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

Sierra, March-April, 1994 by Bill McKibben

But it's a lesson the world has never learned. "Limits" will be the globe's chief topic for decades to come--every crisis pressing in on us, from the greenhouse effect to population to species extinction is a question of how large humans will be in relation to the rest of creation. The Adirondackers know more about limits than most folks-- they've been living under evolving strictures for a century, and as a result are "smaller" relative to nature than people almost anyplace in the Western world. The region isn't going to grow its way out of its problems--hemmed in by law and by wilderness, it needs to create an economy that copes with stasis, a culture geared for repetition and steadiness.

Those limits often chafe, that smallness sometimes bothers. This is not a lagging, backward place, interesting for its packbaskets and rustic bedsteads. Adirondackers are, for better or worse, a vanguard culture. The whole world is going to have to live differently. The whole warming, depleting, unraveling planet will no longer be able to grow its way out of its problems. If we in the Adirondacks can learn to find joy in our situation--to see ourselves made rich and not poor by loon and beaver and pine and bog and trackless snow--it will not only help solve our third crisis, it will be the greatest of our gifts to the world.