range of mountains into, at best, a range of resorts. This crisis rages still, but innovative zoning and land-use regulations imposed in the early 1970s have at least laid the groundwork for grappling with the issues.

The third crisis, hardly yet addressed, is the predicament of the small towns that dot the park, the islands of people in a sea of wilderness. The communities languish --poverty, unemployment, poor housing, and limited education all beg for the kind of genius that has secured health care for residents of the Hudson Headwaters.

These crises reflect the central tension of the Adirondack story, the tension that makes it one of the most important conservation stories in the United States. Ten percent of this nation's land is treated as "virgin," protected from our lusts by parks or wilderness. Ninety percent is available to the highest bidder, its integrity at best a second thought after our material desires have been satisfied. Only in the Adirondacks do so many people--a hundred thousand or so--live intertwined with such large areas of protected wilderness. Only here have there been large-scale attempts to regulate lives with that wild nature uppermost in mind. It is a marriage, and like all marriages, hard work. One constant danger is that people will start to blot out the wilds; the other is that living within ruledand-regulated nature will prove impossible, and people will be slowly driven into poverty, and either turn abusive or just leave.

The Adirondacks are unique for their level of protection, but the tension here, creative as well as destructive, is typical in much of the rest of the world. After all, people live in and around nature across Africa, across the Russian east, through Central and South America, across the western reaches of this continent. If formulas can be found here to solve the similar tensions that affect these places, real hope exists that people and nature can learn to live side by side. If not, then a few island Yellowstones won't be enough to maintain the glory Of the world we were born into. The cold, grand Adirondacks are a laboratory in which we can work out the chemistry of the centuries to come.