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

Sierra, March-April, 1994 by Bill McKibben

But in the mid-1960s, public fancy started to shift back toward the rustic. Meanwhile, the state was at work on the Northway, a highway that would cut travel time from Manhattan to Lake George, near the park's southeastern border, from eight hours to four. Soon an Arizona developer proposed a 20,000-unit housing subdivision in the midst of what had been wild land. At about the same time, a committee headed by Laurance Rockefeller proposed making the Adirondacks--or at least their core--a national park. That would have provided ironclad protection to those 1.7 million acres--and also ended the evolution of the Adirondack idea. Inside the national park: unspoiled. Outside: up for grabs, just like the rest of the continent. Then, driven by both environmental vision and state pride, Laurance's brother Nelson, governor at the time, appointed a commission to make recommendations on how to protect the entire 6-million-acre park. Which is where Davis comes in.

Then a graduate student at Cornell, Davis signed on as the commission's first employee. His job, as natural-resource specialist, was to hike, snowshoe, and paddle the Adirondacks. By the early 1970s, when the legislature decided to create an Adirondack Park Agency to zone the private lands of the park, he was the best qualified to do it.

Davis' staff mapped all the private land in the park on a series of colored acetate overlays, each assessing soil, slope, biological resources, wetlands, critical wildlife habitats like snake dens or deer yards, and even "public resources" like views. When the overlays were stacked together, some areas were still clear, but more were dark. "In many places a lot of small impacts added up to a lot of damage," says Davis. The overlays became the basis for choreographing the future of the park, which-- by the time political compromises were made in Albany--was basically divided into "hamlet areas," where development was encouraged, "rural use areas," which required 8.5 acres per dwelling, and "resource management areas," the backcountry still in timberland and now permitting only one dwelling every 42 acres. "The law was pretty good, with the exception of developable lake frontage," says Davis. The new rules ended up requiring only 1.2 acres per dwelling along accessible lakeshores, "which is pretty much the opposite of the way you'd want to do it, since the lakeshore is most vulnerable biologically"

Still, the scheme was revolutionary, and Nelson Rockefeller managed to ram it through the legislature over the protests of Adirondackers, many of whom felt that they had gone in one second from proud mountain independents to vassals of a state-appointed agency. For a year or two the opposition was intense--a pile of manure was left one night outside the APA, and "one of our staff was slugged by a little old lady," says Davis. Each year, though, "things got a little calmer, as people--most of whom lived in the hamlets, or had no plans for grand subdivisions--discovered 'Hey, I'm not hurt by this.'"