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

Sierra, March-April, 1994 by Bill McKibben

Too much can be made of the signs of emerging moderation. Most local officials-and especially the region's state senator, Ronald Stafford--remain demagogic in their opposition to state regulation of the park. But there's more dialogue now. "It's been good for environmental groups to see that local governments are not all filled with backwoods Neanderthals," says Ricketson. Instead of a huge package of Adirondacks laws, he sees the chance for a nartower bill protecting shorelines, perhaps coupled with relief for local governments that suffer because of tax breaks designed to help the timber industry. Reform of the park agency and slight increases in the size of hamlets might be wedded to increased protection for the backcountry, he says. A few towns are even starting to enact their own zoning laws. "It may take a while--it may be 20 years from now-- but I see the day when someone will stand up and start spewing the same old rhetoric about property rights and so on--and they'll be laughed at."

That day may be hastened by the laws of chemistry and biology. Even as the Adirondack forests are slowly recovering from logging, there is evidence that their waters are starting to suffer from development--nutrient overload can already be noticed in the myriad lakes and ponds of the park. For all the national attention given to acid rain in the Adirondacks, only about 20 percent of its lakes and ponds are sensitive to the problem, most of them high, small, and uninhabited. If current national efforts to control sulfur pollution begin to pay off, attention may shift to more mundane degradation.

"Even a very low-density residential development has a noticeable impact," says Mike Martin of the Adirondack Aquatic Institute, as we paddle Green Pond past newly built houses. "A forest is a system for recycling nutrients, from the litter on the ground back up to the leaves in the trees. If you clear it, nutrients run right down into the lake." And once the house is built and the septic system installed, the problem gets worse. As effluent saturates the ground around a septic system, contamination spreads slowly outward. Eventually, it's likely to reach a lake, or a stream that feeds one. Sewering, an obvious option, usually prompts more development, which in turn causes more runoff. The answer probably lies in property setbacks and shoreline restrictions as recommended in the Davis report, part of an outlook that requires people to anticipate problems, rather than wait until they've become crises.

That lesson is spreading from the Adirondacks around the world. While preparing the report for Cuomo, Davis learned he'd won a MacArthur fellowship a quarter of a million dollars for being a land-use genius. One night soon after, when his family was monitoring phone calls to weed out threats former Sierra Club Executive Director David Brower phoned, inviting Davis to Lake Baikal. ("To someone of my generation," Davis says, "it might as well have been God calling.") Since all his opponents had been loudly recommending he go to Russia, Davis signed on. He found the lake, like the Adirondacks, still in relatively good environmental shape, but it was easy to see trouble gathering; working closely with the Russians, Davis and a team of scientists began to prepare a map very much like the one he'd assembled 20 years earlier in upstate New York.